May 10th, 2006

Is there value beyond LinkedIn's 3 degrees of separation

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:50 pm

Categories: General, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Web Technology

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To most people, networks like LinkedIn.com, Orkut, and Plaxo are simply contact managers on steroids.  In addition to being Internet-based repositories of your contact database that are accessible anytime, anywhere, and from just about any device (as long as its Web-enabled), their hub and spoke designs where just about everybody is a hub means you don’t have to do a lot of work to keep your contact records up to date.  Your contacts do that for you because at the end of the day, your contact records are really nothing more than pointers to your contacts’ online profiles that are maintained by them. 

As is the case with LinkedIn, these networks also grease the wheels of introduction on the basis of degrees of separation.  LinkedIn doesn’t go as far as the Kevin Bacon game which works off the assumption that no two people are separated by more than six degrees (in other words, through a chain of a maximum of length of five people, you should be able to make contact with anybody in the world).  It caps the chain length at three and then it automates the introduction process should you wish to get introduced to someone that you don’t know first hand, but who knows someone you know.

Today, LinkedIn has more than 5 million users, most of whom are using the free version of the service but enough of whom are paying for advanced services to make the company profitable.  There is a range of advanced services including things like a specific number of introductions per month (cost varies by number of introductions) or $95 job listings.   But, from an outsider’s views looking in, it can be more and, in my interview of LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke we discussed the possibilities.  The interview is available for download, or if you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it will be automatically downloaded to your MP3 player. See ZDNet’s Podcasts: How to tune in.

One of those possibilities for example, would be to leverage OPML as a means of managing your blogroll (the list of blogs you pay attention to that’s normally posted off to the side of your blog).  Assuming the contacts you are keeping track of in LinkedIn write blogs and there’s a LinkedIn field for storing the link to those blogs, you could check-off which of your contacts you wanted to be included in your blogroll.  And then, via OPML, your blogroll (on your blog site) would literally be driven by the contacts in your LinkedIn database  that you selected in for blogroll inclusion. One advantage of such an architecture is that you could stop worrying about whether your blogroll links are being kept up to date.  Any time one of your contacts edits their blog address on their LinkedIn record, that information would automatically cascade to your blogroll the next time someone hits your blog site. 

The concept of such link sharing is now demonstrated (and easily proven) with Dave Winer’s recently launched Share Your OPML.  Just yesterday, Dan Farber did a podcast interview with Winer about the launch.

Similarly, during the interview, Guericke agrees that LinkedIn could do more to describe the nature of the relationship.  Are they a friend? A business colleague?  An acquaintance? Or someone you’ve never met in person?  The sorts of information that the XFN specification tracks (see Will social databases give way to social protocols).  Today, LinkedIn is not XFN-aware.  Guericke hasn’t looked at it but he won’t rule it out either.

Another subject we talked about is synchronization of profile data and where such profiles should live.  For example, if you talk to proponents of the Higgins Trust Framework, users should be able to maintain personal profiles and make all or parts of them contextually available to other domains on the basis of their relationship to those domains.  For example, from your profile, you could make the fields containing your favorite color to a Higgins-compliant car buying site, but nothing else that’s personally identifying. Then, when that car buying site begins to display search results as you begin to shop for a car, all the images come up in the various shades of your favorite color. 

Currently, LinkedIn has no plans to support Higgins.  Nor does LinkedIn have a developer program with APIs that can be accessed and manipulated by developers looking to integrate the site with other sites (in true mashup fashion).  External applications like Outlook and salesforce.com have been tightly integrated to LinkedIn, but the integration has been private in nature and is not through commonly available APIs.  Conceivably, with all the profile data LinkedIn keeps for each of its registered users, LinkedIn could be a profile serving-node into a Higgins-like network.  To further explore that option, I alerted Guericke to the upcoming Identity Mashup Conference that’s being organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University’s Law School.  John Clippinger, a senior fellow at the Berkman Center is one of the driving forces behind Higgins which has support from IBM, Novell, and Microsoft.

