Facebook Open Graph: A new take on semantic web

Facebook's Open Graph is both an important step and one that still needs work.

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced an Open Graph initiative -- a move considered to be a turning point not just for the social networking giant, but for the web at large. The company's new vision is no longer to just connect people. Facebook now wants to connect people around and across the web through concepts they are interested in.

This vision of the web isn't really new. Its origins go back the the person who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This vision has been passionately shared and debated by the tech community over the last decade. What Facebook has announced as Open Graph has been envisioned by many as semantic web.

The web of people and things

At the heart of this vision is the idea that different web pages contain the same objects. Whether someone is reading about a book on Barnes and Noble, on O'Reilly or on a book review blog doesn't matter. What matters is that the reader is interested in this particular book. And so it makes sense to connect her to friends and other readers who are interested in the same book -- regardless of when and where they encountered it.

The same is true about many everyday entities that we find on the web -- movies, albums, stars, restaurants, wine, musicians, events, articles, politicians, etc -- the same entity is referenced in many different pages. Our brains draw the connections instantly and effortlessly, but computers can't deduce that an "Avatar" review on Cinematical.com is talking about the movie also described on a page on IMDB.com.

The reason it is important for things to be linked is so that people can be connected around their interests and not around websites they visit. It does not matter to me where my friends are reading about "Avatar", what matters is which of my friends liked the movie and what they had to say. Without interlinking objects across different sites, the global taste graph is too sparse and uninteresting. By re-imagining the web as the graph of things we are interested in, a new dimension, a new set of connections gets unlocked -- everything and everyone connects in a whole new way.

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Four short links: 25 May 2010

European Economic Crisis, Scaling Guardian API, Cheerful Pessimism, and Science Mapping

1. Lending Merry-Go-Round -- these guys have been Australia's sharpest satire for years, filling the role of the Daily Show. Here they ask some strong questions about the state of Europe's economies ... (via jdub on Twitter)
2. What's Powering the Guardian's Content API -- Scala and Solr/Lucene on EC2 is the short answer. The long answer reveals the details of their setup, including some of their indexing tricks that means Solr can index all their content in just an hour. (via Simon Willison)
3. What I Learned About Engineering from the Panama Canal (Pete Warden) -- I consider myself a cheerful pessimist. I've been through enough that I know how steep the odds of success are, but I've made a choice that even a hopeless fight in a good cause is worthwhile. What a lovely attitude!
4. Mapping the Evolution of Scientific Fields (PLoSone) -- clever use of data. We build an idea network consisting of American Physical Society Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS) numbers as nodes representing scientific concepts. Two PACS numbers are linked if there exist publications that reference them simultaneously. We locate scientific fields using a community finding algorithm, and describe the time evolution of these fields over the course of 1985-2006. The communities we identify map to known scientific fields, and their age depends on their size and activity. We expect our approach to quantifying the evolution of ideas to be relevant for making predictions about the future of science and thus help to guide its development.

The iPad and immersive computing

Multitasking on the iPad could prove to be a limitation, not an asset.

Do you remember the first iPhone? Only a pathetically slow EDGE cell network, no GPS, 8 GB max, and worst of all, no app store? And still it changed everything about smartphones, and was the first step in what seems to be a new industry war. Would you buy one today? Oh, so limited -- never!

I thought about that while reading Marco Arment's post about everything the iPad doesn't do. The iPad today isn't a perfect device; developers haven't yet figured out how to make it really sing; it doesn't yet occupy an indispensable role in many of its owners' lives. It's the first step, and I believe it will continue to grow. But I'm amazed by some of the things I already love about it.

Probably the strongest of these is the focus the iPad creates for me. The lack of multitasking is a feature. I thought I'd miss this, and thought Android's work on multitasking might be a strong counterpoint. It's not. I love how focused I am using an iPad, versus working on a laptop. New mail isn't constantly arriving; tweets aren't Growling into view; I don't even have an RSS reader installed. Instead I'm just reading a book or just playing a game or maybe just working. This is a huge relief, an antidote to interruption. (I'm sure having more than just one app running, as promised in OS 4.0, will be a benefit in some ways, but for today I love not having it.)

