It’s a very vibrant space right now, with commercial vendors, open source projects, trends, and standards all vying for attention. I’m thinking here of a couple of overlapping categories:

OpenID

A standard, for which there are good open source libraries, but also commercial providers. Increasingly I’m seeing OpenID as one service (often the anchor service) provided as part of a suite. Of course the traditional mainstream web players like LiveJournal, WordPress.com, Yahoo! and AOL (through AIM) are providing OpenIDs as well.

Lifestream and Profile Aggregation

More social networks == more profiles, and more feeds. A number of services/projects have sprung up (I talk about a few below, but there are many others as well) which enable you to aggregate together all of your profiles in a single place. Some are more focused on aggregating all of your feeds – creating your lifestream and letting others subscribe to it; others are focused on aggregating the feeds of your friends, to make it easier for you to follow.

The Data Portability Project, Open Web Foundation, Open Social Foundation, Autonomo.us

These foundations are not focused (directly) on producing software, but on building awareness of and consensus about the need for user freedom on the internet, and publishing open specifications which will lead to a world in which our online identities and data streams can be more easily managed, exchanged, and even migrated from provider to provider.

It would really be a full-time job to keep track of all that is going on in this space, but here are a few I’ve been following / trying out.

Chi.mp

Chi.mp enables each user to create their own domain in the .mp TLD space. You can check out mine at johneckman.mp. Chi.mp provides OpenID, but doesn’t (yet) consume it. (I can use johneckman.mp as an OpenID to log in to other sites, but I can’t login to chi.mp with an OpenID from elsewhere).

Chi.mp also supports a number of services (currently Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Yahoo (mail), and Hotmail). For those which provide activity feeds, chi.mp will pull those feeds into your profile (viewable by others) and dashboard (viewable only by you). There’s also a generic RSS feed import capability, for services (like personal blogs) that Chi.mp doesn’t know.

Finally, Chi.mp also supports your social graph – your friends lists or contacts lists from various services can be imported – from webmail services like gmail and hotmail but also from services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr which have contacts or friends exposed via an API.

It’s very highly configurable, in terms of who can see what. You can tag contacts, and tag feeds, and use tags to determine visibility of feeds to groups of contacts. I haven’t yet really figured out what else Chi.mp will be able to do with webmail services – I don’t think I will ever want emails I send or receive showing up in my action stream or on my profile, but certainly being able to leverage various APIs for getting contacts will reduce the need to “refriend” people on each new network.

For now, however, Chi.mp has no way to identify that the “John Doe” you are friends with on facebook is the same person as the “John Doe” who is a contact on Flickr – they provide a simple way to manage contacts (and “merge” the two contacts into one virtual person) but there is still human effort (decision making) involved in reconciling these graphs.

Trufina

Trufina adds an interesting twist in that they are trying to more tightly link online identity to offline. Using a method well known to financial services companies – the ability to answer a short set of questions about your financial history which would not be known to someone who found your wallet in the street – Trufina verifies that the person using the name John Eckman is the same one who lives at a given address and has other “meat space” attributes.

You can see my default public profile here:

I have to say their focus on “criminal background checks” I found a bit creepy: I realize that background checks are important for certain kinds of employment, but it seems like the need (and even desire) to assert a record free of felony convictions should be a niche market, not the default market for an online identity vendor. (Employment verification and educational background verification are said to be in development).

They also then enable you as a user to share various parts of your verified identity with others, including inside a number of social networks. You can create an “ID Card” and show that to only specific folks. There was no way I could find, however, to not show the “Criminal Records Search” section of the ID Card – it seems to always show either “” or “ ” – neither of which makes for high confidence. How about the ability to not show that section at all, if I don’t think it’s relevant, in which case you could also dispense with the rather elaborate disclaimer about criminal record checks.

I also found it frustrating that the default “profile” view – the only one people can get to who haven’t been specifically authorized by you – shows only the Trufina user name. Obviously given the market Trufina is after, and the data that a full profile might ultimately contain, they need to be concerned about privacy. But what if I’m perfectly happy to have people see my first and last name and maybe state of residence and employment?

The key to privacy needs to be control, not defaults which prevent users from making basic data public.

