Voting starts today for the various panel proposals for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. After learning a lot from participating in panels at this year’s conference, I’ve submitted two proposals for panel discussions for next years conference. Below are their descriptions and links to each panel presentation for voting

Social Network Interop
Portable contacts, life streaming and various ‘Connect’ offerings have begun to break down the silos and walled gardens that are social networks. Come hear a panel of experts discuss some of the technologies, design issues and future direction of this trend.

Drinking from the activity stream when it becomes a tidal wave
The stream is overflowing. How do you make sure the stream is still useful when there is SO MUCH getting pushed into it

If you click through the links you’ll find a list of the seven to nine questions that will be asked and answered by the panelists. The trickiest part of this process was trying to come up with proposals six months ahead of the conference. A lot changes in six months and it was a little difficult trying to come up with panel topics that wouldn’t seem like rehashing old news by the time 2010 rolls around. At least the panel ideas aren’t as topical as discussing Facebook’s purchase of Friendfeed. :) 

Let me know what you think of the panel ideas and who you think should be on the panels if they get accepted.

Brad Fitzpatrick has been dropping some interesting mind bombs since starting at Google. First it was the Social Graph API recently followed by PubSubHubbub (which I need to write about one of these days) and most recently the WebFinger protocol. The underlying theme in all of these ideas is creating an open infrastructure for simplifying the tasks that are common to social networking media sites and thus improving the user experience.

The core idea behind WebFinger is excerpted below from the project site

If I give you my email address today, you can't do anything with it except email me. I can't attach public metadata to my email address to give you more information. WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them. That metadata might include:

• public profile data
• pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
• a public key
• other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
• a URL to an avatar
• profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
• whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
• or even a public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

... but rather than fight about the exact contents

The way this is written makes it sound like this would be a useful service for end users but I think that is misleading. If you want to find out about someone you’re best of plugging their name into a search decision engine like Bing or the people search of a site like Facebook which should give you a similar or better experience today without deploying any new infrastructure on the Web.

Where I find WebFinger to be interesting is in simplifying a lot of the common workflows that exist on the Social Web today. For example, I’ve often criticized Twitter for using the hand picked Suggested User’s List as the primary way of suggesting who you should follow instead of your social graph from a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. However when you look at their Find People on Other Networks page it is clear that this would end up being an intimidating user experience if they listed all of the potential sources of social graphs on that page (i.e. IM services, email address books, social networking sites, etc) then asked the user to pick which ones they use.

On the other hand, if there was a way for Twitter to know which sites I belong to just from the email address I used to signup, then there is a much smoother user experience that is possible.   

This is a fairly boring and mundane piece of Social Web plumbing when you think about it but the ramifications if it takes off could be very powerful. Imagine what direction Twitter would have taken if it used your real social graph to suggest friends to you instead of the S.U.L. as one example. 

I initially planned to write up some detailed thoughts on the Google Wave video and the Google Wave Federation protocol. However the combination of the fact that literally millions of people have watched the video [according to YouTube] and I’ve had enough private conversations with others that have influenced my thinking that I’d rather not post something that makes it seem like I’m taking credit for the ideas of others. That said, I thought it would still be useful to share some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen on Google Wave from various developer blogs.

Sam Ruby writes in his post Google Wave 

At one level, Google Wave is clearly a bold statement that “this is the type of application that every browser should be able to run natively without needing to resort to a plugin”.  At to give Google credit, they have been working relentlessly towards that vision, addressing everything from garbage collection issues, to enabling drag and drop of photos, to providing compelling content (e.g., Google Maps, GMail, and now Google Wave).
…
But stepping back a bit, the entire and much hyped HTML5 interface is just a facade.  That’s not a criticism, in fact that’s generally the way the web works.  What makes Google Wave particularly interesting is that there is an API which operates directly on the repository.  Furthermore, you can host your own server, and such servers federate using XMPP.

These servers are not merely passive, they can actively interact with processes called “robots” using HTTP (More specifically, JSON-RPC over POST).  Once invoked, these robots have access to a full range of operations (Java, Python).  The Python library implementation looks relatively straightforward, and would be relatively easy to port to, say Ruby.

