Thanks to Domenico Catalano (@DomCat) for putting together this lovely and geeky holiday message! And thanks to all the UMAnitarians for their contributions of passion, business problem-solving, and technical know-how to the User-Managed Access work.

The end of 2010 has brought new progress on several fronts. The UMA-friendly Java-based OAuth leeloo implementation was released as open source; we’ve begun solving some hard problems in defining interoperable interfaces between OAuth authorization servers and resource servers; we’ve been teasing out the implications of trusted claims as the basis for user-centric access control; and we saw two significant submissions in response to the UMA validation bounty program. We’re grateful to submitters Cordny Nederkoorn, whose interest in UMA grew as a result of his explorations into cloud identity, and Project hData, a unique and important effort that seeks to make electronic health data amenable to RESTful web app treatment.

We’ve got lots more developments in store for the coming months, and we welcome your involvement. From our Kantara home page you can join the group (no membership fees!), subscribe to our mailing list, and check out the latest news, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

Happy holidays!

Today I got an email from the London company saying the wire didn't arrive, so I went to the bank's Website again only to be told that my username and password were "frozen" and I needed to call an 800 number to fix it. I called the number and they started an identity prooofing process to make sure they were talking to the owner of the account. They asked:

• My business name
• The EIN
• The business address
• My name
• Last six of my SSN
• My address
• My phone number

Apparently, I got some part of that wrong or it didn't match the profile information I have on file, because the guy on the phone didn't seem happy, so he launched into a "things you should know if you are you" identity proofing process. These services are available from Equifax and Acxiom and maybe others. He asked:

• Which of the following addresses have you lived at before? I said "none" because I hadn't.
• Which of the following vehicles have you owned? I answered that one right, I think.
• Which of the following towns does Tracey Windley own property in? One of the options was "I don't know Tracy Windley" and I picked that.
• Another question about Tracy Windley. I again said I didn't know Tracy Windley.
• Which of the following towns does Jill Windley own property in? I saud I don't know Jill Windley.

Well, I failed this one as well apparently because he told me I had to go into a branch and prove to the branch banker that I was really Phil Windley. Apparently, I found out, the wire I sent was rejected, for no knowable reason and that was why my account was frozen. I wasn't notified the wire was rejected and neither the person at the bank or on the phone can give me a reason why it was rejected. Now, I've got the account unfrozen and the wire reissued. But the interesting thing is why the identity proofing failed.

When I said I don't know Tracy and Jill Windley, I was lying because I do know them. They're my cousin's kids. What I couldn't figure out is why I was getting asked where my cousin's kids owned property. But I think I know now. When I moved from Moscow Idaho in 1993, my cousin Paul, who was the Dean of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho where I was a computer science prof, bought our house. There have been Windleys living at that address for 20 years. But two different families. Apparently that last fact is lost to Acxiom, Equifax, or whoever. They think Tracy and Jill are my kids. And access to my bank account depends on that.

Where does it end? Clearly what banks are doing now to prove identity online is not convenient and doesn't scale. I don't understand why they think solutions like information cards won't be accepted by consumers when they're putting people through what they are. At least Paypal gives me the option of buying a key fob that does one-time passwords. Give me that option at least! Something has to change.

Tags: identity

I violently agree with this:

When we start getting the data out of the apps, we’ll be building ecosystems. Today’s apps trap data inside them, and that doesn’t scale well. It’s time to realize that data is more important than apps, and that by putting data in the center (in people’s data lockers), we build an ecosystem of services that come and perform tasks or manipulate data. I’ll be talking more about this next year, but this separation is the foundation for building the 21st century web.

(Quoted from The Power of Pull)

I have a project in the works, and I have recently made some design decisions that are aligned with this statement (and others in the same blog post). It was very validating to read this today, after having made those decisions just a few days earlier.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Dear Sergey, Larry, and Eric,

I’m concerned, as I’m sure you are, about the impact Facebook is having on the web in general and on Google in particular. Facebook is sucking in not just people, but companies at an alarming rate. More and more companies are making their primary presence at Facebook.com, so they can tailor the visitors’ experience to their profiles and know more about them as prospects. Soon, you’ll be able to buy anything right inside of Facebook. It’s like we are at day 29 of a 30 day algae doubling rate – one more day and the pond will be covered.

