Rohit's Social Graph
We’re coming up to the next Internet Identity Workshop (May 17-19) and with all the hubbub about the dilution in Facebook’s privacy policy (see Cory’s excellent post about it here), I had to add my 2cents to the fray. Note that my blog posts are about as frequent as Halley’s comet, so it’s a reflection of how importantly I view this topic.
Currently identity on the web is a mess. Your personal identity is fragmented between email systems like google/yahoo, social networks (FB, LI, Twitter), various messaging services (skype) and Apple with its unique blend of music/apps. Each wants to own your identity and each is a separate walled garden. As one of my mentors used to say “if you have a foot in two separate boats, there’s only one place you end up”. Well, consumers’ feet today are in many boats and I keep hoping we’re at that watershed moment (pun intended) where something appears that forms a baseline for user-centric identity going forward.
The first open vs. closed battle on the web was AOL v. everyone when AOL tried to ‘own’ the keywords (there have been others since). An a propos summary by MG Siegler recently on Techcrunch nicely depicts that battle. MG makes a great observation around the inevitability of Facebook opening up or being opened up with something new… the question of course, is *what* is that something.
Having attended and spoken at two or three IIW workshops and having worked on Angstro with Rohit Khare for a while now, I think I can speak to what’s next in this identity game. For the web to jump to the next level, it’s critical that we handle identity with some elegance. Now, elegance unfortunately takes time to evolve in an open system – the ability for identity to be managed (think ‘published’) locally is critical to the success of the open web and it’s great to see the list of efforts warming up to that task. Past a certain point, the internet community won’t accommodate a closed system. A new layer is required that both allows easy access and lookupability (sorry) with protection and adequate privacy. Simply put, the difference between an open and a closed system is access to the user ID.
The www.knx.to product that Rohit and I launched at the Techcrunch Real Time Crunchup was the first address book across all the social networks. Yesterday, Rohit published a great post on Techcrunch about how to download your OWN information off Facebook. The application to do that is at www.knx.to/dc.
The important and necessary idea is that users should be able to own their own data – so the ability to store all your facebook info locally (and search/filter it) is one step towards this overall vision.
We have to be able to link to people the same open way we link to websites today. And where back links on the web (via pagerank) created an entirely new market, back links on the social web will do the same… though probably a much bigger one.
For the sake of the overall innovation on the web, I hope we get unstuck from the current madness soon.
May 8th, 2010
Over the last 2-3 months, a lot of people have been watching my tweets and listened to my various conversations wondering what exactly I’m up to. I haven’t been able to say much, but can now finally talk about it. Biting lips for this long has been tough, but I can finally say I’m heading up Singularity University – some great coverage from TechCrunch and CNet (among others).
I’ve been fascinated with innovation and growth for many years, and my experience at Yahoo building and running Brickhouse was very foundational. Analyzing thousands of ideas, putting together great teams and working with some of the world’s best engineers to launch cutting edge products was a hell of a privilege. While at Yahoo, I established an important relationship between Brickhouse and NASA, which led to an invitation to the founding meeting of this initiative.
Once there, I was pretty well hooked. The vision that Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis laid out was extremely compelling: Fundamentally, the world is facing some very large challenges and the technologies identified by Ray can lead to scalable solutions to address these global issues. Add to that the interdisciplinary expertise brought by Peter’s experience and it was too much to pass up. They only had to ask once.
The full press release is here.
Great innovation almost always happens when two disparate concepts are brought together. At SU, we’ll be bringing together dozens of experts across several distinct, accelerating technologies and letting them think about some of the grand challenges facing humanity.