That focus, plus the direct manipulation interface that loses mouse and keyboard in favor of pointing and tapping, makes the experience of using an app more intimate than on a laptop. I think now of personal computing and iPad computing as significantly different. It's not just a different form factor, but a different kind of work that I do on the iPad. Put simply, it seems to produce a flow state much more easily for me, and once I'm in it, I fall out into distraction much less easily.

The apps and features that I most look forward to on the future iPad are those that make this immersive computing experience more ubiquitous and useful.

37signals' "Profitable and Proud"

I love the idea of this new blog series from 37signals, "Profitable and Proud." The first post covers Campaign Monitor, a mailing list service. Having used Campaign Monitor for several companies, I can attest that it's a fantastic service with extremely responsive employees -- like 37signals.

The 37s are obviously furthering their point that venture capital isn't needed, and isn't desirable, to build great companies. I imagine they're also out to show they aren't some incredible exception to the rules, as people sometimes argue ("it worked for you but wouldn't work for us because..."). Highlighting companies they admire who built their businesses without VC is a great way to make that argument.

I think it would be interesting to compare customer service satisfaction across companies with different kinds of ownership structures. I noticed a while that some of my favorite businesses near my home -- Cheese Board/Arizmendi, Zachary's Pizza, and Missing Link Bicycle -- which have the best customer service in their local markets, are all co-ops, owned by the employees. 37signals often argues that running a business their way is better for the business, but I think it is nearly unarguable that it's better for customers, too.

Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win

So now we're apparently in a Google versus Apple fight to the death. Google open-sources VP8 (now WebM), and Steve Jobs immediately throws cold water on it. Apple got their share of scorn at Google's I/O conference. Google thinks they have mobile/cloud/desktop integration nailed--and if what they demo'd last week actually works in FroYo (Android 2.2), they probably do.

But the notion that this is a "fight to the death" is a bit bizarre, even though it's been portrayed that way, and by none other than Steve Jobs, who earlier this year said that Google is out to kill the iPhone. If it is a battle, the terms are uneven.

My own disclosures: I'm definitely a Google fan. And I'm also an iPad-equipped Apple fan, though I am also very unhappy with the closedness of the Apple platform, and the way they treat their developers. But they make beautiful hardware, and they really understand "it just works."

Vic Gundotra nailed it in his second keynote at Google I/O. When he was starting at Google, he asked Andy Rubin why Android was important; why did the world need one more mobile platform? Andy's answer was that Google had a very dismal future if they didn't address mobile; we'd end up with one platform, controlled by one vendor, and one carrier. It was a wise and prophetic answer. If I've pieced the chronology together correctly, this would be about the time the iPhone was coming online. And the iPhone is a great device--great, but ultimately closed.

Apple makes hardware, and the more hardware they sell, the more money they make. So Apple clearly wins if they sell iPhones to everyone--the more iPhones (and iPads), the more they win. There would be nothing better for them than driving the other smartphone manufacturers out of the market. (They don't seem to be interested in low-end, low profit margin phones, but that's another story.) So what it takes for Apple to win is clear: dominance of the smartphone market.

Google's stakes are different. They don't make money from selling phones, and they even abandoned their retail NexusOne store with very little pain. They don't make money from licensing software either, as far as I know. Google makes money from selling ads. And the more ads they sell, the happier they are. Apple is fighting for market share in cellphones; Google is fighting for market share in ad placement.

This asymmetry is very important. Google does not have to dominate the smartphone business; they just have to make sure that there's an environment in which the business of selling ads thrives. While Apple wants to dominate smartphones, Google undeniably dominates online ad sales--and they clearly see ad placement on mobile as a huge opportunity. Conversely, failure to dominate mobile ad sales would be disastrous. At best, it would limit their potential; at worst, if we're heading for the end of the "desktop/laptop era", it could seriously threaten their core business.

Making money selling mobile ads requires that Google keep the smartphone market open, plural, competitive. As long as there are multiple smartphones in the market, content developers will be driven towards open standards like HTML5. Developers will build richer and richer HTML content for the phones--and Google will thrive in its core business, placing ads on HTML pages. Google doesn't need to "win"; they just need to "not lose", to keep the game open, and to drive open technologies to the next level where they can compete successfully. In the long run, a closed system can only thrive if it's the only player in the game. If we've learned one thing from the growth of the Internet, it's that open standards that can be implemented by many vendors trumps closed systems, and enables the kind of competition that drives out monopolies.