Facebook’s plan is clear. Facebook will soon go from nice-to-have to need-to-have. This plan – to be more relevant and useful – is helping them hire a lot of sharp people who believe in that mission. All the Android apps and all the free wifi at 30,000 feet won’t stop the black hole from sucking in more of your best talent. It’s like this: Facebook is trying to get everyone to land and live on planet Facebook, and you’re trying to get people to enjoy the entire universe by making space travel easier. That puts us on the same side. That, presumably, is why you have an “Open Web Advocate” on your staff. You want the web to win. You don’t want everyone to disappear into an alternate reality approved by Facebook’s marketing department.

You can’t continue to raise salaries across the board and throw money at key employees to prevent them from leaving. What you need to do, if I may say so, is give Google employees a mission to believe in. Google needs to become more relevant, and quickly. In the screenshot below, I’m watching nursery rhymes with my 2-year-old son on Youtube, and Google is monetizing this experience by showing me ads for technical jobs, HP & Windows 7, and Optimum phone service.

Let’s not laugh at Facebook until we can correct this, okay?

Fortunately, Google has already laid the foundation necessary to compete with the Facebook juggernaut. The first phase of Google innovation was in search. From web search to video search to enterprise search, Google has become the leader. The second phase was applications. For the last ten years, Google has been providing cloud-based versions of familiar desktop apps, from word processing to spreadsheets to telephone apps. I can’t blame you for using new technology to recreate the old tools – that’s what always happens first. But Chrome OS is really an important new development, the beginning of the third phase. In the third phase, we stop recreating our old ways of working and start building connected productivity ecosystems. This is the subject of my book and this blog, so I won’t go on about it here. But to sum up – everything Google has done to date has emphasized the push model, rather than pull. In this third phase, Google has a chance to give people the tools to pull information, products, and services to them. I have a vision video that presents these concepts visually and will be happy to show it to you.

Seen from the pull perspective, Android and Chrome OS should merge. As more and more people think of their devices as just different ways to see and use their world of online information, the distinction will dissolve.

Google can beat Facebook by jumpstarting the Open Web. Google can lead this development in two critical areas: 1) personal data management and 2) separating data from apps. These are the two defining aspects of 21st century productivity. If Google doesn’t do it, someone else will. Remember, Google was a little struggling company once, but Sergey and Larry managed to find something people really wanted. It worked well back then, but now people want more. The power shift of the 21st century is not to use the cloud to re-create our desktop tools but to build data-driven ecosystems that take us far beyond what we could have done without the power of the cloud.

The good news is that Google is perhaps the biggest and most important cloud-based company. Google’s experimental, mash-up, fail-fast culture will help you pivot from phase 2 to phase 3, which is where Google regains momentum. Google now has a chance to become really useful by giving people data lockers and data ecosystems that bring us all into the 21st century. Google can team up with all the other closed social networks against Facebook, or Google can embrace and promote the open web. I know certain people inside Google are already familiar with the term “personal data locker” and have read my book. In fact, I tried to get Eric a copy of my personal data locker white paper five years ago, but even our mutual friends said he wouldn’t make time to read it. That’s okay. I’ve been busy fleshing it out – writing books, blogging,  tweeting, giving speeches, making connections, and helping influence the Open Web movement. The personal data locker is the cloud-based computer of the 21st century. Microsoft has a significant effort underway in this area. Other big companies are building their own versions, and several start-ups have either launched or will launch soon. I have a list of them, in case you’re interested. And I think you’ll want to see that video.

When we start getting the data out of the apps, we’ll be building ecosystems. Today’s apps trap data inside them, and that doesn’t scale well. It’s time to realize that data is more important than apps, and that by putting data in the center (in people’s data lockers), we build an ecosystem of services that come and perform tasks or manipulate data. I’ll be talking more about this next year, but this separation is the foundation for building the 21st century web.

