The Open Web was open to discussion on day one of Web 2.0 Expo.

The following post was written by social media diva Tessa Horehled, who is representing Wicked PR as a brand enthusiast at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Day one of Web 2.0 Expo is a little bonus day. Show up and attend in depth workshops spanning the wide range of the internet before the full conference kicks off. I attended one workshop — the Open Social Web Workshop with David Recordon (Six Apart), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) and Chris Messina (Vidoop).

If you aren’t very familiar with the concept of DataPortability, watch this video by Smashcut which breaks it into four basic principles: connect, control, share and remix.

Dave Recordon started the discussion, challenging the audience to “think about how you’re going to build your relationships with your users.” The current issues are that users are forced to creating the same profile every time they join a new site, they have import the same media, add the same friends and then potentially have different content everywhere. Tim O’Reilly declared at OCSON 07 that “open data is increasingly important as services move online.” There are many different formats right now that enable the syndication and aggregation of your information online (OpenID, OAuth, XMPD, contact databases, activity streams, hCard, XFN, XOXO) but limited availability for implementation. Ning is the only example the panelists mentioned in relation to the concept of interconnected social networks. On Ning, you are able to register once and use the same login, photo and general information across all social networks hosted or enabled by Ning.

Chris Messina at Web 2.0 Expo 2009 by Tessa Horehled

Chris Messina briefly mentioned a few OpenWeb projects including his own Diso Project, an initiative to facilitate the creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web, and Pinax, a platform for rapidly developing websites. Joseph Smarr continued by explaining there are new building blocks to establish who I am, who I know and what’s going on in a reusable way. He then broke it down into the “Anatomy of Connect”:

Why do people have to create a new account on every service? Re-create their profile? Give away their passwords to every site that asks? Re-discover their friends? Re-friend their friends? Learn new ways to share and communicate? Interconnectivity leads to higher adoption rate. You’re making it easy for the user.

Chris Messina showed some industry trends:
- User control of data
- User-centric web services, real identity becoming the norm
- Location-enhanced services
- Real-time content delivery, ubiquitous connectivity
- Interoperable application platforms
- Content aggregation and syndication
- Increasing quantities of data to work with
- Democratization of digital media creation tools

People are getting more comfortable identifying themselves online. A handful of social networks and tools are now giving the option to show Real Name, Username or Real Name & Username. Instead of the anonymous presences that most users once felt the only safe way of interacting online, users are now integrating their online lives into their offline existence openly.

As fantastic as the Open Web sounds, it’s success lies in the adoption — whether it will be able to become the industry standard. As pointed out by an article from Epicenter (Wired) from late last year entitled “As Facebook Connect Expands, OpenID’s Challenges Grow,” OpenID was developed in essence for geeks. It is lacking the user experience needed to become adopted and implemented by the mainstream.

“… It’s the same paradigm promised by OpenID and its companion open-source technologies being developed by Google, MySpace, Yahoo, Plaxo and other key players on the social web. But where Facebook Connect is heading towards mass adoption on mainstream sites like Digg, OpenID is currently bogged down by several issues, the largest of which is poor usability.”

Then only two months ago, Facebook started to embrace open standards and APIs, now fitting them into their strategy. In a blog post on the OpenID site in early February, Chris and David announced that “Facebook Joins OpenID Foundation Board With A Commitment To Better User Experience.” Followed by a blog post on the Facebook Developers blog announcing the opening of Facebook status updates, notes, links and video, moving from just being able to put data in to also being able to get it out.

The thing is — things get tricky really fast when data moves from one place to another. Facebook made a change to their Terms of Service Agreement, removing a passage that stated users “may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.” Users interpreted this change as that they would be granting Facebook a “perpetual right to license and sublicense your content,” and as you can imagine started a bit of a controversy. They did this because Facebook can’t and didn’t want to be in a position of guaranteeing that your content will be 100% gone when you remove it from their site. Because of their open API, content can feasibly be syndicated in many places and stored locally, even past the life of that content on Facebook. They also can’t guarantee that other users won’t store their own copies locally. In response, Facebook issued the “Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities” which asks their users what they want and to have ownership and awareness behind what they put online.

This is an ongoing discussion and something that should be watched closely. You can’t erase the internet! Once something is published online, even past the life of the content, there will always be a copy of it accessible somewhere on the internet.

For more of this presentation, check out the full Implementing the Social Web presentation on SlideShare.