A well-publicized example is 3D organ printing. Scientists are combining 3D printing with stem stell research to ‘print’ human organs. And that is one idea…
February 3rd, 2009
As part of a new project, our team was donated some G1 Android phones to play with. Already being a T-Mobile customer, it was a no-brainer to play with it for a couple of days and I got to put the phone through its paces. Here’s what I discovered when comparing it to my Blackberry Curve (readers of this blog are no strangers to my endless attempts to optimize my mobile experience)…
SETUP
=====
Moving over to the G1 was very simple given I’ve been using a lot of Google services. I have Google Sync on my BB, so my contacts and calendar are already online and I use Remember The Milk for task (mis)management, so that was also easy. I was up and running in less than 5 mins, including IMAP setup
THE PRO’S
=========
- the G1 is intuitive and easy to use with an excellent interface
- the keyboard is surprisingly good and not having to hit ’shift’ for periods or numbers is huge – I could actually use this for medium-heavy typing efforts
- I downloaded a few apps and they worked really well. The big draw for me was Skype (worked well) and tethering (which I didn’t finish configuring)
- screen is awesome – very bright
- browser is awesome – very thorough and easy to use
- GPS! Fabulous (easy to update FireEagle)
- youtube on the phone – excellent
CONS
=====
- profile – bigger and heavier than my Curve
- battery life (SUCKS!) – big problem – lasts a half day with heavy use
- sliding open and turning sideways everytime I have to type – slight hassle and requires two hands
- calling someone requires way more clicks (and often, both hands)
SUMMARY
========
The Curve is totally optimized to be a great, great phone/email tool and other stuff (music, video) is secondary. The G1 is great for rich media but clunkier as a phone/email tool.
Overall, I’m sticking with the Blackberry for now as I make a lot of calls and emails and doing that really well with a whole day of battery life makes a big difference for me. But I will continue to play with the G1, and if I can get tethering working, then will carry it along on trips.
January 18th, 2009
Wow – when it rains it pours. After eight years of Bush drought we finally get a big relief – first Obama runs away with the election and now I just heard that he’s appointed Sonal Shah to his inner circle.
I first met Sonal in 2003 at the awards gala where she was appointed India Abroad’s Person of the Year for founding Indicorps. Then she then came out to California to run a big chunk of Google.org and we were housemates for most of last year, during which we became very good friends. I haven’t seen her much recently as she’s been heavily involved helping with the campaign, so was taken quite unawares with this fabulous news.
I am, however, not at all surprised. Sonal is an extraordinary choice. She’s dedicated her life to social causes and philanthropy and is one of the wisest, brightest, most energetic people I know.
Certainly if I were President I’d have her in my inner circle 
)
Go Sonal!! The full story is here.
November 10th, 2008
Readers of this blog (all three of them) will know that I don’t often comment on politics. And though my twitter feed has leaned towards the democrats, I’m more of a libertarian. Given the soaring heights of this occasion, though, I feel I must break my non-blogging policy and put down a few thoughts.
First, the Republicans:
- how can you call yourselves conservative after the insanity of the spending increases? What happened to fiscal prudence?
- McCain, what in the name of all that is holy possessed you to put Palin on the ticket?
- Dubya, there are better ways of handling unresolved paternal issues than lying, invading one country and bankrupting your own
- Americans, how could you re-elect Bush in 2004? I mean, really…
And to the Democrats:
- what have you been doing in the last six years??
- please please don’t go too crazy with the spending
- whatever you do, please fix the healthcare system
And to Obama:
- many people I respect very highly got on planes or spent considerable time helping you out. That said it all for me. They include Sunil Paul, Robert Goldberg, Andrew Rasiej, Sonal Shah and who can forget Oprah leaning on Sam Perry… thrilling.
There were times in the last 2-3 years that I despaired utterly for this country. Now I’m back up to ‘very concerned’.
November 10th, 2008
On my second last trip to Ireland, Pat Phelan, one of my favorite bloggers, bounced into the speaker’s dinner, handed me a SIM card and bounced right out again. Pat runs MaxRoam, a disruptive new telecoms play. On my recent trip, I put it through its paces.
WHAT IT DOES
MaxRoam helps avoid international roaming charges. Simple.
HOW
They put multiple numbers (all land lines) on the same SIM card. For instance, I have numbers for the U.S, Ireland, UK and Germany. If any of those numbers is called, my phone rings, wherever I am. I pay the local 25 cents (or whatever) charged by the local carrier. It costs 3 euros per month per number and you prepay the service. The SIM costs 25 euros. (Disclosure: because I’m an honorary Cork man, Pat gave me the SIM for free with a bit of credit to play with).
THE PROS
- being landlines, it’s cheap for people to call you
- you can get a new number right from the website and it works instantly (amazing)
- you can forward (for free) any of your numbers to a local landline OR a local mobile and nobody pays. Outside North America, this is monstrously cost-saving as the caller usually pays (a fortune). Here, Maxroam swallows the costs.