Just as an athlete will inevitably perform better when he's relaxed and not worried about losing, Google's big advantage in the smartphone wars may well be precisely that they don't need to win. Googlers are justifiably proud that US Android sales have snuck ahead of iPhone sales. Of course, that's 50-odd phones available for all US carriers, versus two iPhone models available only from AT&T.; And when the iPhone 4 comes out, Apple will certainly see a big burst of sales. But that's not what's really important to Google; all they need to do is keep the game open, for themselves, Palm/HP, RIM, and the other smartphone vendors--and to establish the kinds of standards that enable a competitive market to thrive.

There is a real threat to Apple, though; just because Google doesn't need to win smartphone dominance doesn't mean they wouldn't like to. And in the wake of their FroYo demos at I/O, that seems increasingly likely. Dan Lyons (Fake Steve Jobs) makes a lot of good points in his Newsweek blog:

• Google's technology is way ahead of anything Apple is offering, or likely to offer. Streaming music from your desktop is only one example. Google, not Apple, is offering what customers want.
• Apple's response to Google's claim that they are shipping more phones was "so what, we have more market share." Lyons says he's heard that before, it's the song of a company that's losing and in denial. I've heard it too. Lyons is right.
• It's easy to think that Apple fell apart in the late 80s and early 90s because a clueless Pepsi exec booted Jobs and took over. But the real story, if you're old enough to remember, is that Jobs mismanaged the company after a series of stellar technical triumphs. History appears to be repeating itself.

I am genuinely sad about this; Apple is a great innovative company. There's no reason they can't do everything Google is doing. Analyzing each players' strengths, Apple really understands user experience and design. They have a lock on that. Google really understands cloud computing and connectivity. However, it will probably be easier for Apple to get up to speed on the connectivity issues than for Google to get Apple's design sensibility. Nothing Google is adding to Android is fundamentally that difficult, and Apple has no shortage of engineering talent.

But--and this is important--Apple will not be able to take Google on in the areas of connectivity and cloud computing as long as they insist on a closed platform. Not because Google's FroYo features can't be implemented on a closed platform, but because it just wouldn't occur to you to do so. Furthermore, you can only go so far telling customers that you know what's best for them. I hate Flash almost as much as Steve Jobs, but you know what? If I were building a platform, supporting Flash would be a requirement. Flash is everywhere. Getting tied up in a pointless fight with Adobe is silly. Vic's daughter is right: she wants the toy that can run her favorite online games. That's going to be an Android phone, not an iPad or an iPhone. Apple is insisting on playing the game in a way that they can only lose.

Having said that, why is Apple so interested in HTML5? Why are they supporting it with almost as much energy as Google? I think Steve Jobs really understands that HTML5 is the "right thing" for the future of the web. Apple is not going to drop native applications. But Jobs has always had an uncanny sense of when things are done right.

Although Google doesn't need to "win" the battle with Apple, Apple's hysteria, along with its insistence on fighting the wrong battles, means that Google has a decent chance of winning. HTML5 may be Apple's last chance to change their ways, and make decisions that aren't dictated by their desire to control the platform. If they don't, they will lose, and that would be tragic, both for Apple and for users.

What does Government 2.0 look like?

Mark Drapeau offers a visual breakdown of the Gov 2.0 components.

The most important thing I learned in grad school was very simple: "Draw the picture." (Thanks Tony.) By that my advisor meant that it's often hard or impossible to describe a complex system in words alone. And consequently, if you can't draw a picture of what you're trying to explain, you probably don't understand it. Drawing pictures of complex systems also helps everyone understand where the knowledge gaps are, or where unsolved problems are buried, or where contradictions exist.

So, moving into the inaugural Gov 2.0 Expo week, as I reflect on where Government 2.0 is and where it's headed, I thought I would draw a picture of it. To some people Gov 2.0 is about technology, to some it's about culture change, to some it's still about taking risks and doing experiments, to some it's about policy, or collaboration, or openness. It's about all of those things. How do they come together into a complex system?

So what does Government 2.0 "look like," then? A few months ago I gave a few talks out of which I developed a short slide deck about the different components of Gov 2.0, which I've now posted publicly. Check out my What Does Government 2.0 Look Like slide deck here. In this post (after the jump), I expand briefly on each slide.