One thing: the future that wins won’t be business as usual. The only thing that can beat Facebook is if all the people building web sites have an incentive to stay on the web and use its power, not collapse into Facebook. It won’t be about gathering behavior and keyword data on people and using it to help advertisers target them better. It won’t be about keeping the customer out of the loop. Shifting from push to pull is hard. If you want to beat Facebook, you’ll have to empower people to collect and use their own data for themselves, even if that means not sharing it with Google’s advertisers. But it’s okay, you’ll still be able to make lots of money from them by helping them do just that.

And so will everyone else. If Google embraces the open web and personal data, thousands of startups will get funded and the data-driven ecosystems will really emerge. This is one way to catalyze the movement. I would welcome the opportunity to get it going, and Google can be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. At the same time, it would give Google employees a mission they can believe in.

Guys, I honestly think I have what you need. It’s in my book, and it’s in all these blog posts. The open web is the solution, data is the secret weapon, and the data locker is the Facebook killer. Let’s talk soon.

Happy new year. I hope 2011 is the year of personal data and the open web, not Facebook assimilation and capitulation.

Personal Data Stores

Personal data stores allow individuals to share online data with service providers. Facebook Connect users can give third-party web sites like Digg, Amazon, and YouTube access to information stored at Facebook, turning Facebook into a personal data store for over 500 million people.

What makes personal data stores special is the seamless sharing with websites for real-time personalization of the web. It’s more than just file back-up or synchronization.  It’s not just publishing “content” to our friends or the public. Personal data stores allow us to bring our information to websites when we want to. It’s a way to treat the user as the point of integration.

Personal data stores can be anywhere, shared with websites whenever we want. Consider giving FedexKinko’s a link to a Flickr account so they can download photos to print a new calendar. Or giving a new doctor permission to access our personal health history rather than filling out a paper form while we sit in the waiting room. Or giving a website access to our Outlook contact list on our desktop computer so they can give us birthday reminders and gift suggestions. The key is user-managed access, wherever the data lives. Facebook Connect gives this kind of access control over all the data we store at Facebook, enabling web-wide personalization built around the individual.

Mash-ups

In recent years, mash-ups and real-time APIs have made it easier and easier for companies to combine information from different services into a single user experience. Instead of building bigger and more complicated proprietary data silos, companies take advantage of services like Google Maps and IP-address geolocation, using real-time information to enhance their websites.

Some service are even built around other companies’ data: Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, which access our Twitter data on our behalf; Trillian, which works with various instant messaging networks; and Mint, which pulls in our financial data from hundreds of websites. The “real-time web” is constructed on the fly, using linked data and real-time APIs to dynamically customize services for each of us.

Personal data stores let us bring our own data to the mash-up party. Not only do we have better control over who sees what, we can provide more timely, higher quality data than service providers can get from other sources. Effective integration with personal data stores means no more ads for that car we’ve already bought; no more recommendations based on false assumptions. Unfortunately, data in the wild is constantly becoming outdated, miscopied, and misconstrued, because that’s the best companies can do using the billions of dollars worth of proprietary data that’s gathered about us rather than provided by us. Personal data stores easily allow individuals to give the most relevant, most up-to-date information to just those companies we want to do business with. That means not just better data, but more intimate relationships with our favorite companies and organizations.

