It’s time for my second Gavin of the day at XTech. Gavin Bell asks Data portability for whom?
To start with, we’ve got a bunch of great technologies like OpenID and OAuth that we’re using to build an infrastructure of openness and portability but right now, these technologies don’t interoperate very cleanly. Getting a show of hands, everyone here knows of OpenID and OAuth and almost everyone here has an OpenID and uses it every week.
But we’re the alpha geeks. We forget how ahead of the curve we are. Think of RSS. We imagine it’s a widely-accepted technology but most people don’t know what it is. That doesn’t matter though as long as they are using RSS readers and subscribing to content; people don’t need to know what the underlying technology is.
Clay Shirky talked about cognitive surplus recently. We should try to tap into that cognitive surplus as Wikipedia has done. Time for some psychology.
Cognitive psychology as a field is about the same age as the study of artificial intelligence. A core tool is something called a schema, a model of understanding of the world. For example, we have a schema for a restaurant. They tend to have tables, chairs, cutlery, waiters, menus. But there is room for variation. Chinese restaurants have chopsticks instead of knives and forks, for example. We have a schema for the Web involving documents that reside at URLs. Schema congruence is the degree to which our model of the world matches the ideal model of the world.
Schemas change and adapt. Our idea of what a mobile phone is, or is capable of, has changed in the last few years. Schemas teach us that gradual change is better than big bang changes. We need a certain level of stability. When you’re pushing the envelope and changing the mental model of how something can work, you still need to support the old mental model. A good example of mental model extension is the graceful way that Flickr added video support. However, because the change was quite sudden, a portion of people got very upset. Gradual change is less scary.
Cognitive dissonance, a phrase that is often misused, is the unfortunate tension that can result from holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time. On the web, the cognitive dissonance of seeing content outside its originating point is dissipating.
J.J. Gibson came up with the idea of affordances. Chairs afford sitting on. Cups afford liquid to be poured into them. When we’re using affordances, it’s important to stick to common convention. If, on a website, you use a plus sign to allow someone to add something to a cart, you shouldn’t use the same symbol later on to allow an image to be enlarged.
Flow is the immensely enjoyable state of being fully immersed in what you’re doing. This is like the WWILFing experience on Wikipedia. You get it on Flickr too. Now we’re getting flow with multiple sites as we move between del.icio.us and Dopplr and Twitter, etc. Previously we would have experienced cognitive dissonance. Now we’re pivoting.
B.F. Skinner did a lot of research into reinforcement. We are sometimes like rats and pigeons on the Web as we click the buttons in an expectation of change (refreshing RSS, email, etc.).
Experience vs. features …don’t be feature led. A single website is just one part of people’s interaction with one another. Here’s the obligatory iPod reference: they split the features up so that the bare minimum were on the device and the rest were put into the iTunes software.
We’ve all lost count of the number of social networks we’ve signed up to. That’s not true of — excuse me, Brian — regular people. Regular people won’t upgrade their browser for your website. Regular people won’t install a plug-in for their browser. We shouldn’t be trying to sell technologies like OpenID, we should be making the technology invisible.
Gavin uses Leslie’s design of the Satisfaction sign-up process as an example. She never mentions hCard. Nobody needs to know that.
We’re trying lots of different patterns and we often get it wrong. The evil password antipattern signup page on the Spokeo website is the classic example of getting it wrong.
We must remember the hinternet. Here’s a trite but true example: Gavin’s mum …she doesn’t have her own email address. She shares it with Gavin’s dad. According to most social network sites, they are one person. And be careful of exposing stuff publicly that people don’t expect. Also, are we being elitist with things like OpenID delegation that is only for people who have their own web page and can edit it?
Our data might be portable but what about the context? If I can move a picture from Flickr but I can’t move the associated comments then what’s the point?
We’re getting very domain-centric. It would be great if everyone was issued with their own domain name. Most people don’t even think about buying a domain name. They might have a MySpace page or Facebook profile but that’s different.
Some things are getting better. People have stopped mentioning the http:// prefix. But many people don’t even see or care about your lovely URL structure. Anyway, with portable data, when you move something (like a blog post), you lose the lovely URL path.
Larry Tesler came up with the law of the conversation of complexity. There is a certain basic level of complexity. We are starting to build this basic foundation with OpenID and OAuth — they could be like copy and paste on the desktop.
We built a Web for us, geeks, but we built it in a social way. We are discoverable. We live online. This lends itself well to smaller, narrower, tailored services like Dopplr for travel, Fire Eagle for location, AMEE for carbon emissions. But everything should integrate even better. Why can’t clicking “done” in Basecamp generate an invoice in Blinksale, for example? If they were desktop applications, we’d script something. Simon interjects that if they were open source, we would modify them. That’s what Gavin is agitating for. The boundaries are blurring. We have lots of applications both on and off the Web but they are all connected by the internet. People don’t care that much these days about what application they are currently using or who built it; it’s the experience that’s important.
Here’s something Gavin wants somebody to make: identity brokerage. This builds on his id6 idea from last year. That was about contact portability. Now he wants something to deal with all the invitations he gets from social networks. Now that we’ve got OpenID, why can’t we automate the acceptance or rejection of friend requests?
We are heading towards a distributed future. DiSo points the way. But let’s learn from RSS and make the technology invisible. We need to make sense of the Web for the people coming after us. That may sound elitist but Gavin doesn’t mean it to be.
Kellan asks if we can just change the schema. Gavin says we can but we should change it gradually.
Step-by-step reassurance is important. Get the details right. Magnolia is starting to get this right with its sign-in form which lists the services you can sign in through, rather than the technology (OpenID).
We are sharing content, not making friends. Dopplr gets this right by never using the word friend. Instead it lists people with whom you share your trips. The Pownce approach of creating sub-groups from a master list is close to how people really work.
Scaffolding and gradual change are important. As a child, we are told two apples plus three apples is five apples. Later we learn that two plus three equals five; the scaffolding is removed. We must first build the scaffolding but we can remove it later.
Gavin wraps up and even though the time is up, the discussion kicks off. Points and counterpoints are flying thick and fast. The main thrust of the discussion is whether we need to teach the people of the hinternet about they way things work or to hide all that stuff from them. There’s a feast of food for thought here.