Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you’re logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click.

What does that mean? It means mashups based on the actual emails in your inbox. If you’ve given a 3rd party app secure access to your Twitter account, then you’ll be familiar with the user experience. The first example out of the gate is a company called Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail. Backup service Backupify will announce tomorrow morning that it is leveraging the new technology to back up your Gmail account, as well.

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People are often wary about the idea of giving outside services access to their email, and well they should. OAuth is designed to make that safe to do. Combined with the IMAP/SMTP email retrieval protocols, it gives an app a way to ask Gmail for access to your information. Gmail pops up a little window and says “this other app wants us to give it your info – if you can prove to us that you are who they say you are (just give Gmail your password) – then we’ll go vouch for you and give them the info.” The 3rd party app never sees your password and can have its access revoked at any time. You can read more about OAuth, how it was developed and how it works, on the OAuth website.

Why is this so exciting? Because it means that the application we all spend so much time in, where so much of our communication goes on and where you can find some of our closest work and personal contacts – can now have value-added services built on top of it by a whole world of independent developers, without your having to give them your email password.

That’s the kind of thing that the data portability paradigm is all about. It’s the opposite of lock-in and seeks to allow users to take their data securely from site to site, using it as the foundation for fabulous new services. Google says it is working with Yahoo!, Mozilla and others to develop an industry-wide standard way to combine OAuth and IMAP/SMTP.

See also: Rapportive – an incredible GMail contacts plug-in.

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Unvarnished is a new website where you can post and read anonymous reviews of people and their professional performance. That sounds a little frightening, doesn’t it?

TechCrunch has been writing about it for days and the company just started rolling out invites. See Michael Arrington’s thought provoking, if extreme, post Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and Evelyn Rusli’s review Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation. I told Unvarnished founder Pete Kazanjy that I thought he was doing more harm than good, I heard his response and now I’ve tried his site. It turns out that reality is a lot more complex than the hype. Unvarnished is both more intellectually interesting and less freakishly prurient than you might think.

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Above: A “trusted reviewer” badmouths VC Dave Hornik. But the criticism isn’t anything you couldn’t read elsewhere (like TheFunded) and is pretty debatable in its validity. This was the only criticism of a person I could find on the site in early browsing today, and it’s pretty tame stuff.

Unvarnished could be positioned as a place you can anonymously slam your former bosses or a place you’ve got to visit in order to see what’s been written about you. It could just as accurately be described as LinkedIn with teeth: minus the sappy reviews people post to each others’ profiles on that site. LinkedIn with teeth makes it seem more mundane, and that is the truth of the matter. Browse around a little and you’ll calm down pretty quickly. Come back later when you’re considering working with someone and you may find it useful.

Could the service be abused? It could, but first let’s look at how it works.

Unvarnished operates on top of Facebook, which is both good and bad. You have to get a request to be reviewed sent by a Facebook friend in order to create an Unvarnished account, you have to use FacebookConnect to log-in to the service and you have to have demonstrated a certain amount of activity on Facebook in order to prove that you aren’t setting up a fake account just to post critical reviews of people on Unvarnished. At many points in navigating the site you’re encouraged to post reviews of your Facebook friends.

The reviews you post are tied to your profile, but readers and the people you review cannot trace back from your reviews to see who posted them. They can only see your aggregate activity history on the site and how highly rated your other reviews have been. In other words, if you’ve reviewed a lot of people and many other users have approved of your reviews, then your next review is going to carry extra weight in the minds of readers. Chronically judgmental but on balance positive? You’ll love Unvarnished!

The downside of the close Facebook integration is that one more time Facebook is centralizing our identity while we navigate around the larger web. Expect to see many more sites do this, though, as it makes authentication really easy and means that every new user automatically arrives with demographic, social and taste data. Sorry OpenID and distributed data portability, 400 million people voted for Facebook.

Opportunities for Abuse

You can’t delete things that get said about you on Unvarnished. It’s like Yelp but for individuals, and many businesses already hate Yelp. What’s to stop people from saying untrue, unkind, unfair and unattributed things about you? Not much.

“A lot of people say ‘I don’t want people to make reputation claims about me’,” site founder Kazanjy says, “but they also say ‘I certainly would like to consume repuation claims about other people’.”

People on the site have the opportunity to say bad things about you and your supporters have the opportunity to respond. You might be a bully with a posse of bullies who have your back. Your critics might be marginalized people who make no use of Unvarnished other than to shed much-needed light on your abuses of power, or they might be people with an axe to grind who jump onto the site to post terrible, untrue things about you.

