Data, Data all around

I attended 2gether08 today for the afternoon and walked into a very interesting discussion on making data public. Now following the Free Our Data campaign from the Guardian I've had a keen interest on the subject. Many points were discussed from innovating on this newly available data, to cost savings for doing so through to privacy issues surrounding private data (such as medical records) and data which people seem to give away freely through social sites such as Facebook and finally data which people give away to serve a better experience (think supermarket club card, or Google search).

One of the interesting points raised was about who the public tend to put their trust in, and maybe not so surprisingly, it's not the government. There is a trend that people are giving or putting more data into corporate entities, be they your favoured supermarket, accountant or bank. An interesting point was raised by Paul Downey that although he does online banking, he doesn't have the same trust in Yahoo! to mashup his banking data through Pipes or some other such technology, this is mainly due to banks be regulated authorities.

The conversation moved on and touched upon escrow like accounts for personal data and this got me thinking about identity. As we move towards tools like OpenID and OAuth, the thought occurred to me, would you log into your bank with your OpenID? If your OpenID provider isn't regulated, or even in the same country as you, would you trust it enough with potential access to your online bank? Let me turn that question around a bit now, if you're OpenID provider was a regulated authority, perhaps the bank in question or even some government department - would that change your answer?

The final question left in my mind was, that with a few people thinking about decentralised escrow like data accounts, could you trust people to look after their own data? I know that when I carry my passport with me, I get slightly paranoid. I also know that after losing 2 or 3 hard discs over the last 10 years, I'm not sure I'd want that responsibility. What I do know is that I hate repeating myself, and if government bodies can share data easier between themselves, and if there's a way I can authorise companies to share my data in a way that makes my life easier to lead, I might just buy into that.

I suppose with the level of data that may become available, the responsibility may shift somewhat with who owns, maintains and secures that data.

Convergence, Divergence and Social Web Apps

What's all this fuss about the iPhone huh? Do people really want convergence? Don't people like carrying around several different electronic devices on them to do everything they want? Wait. Scratch that.

Seriously though, has the world gone convergence mad? Is there any demand left for divergence? Well, I look at my hi-fi system and I see a perfect example. Now, I'm no expert, but since I had my first job stacking shelves at the local supermarket, I've bought hi-fi separates. I've bought good components and upgraded as I've gone along. I pay for what I want, and don't pay for what I don't. Want a kick ass amp? Hell yeah! Want a DAB digital radio? Not really.

When I look at social web apps like Facebook, I see massive convergence. Yes, developers are writing third party apps, but it feels like I get trapped in the Facebook mini-web. I like being able to choose what web apps I want to use and how to use them, and yes, I even pay for some of those (Flickr Pro rocks!). All of those apps are online and interact-able over the web and some even over SMS (e.g. Twitter and Dopplr).

This leads me onto another thought. None of the apps send me an email to tell me something has changed on their site and that I need to go to their site to see that. I can just get that straight through that email, or through other means like RSS (which means I can stick with my favourite RSS reader).

I mention this as I was sent this brilliant blog post at telepocalyse.net which reads like a web manifesto, and one I can sign up to.

In Facebook, I've got my 'friends' sorted and they can see any changes in state, application notifications and lots of other crap. I don't have to tell my friends about each application which is good, but means I get loads of crap I'm not interested in and find it hard to filter that out.

That was for the first point, I think I've touched on some of the others and you can easily see what the post is describing with the others. I can totally understand the point about OpenID though. Please, please, please, if you're reading this and are building a web app, for the love of god let me use OpenID.

OpenID and the Friend of a Friend social network problem

I've been reading some of the Google Groups about social network portability, and this was an interesting side from David Recordon.

Surely there's got to be a lot of leg room for OpenID as the data carrier of some kind of FOAF micro-format? OpenID can be extended, and if everyone moves towards OpenID as the authentication method of choice, surely that can be represented as a node in the social graph.

Something work thinking about methinks...