In response, Guericke raises some fair questions.  For example, when a desitination domain needs to collect profile data — perhaps to register for an event — is the data propogated to that domain and left there? If so, is it kept in synch with the original source (maintained in user centric fashion by the user)? Or, is the profile data left their as a snapshot in time. Or, is no data propogated on a one-time or routine basis and is it served hub and spoke style on a more dynamic basis.  All fair questions worth discussing at the Harvard event.

In the interview, Guericke sees LinkedIn becoming more and more of a platform and therefore agrees that the next logical step would be APIs so that developers could gain more programatic access to the service.  Also in LinkedIn’s future, says Guericke, are smarter features.  For example, a fuzzy search where, instead of searching for people based on keywords, you will be able to search for people who are like someone else you know (and whose profile is stored on the LinkedIn site).

May 10th, 2006

Google's Serendipity

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:50 pm

Categories: General, Web Technology

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Google’s press day brought out the cyrptic visionary in CEO Eric Schmidt, conceptualizing the future of search and the human/Web interface. From Elinor Mills’ write up from the event today:

In the end, the users will dictate the direction of search and Internet services, he said.

"I would propose the first rule of the Internet, most humbly: People have a lot to say," he said, pointing to the popularity of user-created wikis. There will be a "transition from learned information to learning information, and curiosity will be how you establish your expertise."

In five years, Google will have built "the product I’ve always wanted to build–we call it ’serendipity,’" he said, adding that it will "tell me what I should be typing."

Also coming in the future: simultaneous translation in the major languages and the ability to take a picture on a mobile phone and use OCR (optical character recognition) to find out what it’s a picture of, he added.

"We have literally just begun on the potential of this unification," he said. 

"Curiosity will be how you establish your expertise," transitioning from "learned information" to "learning information"  and "telling me what I should be typing." Google’s "Serendipity" sounds like it needs a bit more product definition. At least you could understand Bill Gates when he described his vision for Information at your fingertips in 1994 or Apple’s Knowledge Navigator circa 1987. And, who wants to just type in queries–you should tell Google what you want, although it seems that Schmidt thinks that Google will tell you what you should type, whatever that means.

 One of Google’s mottos is:

How about adding Innovation, More Clarity to the mix…

Google did intro a few cool new services. Google Trends, which tracks user search behavior, such as how many queries, for any term and links to news stories.  Google Co-op is built around community. Here is the official description:

…users can contribute their knowledge and expertise to improve Google search for everyone. Organizations, businesses, or individuals can label web pages relevant to their areas of expertise or create specialized links to which users can subscribe.

Once a user has subscribed to a provider’s content, all of that provider’s labels and subscribed links are added to the user’s search results for relevant queries. These contributions serve as meta information that helps Google’s search algorithms connect users to the most relevant information for their specific query. Users interested in contributing can get started at www.google.com/coop.

For example, a doctor can label web pages related to arthritis, and users who subscribe to that doctor’s information will receive options at the top of the results for more specific information such as "treatment," "symptoms," or "for health professionals" when they enter a relevant query.

As a first step, Google has worked with partners to annotate web pages related to health and city guides and to offer dozens of subscribed links to specialized content such as restaurant and movie information. Going forward, the broader online community will begin building out new topic areas and subscribed links to help improve the way people find and discover information online.

Users can subscribe to content and providers at www.google.com/coop/directory. Google Co-op is available today on all English language Google domains including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Google Desktop 4 Beta brings Google Gadgets into the desktop and links with personalized home pages, and also has tigher integration with other Google services. In deference to enterprises, network administrators can now disable Search Across Computers at the network level by blocking access to specific URLs.

Finally, Google Notebook lets users to clip text, images, and links from the pages and save them in a notebook file online. 

Philipp Lenssen has good coverge of  the press day… 

More Google coverage:

• Google has its eye on Vista search
• Donna Bogatin: The illusory Google Trends
• Tom Foremski: Google says still not evil
• Will search keep Google on the throne?
• Google unveils new applications
• Google rejection notice??
• Garett Rogers: Doing business, the Google way

May 10th, 2006

Google rejection notice ??