Perhaps the most liberating aspect of personal data stores is that everyone gets to have as many as we want. We all have our favorite websites for different online activities. As those sites open up their data with a user-driven permissions mechanism, they become personal data stores. So, whether it’s YouTube for videos, Flickr for Photos, Foursquare for location updates, TripIt for travel plans, or RunKeeper for exercise data, we get to bring our best data with us wherever we go. Savvy websites pull in this high quality data to personalize our visits, while those with unique data open it up for use elsewhere to maximize value to their users, which is exactly what Facebook is doing with Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect makes this kind of access simple for everyone, with industry changing adoption rates. Over 66% of the top 100 websites and over 1 million total websites now integrate with Facebook in some way. Nearly 1/3 of Facebook users—over 150 million people—use Facebook Connect every month. Every time we do, we give websites access to information stored in our Facebook accounts, such as our name, gender, names of our friends, and all the posts currently on our wall or posted by us. It’s an archetypal personal data store, with highly credible and timely data in the form of our friend list and our status updates. Sure, Facebook Connect is still far too limited in the amount of information we can store and we lack control over how that information gets used… but architecturally, Facebook has changed the game for a vast portion of the World Wide Web.

To find out what information Facebook is sharing, I built a website called “I Shared What?!?“, an information sharing simulator for Facebook. The site uses javascript and Facebook Connect to display everything it can get from Facebook. Visitors see in specific detail exactly what they share when hitting the “allow” button in the Facebook Connect permissions dialog.

Facebook uses open standard technology to bring mash-ups to a new level, built on information provided directly by the user, in real-time, with minimal fuss or bother. There are shortcomings, of course. A lot of them, but I’ll save those for future posts. For now, think of Facebook as the 800 pound icebreaker of a new way for companies to connect with their customers.

To this veteran VRM evangelist, Facebook has done more in 2010 to usher in the era of the personal data store than anyone, ever. In one fell swoop, Facebook launched a World Wide Web built around the individual instead of websites, introducing the personal data store to 500 million people and over one million websites.

Unexpectedly, Facebook has moved VRM from a conversation about envisioning a future to one about deployed services with real users, being adopted by real companies, today. We still have a lot of work to do to figure out how to make this all work right—legally, financially, technically—but it’s illuminating and inspiring to see the successes and failures of real, widely-deployed services. Seeing what Amazon or Rotten Tomatos or Pandora do with information from a real personal data store moves the conversation forward in ways no theoretical argument can.

There remain significant privacy issues and far too much proprietary lock-in, but for the first time, we can point to a mainstream service and say “Like that!  That’s what we’ve been talking about. But different!”

The continuing deterioration of privacy and multi-party security due to short-sighted and unsustainable practices within our industry has begun to have the inevitable result, as reported by this article in the New York TImes.

A Commerce Department task force called for the creation of a ‘Privacy Bill of Rights’ for online consumers and the establishment of an office within the department that would work to strengthen privacy policies in the United States and coordinate initiatives with other countries.

The department’s Internet Policy Task Force, in a report released on Thursday, said the “Privacy Bill of Rights” would increase transparency on how user information was collected online, place limits on the use of consumer data by companies and promote the use of audits and other forms of enforcement to increase accountability.

The new protections would expand on the framework of Fair Information Practice Principles that address data security, notice and choice — or the privacy policies many users agree to on Web sites — and rights to obtaining information on the Internet.

“The simple concept of notice and choice is not adequate as a basis for privacy protections,” said Daniel J. Weitzner, the associate administrator for the office of policy analysis and development at the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration [emphasis mine - Kim].

The article makes the connection to the Federal Trade Commission’s “Do Not Track” proposal:

The F.T.C., in its report on online privacy this month, also called for improvements to the practice principles, but focused on installing a “do not track” mechanism that would allow computer users to opt out of having their information collected surreptitiously by third-party companies.

That recommendation caused concern in the online advertising industry, which has said that such a mechanism would hamper the industry’s growth and could potentially limit users’ access to free content online.

[The prospect of an online advertising industry deprived of its ability to surreptitiously collect information on us causes tears to well in my eyes.  I can't continue!  I need a Kleenex!]

The proposed Privacy Policy Office would work with the administration, the F.T.C. and other agencies on issues surrounding international and commercial data privacy issues but would not have enforcement authority.

“America needs a robust privacy framework that preserves consumer trust in the evolving Internet economy while ensuring the Web remains a platform for innovation, jobs and economic growth,” the commerce secretary, Gary F. Locke, said in a statement. “Self-regulation without stronger enforcement is not enough. Consumers must trust the Internet in order for businesses to succeed online.”