Identity.net

The folks at Identity.net have partnered with Trufina, to link your “Trufina Verified Identity” to an OpenID which can be used throughout the web. It’s a great concept – to be able to demonstrate that the virtual identity a given OpenID represents is tied to a real offline person could be quite valuable.

I’d hope to preserve, however, the option to also have OpenIDs which are not linked to my offline identity. The ability to get the benefits of OpenID (in terms of single-sign-on) without necessarily having all online activity tracked directly to your offline identity is one of the freedoms the internet promises and I’d hate to lose that. (A number of OpenID providers enable you to create multiple OpenIDs that only they know are associated with each other – this enables you to project different identities on different sites).

Like many of these services, Identity.net is in beta, and was having trouble with their control panel when I signed up, so it’s possible I haven’t yet seen what flexibility they offer in creating and using OpenIDs tied to your Trufina identity.

ClaimID.com

I use ClaimID with delegation to use JohnEckman.com as an OpenID. ClaimID also provides a basic profile page on which you can enter links to web sites and verify your ownership of them, as well as display contacts, optionally marked up in XFN (with semantic data about the relationship you have with each contact).

Movable Type with Action Streams Plugin

I use the open source edition of Movable Type with the Action Streams plugin to power JohnEckman.com as a lifestream aggregator, pulling in feeds from various web services. Creating additional plugins to add services to Action Streams is relatively simple, and I’m hosting it myself so I have complete access to the data stored and complete flexibility in display.

The DiSO project has produced a similar plugin (WP-DiSo-ActionStream) for pulling action streams into WordPress (I’m using the OpenID plugin from DiSO on this blog), and there’s an Activity Streams module available for Drupal as well.

Finally, there’s Sweetcron, which I have only just started to experiment with, but which focuses on just managing the action stream aggregation without the extra functionality (and overhead) of a blog or other framework like MT, WordPress, or Drupal. It’s also easily extended.

As all of these evolve, how much ownership and control will users want to have over the content their online activity produces? How much technical understand and effort will they be willing to expend in order to exert that control?

What, in other words, will be the balance between hosted providers (they do all the work but also retain some element of control) and self-hosted open source platforms (you do more work and gain more control)?

Will the central difference between the two options lessen as real data portability becomes commonplace?

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.

The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it:

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

But why is this even an opening up of Facebook? I can’t take my news feed and add it to my lifestream or use it on another site – all I can to is add data to Facebook’s walled garden.

Marc Canter, in the middle of his video about Data Portability, makes the point that our web based applications need to learn to spit as well as to suck – his choice of terms might be a bit visceral, but it does get the point across.

The scheduling application for SXSW (sched.org/sxsw2008) spits, but doesn’t suck. You can export your schedule in an iCal format, and group multiple sched.org calendars together (like this) but you can’t import an iCal schedule in, even to add events not in sched.org’s database to your calendar. (Though I guess you can pull both out to something like Google Calendar and get your unified view there). You also can’t, as Chris Messina pointed out, login with an OpenID.

Fire Eagle, right now, seems all suck and no spit. It can get my status from Dopplr, or from certain phones, but for now at least I don’t see any way to get it out. The site help says:

There are many applications that can use your Fire Eagle location! For example, you can use Fire Eagle to update your location on your Facebook profile; or embed a badge on your blog or MySpace that shows roughly where you are. Many more are coming. If you’re an engineer then maybe you could write one!

But when I go to the application directory, it looks to me like they are all coming, as in not available now.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Fire Eagle is a great concept, and gets a lot right – specifically the granularity of different privacy settings, in terms of how precise Fire Eagle can be in sharing your location. I’ve been looking forward to it since Marc Davis talked about at the Futures of Entertainment conference last November.

[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]

[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]

Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.

The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.

The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.

(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)

The full presentation listed 11 key needs for Drupal 7, highlighting usability and APIs, as well as the more predictable “CCK Fields into core and “Views lite in Core” approach.

Dries also set expectations for the code freeze for Drupal 7 – May 15, 2008- but suggested that code freeze could be delayed as far as October 2008 if 100% test coverage existed for core.

The last section was all about the semantic web and RDF triples, arguing that better usage of structured data in RDF formats could enable Drupal powered sites to become part of the broader emerging data web.