Kazanjy’s contention is that a low reputation on the site and a group of vocal supporters can overcome any unfair criticism of you. That’s not very convincing.

Unvarnished as a Democratic Force

When he says that both the offline world and the web at large work in the same way (anyone can post anything about anybody) but that Unvarnished is merely centralizing this discourse, then things start to get interesting.

Few people have the knowledge, the broadcast platform or the search engine pull to really post a free-flying slam against a person online in a place it could be easily found. The relatively few people who could do that have an unspoken agreement not to do so. It would be uncouth and open them up to other powerful people doing the same thing to them.

Unvarnished aims to create one centralized, democratized place to learn about a person’s reputation. Suddenly even people who are not powerful public figures will have a single, prominent place to post their criticisms of others – and they’ll have very little disincentive to doing so.

Is that evil? Perhaps it is, a little. Is it a little bit genius as well? Time will tell. Unvarnished invites have begun filtering through Facebook today. If you see one, take a few minutes to check it out.

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What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn’t know where it came from? If you’re like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it.

Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement.

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Pausing the Stream

Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland’s forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge (“The conference for open source citizens”).

Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for “boom” and “explosion,” limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom.

What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash Dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis.

So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you.

Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left.

Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels’ friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map’s data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data.

The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them.

It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it’s now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved.

Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom. (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful.

A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did.

That Was a Practice Run

Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, “It’s not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once.”

Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki, Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with.

Beels says he’s inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. “The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what’s going on,” he says, “is larger than you might think.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter’s News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news.

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Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementers of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to “@janedoe@twitter” and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It’s a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it’s part of your phone provider’s network or not.

Facebook isn’t implementing Salmon, but that’s what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold.

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Because Salmon is an open standard, any service can implement it without formal business relationships, and Google Buzz is expected to enter the Salmon ecosystem next. If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example.) If you could still message your friends inside and outside Facebook, it would be a lot easier for innovative new alternative networks to lure you away from the one big site that 400 million people use today.

The Players

Evan Prodromou of Status.net says his service has 1.2 million users, hosts 12,000 sites on its cloud and is adding 800 sites per week. It’s a hot little startup that’s fast implementing new technical protocols and making high profile hires. Status.net began rolling out Salmon support earlier this month but today announced that it was working with Cliqset on displaying the cross-network communication. “We’ve got disparate implementations communicating well using this open standard for cross-network conversations,” Prodromou said today, “It’s the first time!”

Cliqset is better at trailblazing innovation than at user acquisition but is a very respected member of the technical community working to create social network interoperability.

Google Buzz appears to have seen a lukewarm public reaction to its launch but is most disruptive because of its support for open data standards. Salmon is still listed in the “coming soon” stage of the Buzz roadmap.

Today’s news isn’t just about those players, it’s about the Salmon protocol that would allow any social network to participate. Salmon was developed primarily by Google employee John Panzer. If you’ve seen the way that the Echo commenting system displays Tweets, trackbacks and other social media mentions below blog posts, that’s the kind of model that Salmon aims to make open source.

Interoperability as Foundation for Choice, Innovation, User Control

Facebook’s near monopoly on mainstream social networking means that users have limited options in how they experience social networking and they have to play by Facebook’s rules. Not everyone likes how Facebook changes its rules, especially its privacy policy.

Likewise, though Facebook is incredibly quick to innovate, it’s generally assumed that a market with more than one competitor gives all companies in question more incentive to try to win the hearts of users.

Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can’t today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier, and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its privacy policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends?

That’s why interoperability is important and that’s why it’s a big deal that two small social networks used by early adopters have pushed Salmon-based interoperability out into the wild.

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Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you’re logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed “pre-approved” sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today.

Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that “the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless.” There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in.

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The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For.

Here’s the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

That sounds downright creepy. It’s nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites – that’s what Facebook Connect does – but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won’t be well received by users. There’s a big difference between opt-in and opt-out “data portability.”

Schnitt says: “People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

Shnitt is the man who told us in a previous interview about Facebook’s fundamental shift away from being private by default (Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy) that users generally go along with the company’s default privacy settings because they agree with the company’s recommendations and because the world is changing to be less private. He cited the growth of Twitter, blogging and reality TV as evidence that the world was changing this way and that people are less interested in privacy.

In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, “this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising.”

Do you buy all that?

Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don’t trust Facebook’s judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you’ll be sharing it.

By default, you’re sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that’s because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook’s cultural and commercial agenda.