All of this is, in my view, just an initial reaction to behaviors that are seriously out of control.  As information leakage goes, the surreptitious collection of information” to which the NYT refers is done at a scale that dwarfs Wiki Leaks, even if the subjects of the information are mere citizens rather than lofty officials of government.

I will personally be delighted when it is enshrined in law that a company can no longer get you to click on a privacy policy like this one and claim it is consent to sell your location to anyone it pleases.

If you’ve never used the social bookmarking service that began life with the whimsical domain name del.icio.us, here’s the Wikipedia summary. The service began in 2003, and by 2004 had transformed my work practices more profoundly than almost anything else before or since. I’ve written scores of essays explaining how and why. Here are some of my favorites:

2004: Collaborative knowledge gardening

2005: Language evolution with del.icio.us (screencast)

2005: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us

2006: Del.icio.us is a database

2007: Discovering and teaching principles of information management

2007: Social information management

2008: Twine, del.icio.us, and event-driven service integration

2008: Databasing trusted feeds with del.icio.us

2008: Why and how to blurb your social bookmarks

2009: Collaborative curation as a service

Since the now-infamous leak of an internal Yahoo! slide naming delicious as one of a set of doomed services, there’s been some great gallows humor. Ed Kohler:

The easiest way to shut down Wikileaks would be to have Yahoo! acquire it.

And Anil Dash:

It seems like @pinboardIN is the most successful product Yahoo!’s had a hand in launching in five years. Congrats, @baconmeteor.

Anil is referring to pinboard.in, one of several delicious-like services to which delicious users began fleeing. Pinboard is notable for a clever model in which the price of a lifetime subscription rises with the number of users. When I first checked yesterday morning, that price was $6.90. I signed up at $7.24. Neil Saunders started tracking it at #pinboardwatch; it got to $7.74 last night; it’s $8.17 now. Maybe I should’ve bought 100 accounts at $6.90!

But seriously, this is a moment to reflect on how we can preserve the value we collectively create online. As some of you know, I have made heavy use of delicious in my own service, elmcity. When the news broke, Jeremy Dunck asked: “Bad news for elmcity, huh?”

Actually that’s the least of my worries. The folks who curate elmcity calendar hubs use delicious to configure their hubs, and to list the feeds aggregated by their hubs. It’ll be a bit inconvenient to transition to another bookmarking service, but it’s no big deal. And of course all the existing data is cached in an Azure database; the elmcity service doesn’t depend on live access to delicious.

The real concern is far broader. Millions of us have used delicious to create named sets of online resources. We can recreate our individual collections in other services, but not our collaborative efforts. In Delicious’s Data Policy is Like Setting a Museum on Fire, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

One community of non-profit technologists has been bookmarking links with the tag “NPTech” for years – they have 24,028 links categorized as relevant for organizations seeking to change the world and peoples’ lives using technology. Wouldn’t it be good to have that body of data, metadata and curated resources available elsewhere once Delicious is gone?

The problem with “elsewhere,” of course, is that there’s no elsewhere immune to the same business challenges faced by Yahoo!. Maybe now is the time for a new model to emerge. Except it wouldn’t be new at all. The Building and Loan service that George Bailey ran in It’s a Wonderful Life wasn’t a bank, it was a coop, and its customers were shareholders. Could delicious become the first user-owned Internet service? Could we users collectively make Yahoo! an offer, buy in as shareholders, and run the service ourselves?

It’s bound to happen sooner or later. My top Christmas wish: delicious goes first.

KRL (Kynetx Rule Language) started out as a fairly small domain specific language for augmenting Web pages. We integrated with several online services (like geolocation, weather, and so on) to make what we were doing simpler to write. Later, as KRL grew, we added more integrations with Web APIs and services like Twitter. We've increased the abstraction capabilities of the language by adding first-class functions.

Lately we've realized that many of the native integrations of external APIs we've done could--and should--be done by developers working in KRL. If only they had a way to encapsulate and share them! Now they do. This week we pushed code that added modules to KRL.