This dichotomy pointed out by Sam is very interesting. One the one hand, there is the Google Wave web application which pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a rich web application that simply uses Javascript and the HTML DOM. This is a companion step in Google’s transition to taking an active role in the future of building Web applications where previous steps have included Google representatives drafting the HTML 5 specification, Google Gears and Google Chrome. However where things get interesting is that the API makes it possible to build alternate client applications (e.g. a .NET Wave client written in C#) and even build services that interact with users regardless of which Wave client they are using.

Joe Gregorio has more on these APIs in his blog post Wave Protocol Thoughts where he writes

There are actually 3 protocols and 2 APIs that are used in Wave:

• Federation (XMPP)
• The robot protocol (JSONRPC)
• The gadget API (OpenSocial)
• The wave embed API (Javascript)
• The client-server protocol (As defined by GWT)

The last one in that list is really nothing that needs to be, or will probably ever be documented, it is generated by GWT and when you build your own Wave client you will need to define how it talks to your Wave server. The rest of the protocols and APIs are based on existing technologies.

The robot protocol looks very easy to use, here is the code for an admittedly simple robot. Now some people have commented that Wave reminds them of Lotus Notes, and I'm sure with a little thought you could extend that to Exchange and Groove. The difference is that the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP, which makes it language agnostic, a feature you get when you define things in terms of protocols. That is, as long as you can stand up an HTTP server and parse JSON, you can create robots for Wave, which is a huge leap forward compared to the extension models for Notes, Exchange and Groove, which are all "object" based extension models. In the "object" based extension model the application exposes "objects" that are bound to locally that you manipulate to control the application, which means that your language choices are limited to those that have bindings into that object model.

As someone’s whose first paying job in the software industry was an internship where I had to write Outlook automation scripts to trigger special behaviors when people sent or modified Outlook task requests, I can appreciate the novelty of moving away from a programming model based on building a plugin in an application’s object model and instead building a Web service and having the web application notify you when it is time to act which is the way the Wave robot protocol works. Now that I’ve been exposed to this idea, it seems doubly weird that Google also shipped Google Apps Script within weeks of this announcement. 

Nick Gall writes in his post My 2¢ on Google Wave: WWW is a Unidirectional Web of Published Documents -- Wave is a bidirectional Web of Instant Messages that

Whether or not the Wave client succeeds, Wave is undoubtedly going to have a major impact on how application designers approach web applications. The analogy would be that even if Google Maps had "failed" to become the dominant map site/service, it still had major impact on web app design.

I suspect this as well. Specifically I have doubts about the viability of the communications paradigm shift that Google Wave is trying to force taking hold. On the other hand, I’m sure there are thousands of Web developers out there right now asking themselves "would my app be better if users could see each other’s edits in real time?","should we add a playback feature to our service as well" [ed note - wikipedia could really use this] and "why don’t we support seamless drag and drop in our application?". All inspired by their exposure to Google Wave.

Finally, I've ruminated publicly that I see a number of parallels between Google Wave and the announcement of Live Mesh. The one interesting parallel worth calling out is that both products/visions/platforms are most powerful when there is a world of different providers each exposing their data types to one or more of these rich user applications (i.e. a Mesh client or Wave client). Thus far I think Google has done a better job than we did with Live Mesh in being very upfront about this realization and evangelizing to developers that they participate as providers. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding in a year or so when we see just how many services have what it takes to implement a truly interoperable federated provider model for Google Wave.

In between watching the Google Wave video and Slumdog Millionaire, I got around to completing the first set of tabs for the ribbon in RSS Bandit. Screenshots are below, as usual let me know what you think.

Fig 1: The home tab. This is the default tab on launching the application. I like that formerly hidden features of the application like subscribing to newsgroups and managing podcasts are now front and center without having to compromise on the common tasks that people want to perform.

Fig 2: The ability to synchronize RSS Bandit with your Google Reader or NewsGator Online feeds is also now a lot more discoverable instead of being hidden in some obscure menu with an obscure name ("Synchronize Feeds"). 

Fig 3: The folder tab. This is menu is contextual and becomes selected when you click on a folder in the tree view. There are two features I’d like to call out in this view; Rules and Filters.

Fig 4: The rules tool is where we’ll end up placing existing and new options on behavior the user would like executed on receipt or viewing of new content.

Fig 5: The filter tool is used for filtering the items that show up in the list view. We've had several requests for this feature over the past few years but couldn’t figure out an elegant way to incorporate it into the user interface.