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A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That’s the kind of news I like to know and so I’m very excited that MSNBC’s hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon.

EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, or in this case block-by-block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here’s what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we’ve probably ever had before.

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Does existing local media consider EveryBlock a threat? Local TV news personality and new media experimenter Stephanie Stricklen doesn’t. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s not awesome,” she told us. “Any time you bring another source of information into a city, especially one where you can access info about such a small geographic perspective, I like that.”

“No matter what you think of online journalism, everything is changing and the more players that come to the table the better we are all. We serve different audiences. The local TV stations could never have the time to visit every single block every day, there’s not enough people, not even the newspaper could.”

Might local human reporters use a service like EveryBlock to find stories they should investigate and put in context? “Absolutely,” Stricklen said, “I can see myself using something like this.”

As I write this story, some kind of animal problem has been reported at an intersection near where I live and an experimental short film screening was just blogged about by a neighborhood arts organization. The films aren’t my style, to be frank, but I love that I am aware of the event.

In fact, many of the updates from public records are maddeningly unclear. Many others are so trivial that lots of readers wouldn’t consider them news. The health department visited the Chinese restaurant down the street and found the ice-scooper stuck handle-side down in the ice machine! Some lady on Yelp said she didn’t like the tapas restaurant. Someone just flagged down a police car, but EveryBlock has no idea what it was about. To this EveryBlock’s Dan O’Neil says: “Are there gaps in EveryBlock’s knowledge? Yes. Are there gaps in human knowledge in real life? Yes! There’s a comment field, help us out!” Is this a newswire of completed stories? No, this is something different. (But it is a complete publishing of the public records your taxpayer funded agencies make available, O’Neil points out.)

To be honest, I like reading that kind of stuff. Maybe you do too. As O’Neil says, “we do have a wider definition of what news is.” Not everyone feels satisfied with the level of detail being provided or the absence of filtering the signal from the noise. It’s hard to imagine machines replacing the human storytelling that journalists provide. The machines could augment that journalism, though, and there’s lots of room for them to do an even better job of it.

Where Humans and Machine Work Together

EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty told us in January that the organization had hired a full-time editor to research various government agency codes in order to articulate public records in a more human-readable way. “It’s one thing to publish public records; it’s another to make sense of them,” he said.

EveryBlock’s O’Neil told us that editor’s name is Paul Wilson and said Paul put in hours interviewing Portland municipal staff in order to translate the data fields the city publishes into the format EveryBlock now publishes. O’Neil says those municipal staff members are unsung heroes, especially Rick Nixon of the Bureau of Technology Services.

“It’s a very complex endeavor to publish regularly updated data,” O’Neil says.

“Portland has excellent meta data and contact info, but a lot of times it’s hard to get to the expertise and for those experts to explain it to someone else. When it’s not your job to answer phone calls from web developers and tell them what spreadsheets mean, it’s tough. We’re in a weird gap time. In the future the expectations and questions we bring to data will be more common and it will be a part of peoples’ job descriptions – but the people in Portland should be commended for already really trying to figure out what these things mean.”

Portland makes a lot of this data officially available as part of its brand-new CivicApps program, but EveryBlock worked with the county restaurant inspection agency to get that data in particular through other channels. “We’re cycling through 5,000 restaurants on a nightly basis,” O’Neil says, “and the restaurant inspections in Portland are the most plain language content of all the cities we look at. It’s great to see those people speaking in human and not just municipal language.”

Home-Team Geeks

“What will be really exciting is to see what Portland’s indigenous community of developers and web journos do with the content the city is making available,” says Steve Suo, editor and executive VP of Portland’s real-time, white-label EveryBlock competitor NozzlMedia. Nozzl is made up of long-time newspaper guys, now building something for the future. (See our write up of Nozzl: “Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters“.) EveryBlock’s arrival in town happened just days after the city’s celebrated opening of a substantial amount of new data through CivicApps, and with help from the city. Nozzl thinks it can do a better job of putting this data into context. “The more eyes you have on the data, the more insights we’ll see brought to bear,” Suo says.

“We’re currently adding all the same Portland data for our Portland metro news customers,” Nozzl co-founder and CEO Steve Woodward says. Woodward says that in addition to prioritizing context and serving white-label customers, Nozzl pulls from more sources of data, covers a broader geographic area, and focuses on real-time data. “EveryBlock will tell you what crimes occurred near your home over the last several days. Nozzl will give you information about that siren you hear at this very moment.”