In KRL, any ruleset can be a module. At present, only declarations in the global block are available to the ruleset that uses the module. There are language changes in the works that will allow actions to defined and shared in a module as well. Please stand by, as they say. Not everything in the global block has to be exported, so you can keep things private. Modules can be parametrized and aliased. For details see the module documentation.

Alex Olsen created a nice little demo of modules that I'll share to show how they work. One of the little tools we use to make storing temporary information easier is called StringBin. StringBin allows you to create key-value pairs in the cloud and has a simple API. Alex defined his StringBin module like so (Gist here):

ruleset a369x115 {
  meta {
    name "StringBin Module"
    description <<
      StringBin Module
    >>
    author "AKO"
    logging off

    provide read, write, destroy
    configure using pin = "nopin"
  }

  global {
    datasource write <- "http://api.stringbin.com/1/write?" 
               cachable for 1 second
    datasource read <- "http://api.stringbin.com/1/read?" 
               cachable for 1 second

    write = function(k,v) {
      datasource:write({"pin":pin,"key":k,"value":v})
    }

    read = function(k) {
      datasource:read({"pin":pin,"key":k})
    }

    destroy = function(k) {
      datasource:write({"pin":pin,"key":k,"value":""})
    }
  }
}

The important things to note here are the provide and configure clauses. The provide keyword is followed by a list of names that will be available outside the module. The configure keyword indicates the module parameters and their default values. Alex's module has one parameter, the StringBin pin or developer token and it defaults to "nopin". Note that that datasource declarations are not provided to rulesets using the module and the implementation details are effectively hidden.

You can use this module like so:

meta {
  use module a369x115 alias StringBin 
         with pin = "X9ooUUsrR180MkpxZ2N1M"
}
...

rule write_to_stringbin {
  select when pageview ".*"
  pre {
    stuff = StringBin:write("yellow", "mellow");
  }
...
}

Note: I've cut out large pieces of Alex's example, for the complete sample ruleset that uses his module, see the Gist.

In the preceding code, the module is used by putting a use module clause in the meta block. The use module clause needs a ruleset name and optionally an alias (StringBin in this case) and configuration (setting the pin in this case). Later, the write function from the StringBin module is used to write the value "mellow" to the key "yellow".

Because modules are parametrized and can be aliased, you can use the module multiple times with different parameters. For example, suppose we had two StringBins and we wanted to copy a value out of one into the other. We could accomplish that like so:

meta {
  use module a369x115 alias BinA 
         with pin = "X9ooUUsrR180MkpxZ2N1M"
  use module a369x115 alias BinB 
         with pin = "ada98u0ada0kkdad0a0da"
}
...

rule copy_stringbin {
  select when pageview ".*"
  pre {
    stuffToCopy = BinA:read("yellow");
    results = BinB:write("yellow", stuffToCopy);
  }
...
}

In the preceding code, we've attached to two bins called BinA and BinB and we're reading something out of one and writing to the other.

Parametrized modules provide a convenient way to encapsulate complex behavior and use it over and over again. Now that you don't need language mods to make your API calls all pretty, I'm expecting to see an explosion of APIs that are integrated--via modules--into KRL.

Tags: krl kynetx programming+languages modules

I have a different perspective on what’s dangerous about this and what’s not. Freeing up the mind to do “the real work” has real benefits; I know how much it’s helping me right now.

But that’s a topic of another day (and this blog post is, as Devin describes in his article, a reminder for that day). For now, back to the day job.

In this podcast Kaliya talks to Phil Windley who is the CTO and co-founder of Kynetx and co-founded and co-produces the Internet Identity Workshop with Kaliya & Doc Searls. He gives his perspective on the key differentiator between today's social networks and Personal Data Ecosystem the emergence of the personal data store where individuals control their own data. He also covers the event based architecture his company Kynetx is developing and refers to the project neck pain demo. In the podcast he mentions Twillio.

Tags: podcast pds kynetx identity iiw