- 5 cent SMS worldwide (I didn’t test this)
THE CONS
- you can’t put your current number onto it (but you can forward your number to it)
- forwarding usually works, but occasionally it took 2-3 tries when I used it
- lots of numbers to think about
- you need a totally unlocked phone (I used an old Nokia)
- not the greatest website in the world (but who cares, it works)
OVERALL
After a bit of fiddling to get used to it, I’m hooked. I totally loved the service – can’t imagine traveling without it. Being able to forward a 212 number to a UK mobile and talking for hours for no charge internationally on a mobile was fabulous. I worked out I saved about $185 in my two week trip. The cost for my two weeks of rather frequent calling was about 14 euros. I’m hoping he adds a data service soon.
I think Pat is onto something really huge here. The addressable market for international roaming is monstrous, and creating an MVNO is a very interesting way of attacking it. I wish I could invest (Pat?, nudge wink?). More coverage on VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
Pat, by the way, is also behind Twitterfone.
June 18th, 2008
Wow, how bad a blogger am I (ok, I never really had the moniker anyway). But it’s way long since I updated the ole papyrus. I’ve been back from Europe for 2-3 weeks and it’s been non-stop meetings since. Let’s first start by recapping that trip.
First stop was London – a few meetings and some quality time with my god-daughters (little Irish identical twin girls). Next was Dublin for more meetings – I’m on the advisory board of PutPlace, so met with Joe Drumgoole and then lunch with Joe and Niall Larkin. Joe, after paying for lunch, also organized a very nice little meetup and some interesting folks showed up, including Paul Campbell, Marcus MacInnes, Eoghan McCabe and Dennis Deery. Oh yes, and I said hi to Bill de hÓra for 60 secs as he whizzed by… good to see him again, albeit briefly.
Then it was off to Hamburg, where Sarik Weber invited me to give a keynote address at the Facebook Developer Garage. Nice reviews of my talk here and here (if you read German).
Back in London, Tom Hughes-Croucher took me out to lunch and gave me this birthday card (like, a real one), which I haven’t seen for ages. Thanks Tom!
And finally, I met the BT/Osmosoft chaps… Jeremy Ruston, Paul Downey, Phil Whitehouse, Phil Hawksworth and others. Confabb is doing a very interesting collaboration with them that’ll beta at SuperNova.
June 16th, 2008
A proposal for an Ignite talk I submitted has been accepted for next weeks Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It’s going to be about the metaphysics of growth, something I’ve been thinking, reading & writing about for about 15 years.
I touched on this topic very briefly at Brad Templeton’s Nanotechnology Conference which we hosted at the Yahoo HQ.
This’ll be the first time I’ve ever talked about some of this stuff publicly, so the response should be interesting. The basic question is: “How does growth happen”? I’ll be talking about the basics of it and then applying the principles to the rapid growth environment of Silicon Valley.
Now all I have to do is write it…
April 15th, 2008
Onto the Q&A… this should be the fun stuff…
Q: Why is x traffic study not being considered in your proposal
A: The study wasn’t done in time
Q: You’re claiming that after 400 new units the traffic will decrease?
A: [[can't hear answer]]
Crowd is getting raucous… “what are you doing about widening x road”?
The questions are specific to individual situations… lots of side conversations starting at the back of the room… some people starting to leave. Some folks getting annoyed. This is fun stuff!
Tough questions now, and the developer folks are trying to keep the conversation civil. Lots of arguments about projected traffic numbers.
UPDATE:
So I talked to some of the attendees afterwards and they said their complaint was that the developer plans to build way too many condos and time shares in Crystal Bay. The resulting project would increase the population of the town by about 4X, cause increased pressure on traffic, fire and pubic resources and be potentially detrimental to Lake Tahoe. Also their studies were curiously out of date. I have not talked to the developers yet, so this is a slightly one-sided viewpoint, but after hearing the presentation, I’d be extremely nervous if I lived there. Here’s a link to the petition if anyone wants their voice heard…
March 19th, 2008
Second speaker is up… mostly talking about road changes
“… we’re putting in guard rails where necessary…”
“… heh heh.. well, that’s it…”
“… if there’s a wildfire, folks can use our parking lots…”
7.50pm – Third speaker, who’s a “traffic engineer” – now talking through the circulation plan. Claiming the traffic is actually declining in the area. Folks are mostly sporting pursed lips…. especially as he’s now estimating 0.5% traffic growth per year for the next 20 years.
March 19th, 2008
Previous Posts
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=abaf0d2a-2da6-4e91-965b-61a391a68b61)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8018520b-d34e-4764-87f8-654021dd98b5)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5e49d472-2fa9-4a4b-b093-f1006af2e1da)