EveryBlock’s O’Neil basically says bring it on, pointing to Portland’s mere five minute delay on 911 call data and his site’s real-time bulletin feature.

These are remarkable times. There are services like EveryBlock, Nozzl, Outside.in, Fwix and more all battling it out to best serve us users with new and innovative ways to drill down into more details about our immediate physical surroundings.

EveryBlock is the biggest player in the game, though, and our awareness of hyper-local news here in tech-savvy Portland has probably been changed for good.

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Facebook confirmed today that it is working on a location-based product but said that it has re-evaluated its plans to focus more on places like restaurants.

As part of a larger blog post about clarifying language around privacy controls, Facebook deputy general counsel Michael Richter said today that the company now has “different ideas” that are “even more exciting” than what it previously planned to do with location. More details will be available, including regarding privacy, as the company finalizes the product.

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That doesn’t sound like an open product development cycle with privacy policy discussions going on before the product is finalized, but from an innovation perspective it’s hard not to be excited about something “more exciting” than simply adding location to posted items.

Anonymous sources told the New York Times earlier this year that Facebook was developing a location feature to be released at the F8 developers conference in April.

Here’s the relevant section of today’s post:

The last time we updated the Privacy Policy, we included language describing a location feature we might build in the future. At that point, we thought the primary use would be to “add a location to something you post.” Now, we’ve got some different ideas that we think are even more exciting.

So, we’ve removed the old language and, instead added the concept of a “place” that could refer to a Page, such as one for a local restaurant. As we finalize the product, we look forward to providing more details, including new privacy controls.

The reference to Pages like local restaurants may allude to a very close tie-in with local business advertising at the launch of the location feature.

The difference between location and “place” is a significant one. Substantial resources are dedicated by location-aware social networks to determine what “place” your location refers to. That might mean neighborhood, it might mean business name and it might mean recognizing when you are posting from home so that location can be selectively hidden if you so choose.

What kind of “place” analysis does Facebook have in mind that goes beyond location? Time will tell, but hopefully user privacy will be handled effectively. Location disclosure is a very touchy subject and Facebook’s recent about-face towards a default all-public privacy stance could cause a substantial backlash when it comes to the mainstreaming of location sharing.

Physical location is one of the most sensitive forms of information we posses and it’s going to be very tempting for Facebook to push people towards being more public than they might like. Can the company get the balance right? Privacy and useful features are the two big questions.

See also: Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy

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Digg released its official iPhone app this morning and in many ways it’s more usable than the website itself. The app is a little buggy, doesn’t allow you to post comments and doesn’t include the video or images section of the site – but it’s still quite good.

The best is likely to come as the app’s login process points to the next version of Digg as a platform. In that future scenario, top stories will be surfaced faster and more to your liking by integrating links shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, there are a number of reasons I’m more likely to use this new app than I am to visit Digg.com.

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The new Digg app’s design is clean, simple and easy to browse. No ads, no story summaries until you ask for one, no extraneous text about Digg features. It’s much easier on the eyes than the site itself, which has grown overloaded with features, colors and text. Feature request: It sure would be nice to be able to peruse the images section of Digg on the iPhone, especially if there was a way it could be made fast.

Bookmarking stories to read later is smart. That’s a feature unique to the iPhone interface. Browse your favorite categories looking for the stories you’re interested in reading, bookmark them, then go back and see them all in one place. That’s a compelling use-case, especially on mobile. What percentage of the stories on any Digg page do you really want to read? Hunting for interesting content amongst what’s popular is part of the fun. Why stop hunting for fear of losing track of a gem you’ve found? Feature request: Instapaper integration. I’d love to hit up Digg while sitting on the tarmac before a plane takes off and easily save some good stories to read while I’m up in the air. Perhaps just off-line reading like the New York Times app is what I’m looking for.

The “most popular” paradigm is particularly well-suited for mobile. If you’re a serious web user, you probably get news and links from all over the web, not from one site. Right now Digg’s links are probably old news to you, too. The limited selection or most-popular “in case you missed it” type of stories you’ll find on the Digg front page is uniquely well suited to mobile reading. I don’t have time to do too much exploration on my phone so please recommend me some good stuff in a hurry. Feature request: Please bring me personalized recommendations asap in this app.

The sooner those recommendations can be tied to the activities of my friends on Twitter and Facebook, the better. Unfortunately, it looks like that New Digg is still several months away.

Until it comes out, though, the Digg iPhone app is a pretty good way to follow popular news online. You can get it here or search for it in the app store.

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