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:28 pm

Categories: General, Web Technology

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This is the first time I have seen this…I was just heading for the Google home page and received this 403 page:

 

 

When I typed in a query into the toolbar, no problem. What’s up? 

Update: Definitely not a real Google logo above–hijacking in progress…

 

May 10th, 2006

Trouble ahead for security industry as Microsoft gets security right

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:34 am

Categories: General, IT Management, Personal Technology, Security, Software Infrastructure

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Whether you choose to believe it or not, Microsoft appears to finally be getting its security house in order.  No, frequent patches, like yesterday’s corrections to critical flaws, are not evidence that secure computing for Microsoft is an impossible task.  On the contrary. Microsoft, probably more than any other vendor (because of what it has been through), knows more about what it takes (technology-wise, business process-wise, timing-wise) to secure its customers than any other non-security vendor in the computer industry.  That doesn’t mean that there still isn’t a To-Do list with items left on it.  ID management is overflowing with enough companies and options to make your head spin. But it does mean that Microsoft, between what it’s doing for existing users of its products and what it’s doing in the next version of Windows (Vista), is on the right path. 

There’s other evidence of Microsoft’s progress. While vulnerabilities still exist and new malware that exploits them continues to turn up, it has been a long time since malware that exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s operating systems or applications resulted in a widespread outbreak or a serious disruption on the order of something like SoBig, CodeRed, Melissa, or the infamous ILOVEYOU worm that "celebrated" its sixth anniversary last week.  As Windows’ "surface area" (digital security-speak for multiple swaths of vulnerabilities) continues to shrink, malware developers will increasingly be looking elsewhere for trouble (for example,  some mobile platforms and, more recently, Mac OS X).  In its Spring 2006 Top 20 List of Security Vulnerabilities, the SANS Institute #1 listed item said:

Rapid growth in critical vulnerabilities being discovered in Mac OS/X including a zero-day vulnerability (OS/X still remains safer than Windows, but its reputation for offering a bullet-proof alternative to Windows is in tatters.)

When I think of words that foster confidence, or even hope that the situation will be corrected, "tatters" is not one of those words. 

The traditional security vendors appear to be scrambling as well.  Shortly after a recent meeting with Gene Hodges during which the then-CEO of McAfee told me that the company was going to do just fine despite Microsoft’s inclusion of competing security software and services in Vista, he jumped ship.  Usually,

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May 10th, 2006

Note to recording artists: Just say "no" to Apple

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:15 am

Categories: Digital Restrictions Management, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Security, Software Infrastructure, Web Technology

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In case you missed it, while I and other members of the anti-DRM brigade continue our crusade against digital rights management technologies (officially, DRM.  But I call it CRAP.  Read why or watch CRAP: The Movie), France stepped up to the plate and drafted a copyright bill that, if passed into French law, would have required Apple to open up its proprietary DRM so that content (audio, video) downloaded from Apple’s iTune’s Music Store (iTMS) can play on other devices besides iPods and in other PC software besides iTunes.  Your fans should have the right to play your content back on the device of their choosing. In some ways, the French bill was looking to make Apple’s DRM live up to its name: FairPlay. 

Being able to take your favorite Bare Naked Ladies song and natively listen to it with any of your digital playback technologies or devices without having to illegally circumvent the copy protection (eg: Apple’s DRM) that’s included with it seems like a fair thing to ask for.  It’s also the right thing for consumers who, because of the way Apple has so smoothly integrated iTMS, iTunes, and iPod, are mostly unaware of the harm (in the form of restrictions) being caused to them as a result of using Apple’s products and services.  For example, should they over time buy 1000 songs at 99 cents each through iTMS and later decide that, because of how powerful the new class of smartphones are, that they want to use the same Windows Mobile-based device for playing their music as they use for making phone calls, they may be surprised to learn that their $1000 investment in music won’t work on their new $500 smartphone/playback device.  At least not without breaking the law.

If Apple didn’t control more than 80 percent of all music sold online or didn’t have the power to force the record labels to knuckle under, such trainwrecks in compatibility might not be an issue.  But Apple does control more than 80 percent of all legitimate online music sales and that power is what what brought the record labels to their knees, forcing them to knuckle under

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