Fig 6: The feed tab. This is a contextual tab that is selected when you click on a feed in the tree view. One feature that I love which is now properly highlighted is that we support creating new posts in feeds that support this such as newsgroups (existing feature) or posting a new status update on Facebook if you have hooked it up as a feed source (new feature).

Fig 7: The item tab. This is the contextual tab that is highlighted when you select an item in the list view. There are no new features highlighted here. What we do think will be interesting is if we make it straightforward for existing and new IBlogExtension plugins to end up showing up in the item tab. So you should think of this tab as being extensible and should expect that some of our existing plugins (e.g. "Email This", "Post to Twitter", etc) will also end up in this tab.

A few days ago, Jeff Atwood responded to one of my status messages on Twitter with the following response of his own

This is a good opportunity to talk about what Twitter brings to the table as a social software application (as opposed to the Twitter as Google Killer meme). Twitter currently positions itself as a microblogging platform which is implies that it’s like blogging just smaller. A blog is often two things, first of all it’s about personal publishing platform for one or more people to share their opinions and knowledge with the world. The second thing is that it is the community of people who read that blog and the conversations they have about it on the site. The second is usually embodied by comments on the blog. In fact some, like Jeff Atwood, have argued that a blog without comments isn’t really a blog. As Jeff writes

I firmly maintain that a blog without comments enabled is not a blog. It's more like a church pulpit. You preach the word, and the audience passively receives your evangelical message. Straight from God's lips to their ears. When the sermon is over, the audience shuffles out of the church, inspired for another week. And there's definitely no question and answer period afterward.

Of course, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect. Maybe a blog with comments disabled is more analogous to a newspaper editorial. But even with a newspaper editorial, readers can make public comments by sending a letter to the editor, which may be published in a later edition of the paper.

When you look at a blog such as Mashable and compare it its Twitter counterpart or even Jeff Atwood’s blog versus his Twitter account, it seems clear which is more of church pulpit where the audience passively receives your evangelical message versus a forum for two way communication between the audience and the author.

An interesting dynamic that Twitter has added to personal publishing that doesn’t have a good analog in blogging is the notion of a public list of subscribers to the publisher’s content with links to every one of them and a fairly pejorative name for them  “followers”.  This feature has led to both micro and macro celebrities engaging in games to see who can amass the most fans with the most notable public display being the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million followers.

Twitter takes blogging to the next level as a platform for building and encouraging celebrity. The other side of this is poignantly captured in James Governor’s post A truth of Asymmetric Follow: On sadness, fans and fantasy 

Well last week I had a chance to walk in the fan’s shoes, and of course I learned a lot, while trying to build buzz for our charitable efforts for Red Nose Day. I have to admit I hated it. I *really* wanted to get the attention of @wossy or @stephenfry. Could I? Of course not. These guys have day jobs…

But it was only on spending a lot of time surfing around user profiles to check for spambots that I discovered how profoundly depressing the celebrities on Twitter phenomenon can be. It was coming across profiles of Twitter users following ten or so celebrities on Twitter (and nobody else), wondering why their questions weren’t being answered. Why are they ignoring me, I keep asking them questions? After I saw a few of these profiles I felt a little depressed.

From this perspective it is unsurprising that tech celebrities like Jeff Atwood & Robert Scoble and real-world celebrities like Ashton Kutcher & John Mayer love the Twitter dynamic. Similarly, it is also unsurprising that over 60% of users abandon the service within the first month. After all, we aren’t all celebrities.

In its current form, Twitter is growing primarily as a platform for celebrities, wannabe celebrities and their fans. The key thing to note is that celebrity here isn’t limited to the kind of people you read about in People magazine and US Weekly. For example, I use Twitter to follow web technology celebrities like Tim O'Reilly and Scott Hanselman. On the other hand, my wife uses Twitter follows popular mommy bloggers like McMommy and Playground for Parents.

Going back to Jeff Atwood’s twitter message, I don’t consider Twitter to be Facebook with the annoying bullshit stripped out. For the most part, the Facebook experience has focused on being away to bring your offline relationships to the web. This is captured in the current home page design which proclaims that Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

From my perspective, this goal has more widespread appeal and utility than being a next generation platform for celebrity on the Web. Your mileage may vary.

Now Playing: Kid Cudi - Day N Nite (remix) (feat. Jim Jones & Trey Songz)