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Four short links: 24 May 2010

Google Docs APIs, Wikileaks Founder Profile, DNA Hacking, and Abusing the Numbers

1. Google Documents API -- permissions, revisions, search, export, upload, and file. Somehow I had missed that this existed.
2. Profile of Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange (Sydney Morning Herald) -- he draws no salary, is constantly on the move, lived for a while in a compound in Nairobi with other NGOs, and cowrote the rubberhose filesystem which offers deniable encryption.
3. OpenPCR -- producing an open design for a PCR machine. PCR is how you take a single piece of DNA and make lots of copies of it. It's the first step in a lot of interesting bits of molecular biology. They're using Ponoko to print the cases. (via davetenhave on Twitter)
4. Metric Mania (NY Times) -- The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them. First, we count if we can, but counting depends a great deal on previous assumptions about categorization. Consider, for example, the number of homeless people in Philadelphia, or the number of battered women in Atlanta, or the number of suicides in Denver. Is someone homeless if he’s unemployed and living with his brother’s family temporarily? Do we require that a women self-identify as battered to count her as such? If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count. We can never be reminded enough that the context for data must be made as open as the data. To do otherwise is to play Russian Roulette with the truth.

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Data.gov 2.0, Law.gov, cloud computing at Apps.gov, open data, Facebook Communities and government, and the future of the Internet and democracy.

This past week in government 2.0 news was full, as always, particularly for this correspondent as the Gov 2.0 Expo comes to Washington next week. Bernard Kouchner may have written that the "universal spirit of the Enlightenment should run through the new media" but this week, the zeitgeist of the government information revolution online was powered by open data. As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please send them to alex@oreilly.com or reply to @digiphile on Twitter.

Data.gov 2.0

The news that earned the most headlines was of the relaunch of Data.gov, which has seen substantial growth and improvements since the U.S. federal government published the first data set at the online repository a year ago. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra called data.gov: "pretty advanced for a 1-year-old" at the White House blog and talked at length on Federal News Radio about the anniversary of the website. The best coverage of the relaunch came from Wired's sneak peak at the redesigned Data.gov. Read NextGov for another good take on the update to the nation's data warehouse. And on the first anniversary of Data.gov, the Sunlight Foundation officially announced the launch of the National Data Catalog.

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My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy

In a recent Inc Magazine live chat, I found myself, somewhat surprisingly even to me, defending Facebook regarding their ongoing and evolving privacy policy. Here's what I said:

The essence of my argument is that there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions - asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information. I'd rather have entrepreneurs making high-profile mistakes about those boundaries, and then correcting them, than silently avoiding controversy while quietly taking advantage of public ignorance of the subject, or avoiding a potentially contentious area of innovation because they are afraid of backlash. It's easy to say that this should always be the user's choice, but entrepreneurs from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg are in the business of discovering things that users don't already know that they will want, and sometimes we only find the right balance by pushing too far, and then recovering.

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It's important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

What we're really trying to figure out are the right tradeoffs. And there's no question that there will be tradeoffs. The question is whether, in the end, Facebook is creating more value than they capture. I'm finding Facebook increasingly useful. And I think a lot of other people are too. Does anyone else see the irony in the screenshot below, from ReadWriteWeb's article More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook, Call for an Open Alternative:

Almost an order of magnitude more people have used Facebook's "Like" feature to approve of the suggestion to quit Facebook than have commented on the blog post!

That being said, T.S. Eliot's judgment (from Murder in the Cathedral) that

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

danah boyd goes to the heart of the matter when she writes:

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

There was an excellent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, outlining the "user bill of rights" that Facebook's privacy policy ought to be based on:

Users have the right to:

1. Honesty: Tell the truth. Don't make our information public against our will and call it "giving users more control." Call things what they are.

2. Accountability: Keep your word. Honor the deals you make and the expectations they create. If a network asks users to log in, users expect that it's private. Don't get us to populate your network based on one expectation of privacy, and then change the rules once we've connected with 600 friends.

3. Control: Let us decide what to do with our data. Get our permission before you make any changes that make our information less private. We should not have data cross-transmitted to other services without our knowledge. We should always be asked to opt in before a change, rather than being told we have the right to opt out after a change is unilaterally imposed.

4. Transparency: We deserve to know what information is being disclosed and to whom. When there has been a glitch or a leak that involves our information, make sure we know about it.