“Google and others want to build a social graph which connects everyone – we have an opportunity to build a larger graph which connects everything.”

I will link to the presentaiton itself when posted – for now also check out http://twitter.com/benfinklea who was live tweeting it and keeping up far better than I could.

However, based on the twitterstream (hashtag #gsp), sounds like lots of interesting presentations there:

• Charlene Li on the Future of Social Networks (CNet coverage)
• Charlene Li on the Future of Social Networks (the Slides on Slideshare)
• Beth Kanter’s notes (and her own slides on “Giving Good Poke: Using Social Apps and Media for Social Good)
• Chris Messina on Diso (slides)
• Slideshare tag gspwest2008 and tag gsp seem the best places to look for presentations to be uploaded
• Jeremiah Owyang’s notes on David Glazer’s presentation Open Social

I know I’m also missing lots of others blogging the conference – links in the comments appreciated.

I wonder if the trajectory he describes whereby proprietary data formats are ultimately superceded by open ones will also hold true for all this FLV video being created – as I recall the file format/spec is already well understood, and I know I’ve seen FLV players which were non-Adobe created.

Good video interview (about 20 minutes), if you can get past the conceit (in the rhetorical sense of the word, not the egoism sense) of the self-interview.

The Existential DiSo Interview from Chris Messina on Vimeo

Only part I really struggled with was about 16 minutes in when he starts to talk about the “Gestapo like tactics” of Facebook. I’m a huge supporter of what DiSo is trying to do, but I don’t think closing people’s accounts for terms of service violations passes into the realm of the Gestapo (Remember Godwin’s law?).

Mentions at one point the goal of having a working demo by SXSW – I look forward to seeing it!

(I’m sure they meant weave as in the “weaving the web” reference – but I can’t but help think about hair weaves, and the artificial extension of the browser beyond its natural domain – a little irony in the name itself? Not that there’s anything wrong with wearing a weave, mind you.)

News Coverage:

• Mozilla Weave: More Servers for your browser (ajaxian)
• Hands on with Mozilla Weave: Personalize your own cloud (ars technica, with screenshots)
• Mozilla launches Desktop Integration Tool for Firefox (Mashable)
• Mozilla Weaves Web Platform for User Data (ReadWriteWeb)
• Mozilla Weave Helps Us Move to the Cloud (Web Worker Daily)
• Mozilla floats Weave as Web platform (Between the Lines at ZDNet)
• Mozilla Weaves Services (GigaOM)

And the original announcement itself: Introducing Weave (Mozilla Labs).

In that announcement, Mozilla Labs argues that:

Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

The initial release, which requires a Firefox 3b2pre or later build, lets the user synchronize browser history and bookmarks with data storage in the cloud.

The more interesting pieces will come, however, as other kinds of data start to leverage the service. What if, for example, my social graph information – the list of people I’m connected to and in what fashion – traveled with me through weave to various browser installations, and could be provided by the browser to a social network application, with my permission?

I’m certainly happy to see that Mozilla’s started on the right foot, with the assumption of user control over their data, and that they are planning encryption as a core part of the service.

I guess the question is ultimately where the real hair stops and the weave begins – what is naturally a part of the browser (or what Mozilla Labs calls “browser metadata”) and what is part of the application. It feels a bit strange (browser-centric?) to think of my bookmarks as a bit of browser-metadata.

I’d prefer to say that the browser itself is a bit of metadata on the edge of my bookmarks – that the bookmarks are the key data, and the fact that I accessed them in Firefox is secondary at best.

If the concept is “store your bookmarks, history, and customizations to Firefox with Mozilla, and retrieve them anywhere you use our app” that seams perfectly reasonable but also non-revolutionary (even a bit passe).

If the concept is “store your personal identity and associated metadata in the cloud, and bring it with you to any site you choose to share it with” it sounds much more interesting and potentially revolutionary.

What if one of the things I “weave” into Mozilla’s cloud is my openID? Saved passwords? References to my social graph?

It’s only a 0.1 release, but well worth watching.

(Maybe another reason I’m thinking of identity in this context is the Sir Walter Scott quote which the name evokes:

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!

Has someone at Mozilla Labs been reading Marmion? ).