5. Freedom of movement: If we want to leave your network, let us. If we want to take our data with us, let us do that, too. This will encourage competition through innovation and service, instead of hostage-taking. If we want to delete our data, let us. It's our data.

6. Simple settings: If we want to change something, let us. Use intuitive, standard language. Put settings in logical places. Give us a "maximize privacy settings" button, a and a "delete my account" button.

7. Be treated as a community, not a data set: We join communities because we like them, not "like" them. Advertise to your community if you want. But don't sell our data out from under us.

We need to heed the advice of management gurus Tom Peters and Esther Dyson. Tom reminds us to "Fail. Forward. Fast." Esther's tag line is Always make new mistakes. With that in mind, I'm willing to cut Facebook some slack. For now.

App contests are unlocking government innovation

Apps for Democracy co-creator on how app contests get government going.

In August, Army CIO Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson will announce the winner of the Apps for the Army Challenge. He'll be speaking about the progress of the contest at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. next week. Regardless of which application wins the contest, however, the development of software by coders in the Army is an important case study in disruptive IT innovation. Creating application contests, especially for government entities, is no walk in the park, given the complex rules and regulations that govern procurement.

The man who may know the most about the nuts and bolts behind that process is Peter Corbett, the founder and CEO of iStrategyLabs an interactive agency based in DC. In the Government 2.0 world, Corbett is well-known for co-creating Apps for Democracy with Vivek Kundra, now federal CIO, and for his work on Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp and civic entrepreneurship. An edited interview with Corbett on app contests, open data and innovation follows. For the raw take, you can also listen in to the embedded podcast.

What are your current projects?

Peter Corbett: At the moment, it's Digital Capital Week, a specific innovation initiative we've got here in the District. It's 3,000 plus people, all geeks and creatives, who want to make the city and world a better place. It'l be here June 11-20.

We're also doing Apps for the Army. When application development challenges wrap up and all of the apps are shown, that's when it really gets exciting.

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Open space data can improve lives (and save birds)

Jeanne Holm wants to see an international ontology for space data.

The spectacle of thousands of migratory birds is among the natural world's wonders. And the images of the Earth generated by NASA's network of weather satellites are among humanity's most breathtaking creations. [Satellite Image of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge via NASA]

What happens when bird migrations are tracked using that advanced imaging technology and then mapped onto flight paths? Open government data leads to fewer bird strikes. That's of major interest to anyone who operates, flies on, or is otherwise associated with European air travel, given that the cost of bird strikes due to damage and delays for civilian aviation is estimated to be €1-2 billion.

I learned about this application of open data from Jeanne Holm, the former chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (she's since left to be communications and collaborations lead for Data.gov). Holm told me about FlySafe, a European Union initiative that's primarily led through ESA, the space agency.

"Space data is meant to help us understand the world around us," said Holm. "We share because people are asking for it and making a difference with it."

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The solutions to our big problems are in the network

"Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen on global connectivity and positive change.

Massive issues around the environment, social change, and worldwide economies feel intractable. Where do we even begin?

What is a sustainable network?

Sarah Sorensen: Every network can be a sustainable network because it has the ability to be a sustainable platform for change. Unlike any technology that has come before it, the network is able to permeate all parts of the globe and establish new links and relationships between people, governments and economies.

Every network is also self-sustaining. In the book I call this the "The Sustainable Network Law," which states that: the more broadband that is made available, the faster network innovation occurs, the greater the opportunity is for creating change, and the greater the need is for even more bandwidth.

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Recent Posts

• Four short links: 21 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 21, 2010
• Make-offs: DIY indie innovations | by Dale Dougherty on May 20, 2010
• Four short links: 20 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 20, 2010
• What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention | by Andy Oram on May 19, 2010
• Applying social software to digital diplomacy at the U.S. State Department | by Alex Howard on May 19, 2010
• Four short links: 19 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 19, 2010
• Educational technology needs to grow like a weed | by Marie Bjerede on May 18, 2010
• Four short links: 18 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 18, 2010
• Mobile operating systems and browsers are headed in opposite directions | by Jason Grigsby on May 17, 2010
• Four short links: 17 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 17, 2010
• Disintermediation: The disruption to come for Education 2.0 | by Rob Tucker on May 14, 2010
• Gov 2.0 Week in Review | by Alex Howard on May 14, 2010