Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Wiki as Platform

Don Dodge, citing Socialtext and wikiCalc as prime examples:

These new wiki and blog based platforms are an example of the promise of Web 2.0. They introduce a whole new way to build collaborative, interactive, web ready applications that can be hosted "in the cloud" or inside the firewall.

Platform shifts happen every 10 to 15 years. We may be witnessing the start of a new platform shift with Web 2.0 style blog and wiki platforms.

i hesitate to call what we do a platform yet.  It is hard to think of a startup that started and remained as a platform.  Instead we are focusing on being a killer application first.  Apps that gain widespread adoption become attractive for others to develop upon, and if managed right, become platforms. 

That said, Don is right that we are at the beginning of a platform shift.  Wikis and Blogs have from their very beginning afforded open source and open APIs.  They make great containers for orchestrating web services to form composite applications, or for being mashed up elsewhere.  And more importantly, they are collaboration and communication tools that demand and enable redesign of applications.  Not just slapping them on a web page.

Weak signals that this is already happening include how Angel.com leveraged Wiki Web Services for a public wiki knowledge-base with Excel documents.  Or Joe Gregario's leverage of wikiCalc and his Sparkline generator to prove out the spreadsheet as a mashup fabric:

I recently pointed to a cool thing Jon Udell did with my sparklines generator. In that article Jon asks:

    How can more people be empowered to do such redesigns, for print and for the web?

My answer is based on my opinion that any solution needs to be Document Centric. I believe an online spreadsheet is an excellent starting point for building a mashup fabric: a document into which a range of online services can be combined. To that end I downloaded and installed wikiCalc and tried to integrate my sparklines service into a spreadsheet...

Mini-Meme

Gabe at Techmeme created Mini versions of his meme trackers for mobile users.  Just add /mini to the end of the URL of your favorite Memeorandum site or /miniriver for an extended version.

This of course, is going straight into my list of links and notes in Miki, the mobile wiki.  All web apps should have mobile versions like this.

Certifiable

There is a recursive irony in the public debate about the Generic Attribution Provision proposed before the Open Source Initiative.

In blogspace, David Berlind raises the red flag broadly and narrowly on vendors and projects calling themselves open source without using an OSI approved license or having their license certified. In fact, there is no trademark on "open source." The commercial open source vendors David identifies broadly and narrowly in his second post are not breaking any rules or undermining the community. This doesn't mean David's flag is moot, there is an underlying confusion in the market he is bringing to light.

There are clear incentives for companies and projects to seek to be OSI Certified, because it is a trademark. Trademark is the the one body of intellectual property law that largely supports innovation with relative Freedom -- and trademark is attribution. Open Source projects that have followed the process and gained certification have earned something. It is a process that is inevitably burdensome and risky, as is any process, especially subject to an open community. But because it is difficult, no matter how helpful those involved, it garners meaning. The certification mark means something, a signal of trust, relative efficiency to the noise of the market, acceptance in the bazzar backed by conversations that others can join.

The recursive irony is that Socialtext seeks certification attributable to OSI for a license that includes attribution. The OSI Certified badge will be proudly displayed. A signal that we are playing by the rules of the open source community and by doing so contribute value to the community.

For the Socialtext community, to be part of it must mean something. Those that preceded you must have done something. Being spawned and rooted by a commercial open source company must mean more than a value proposition that attracts. Leadership means more than creating something on your own and citizenry means being a part of an inevitably larger whole. People participate through social contracts. Agreements build upon agreements to constitute a body made of bodies. We think that the Socialtext Public License attribution provision will compound community value as the OSI Certified badge does, and will not stifle innovation as the Creative Commons attribution provision has proven.

Some companies may not choose or be able to attain the value of the OSI Certification mark. They can use the term "open source" to describe their offerings, but it is of less value to be part of the non-standard part of the market.

I already find the license-discuss mailing list full of noise, engaged in personality conflicts and not deliberating the approval in question. Partially this is because of the mailing list as a tool, which is lacking the attribution affordance of hypertext, and the emphasis of identity of contributors without persistence leading to personal flame-wars, the babel problem revisited, lack of memory, permanent addressability and all the things new tools have moved past. The conversation even spiraled into notions of an explicit reputation system outside of certification (the horrors, for goodness sake move this to a blog or wiki and let the community imply judgment). Oh, wait, this is not about our tool, but tooling the machines of the future.

The World Wide World

Part of the future is being prototyped in gaming.  As it always has been, play is always innovation at some level.  But at the massive level, part of the future is playing itself out today.

My last post took an unexplored tangent off of Raph Koster's insight into Second Life's Copybot, exploring the arbitrage opportunity when content production costs are increasing, but it was too generic.  See Raph's comment and his deeper thoughts on the future of content.  He clarifies that he thought rising production costs applies to the content industry, not end users.  I'd say that platforms will emerge for end users to have their day.

Second Life is actually the closest to this, which makes it interesting.  Can you imagine an end user demanding a VCR that doesn't copy, but only plays?  Or wanting a CDROM that doesn't burn?  Perhaps when the tools of production are evenly distributed, but the culture doesn't follow.

Part of what I guess is happening in SL is distorted rates of change.  See, I remember when I first met Raph at Supernova and he said something to the effect of, "we gamers are evolving faster than you n00bs." People believed intellectual property rule of law was established, and then the game changed.  Only the Marxists would be happy with this.

Or the people, like Raph, that realize that the physics have changed.  Better yet, that there are no closed systems.

Joi first for me and most naturally realized that MMORGs don't adapt to the real world enough.  The business is still perceived as a content business with a captive audience.  Where users are not content generators, but accumulators.  SL, to Philip Rosendale's credit, breaks this mold where content is pre-dominantly generated by users.  It also breaks the mold of embracing an open economy with other economies.  But how much of the mold is broken?

The former could be broken more.  Where is the standard that allows me to create a 3D representation of a character or object that is portable across worlds, even if rendered and with different attributes?  Where is the accessible scripting language, the HTML of worlds? 
A long time coming.  While I believe Virtual Worlds will eventually be part of the web, not just the internet, the walled gardens are profitable and defensible in absence of alternatives.

The current view is due to capital costs, in a hit or miss business that harkens to Hollywood, content production is in the hands of vendors.  I hope SL gets through this successfully, because at the level editing level, they enable a user-generated alternative.  In fact, they have their first SL Millionaire.  Wonder how she would play with inevitable erosion of digital property rights.  Is she creating experiences, or just playing a spot market amidst DRM countermeasures?

If you want to see the future of content creation, a controversial glimpse of it is in this documentary.  In it, the entrepreneur who manages a gold farming venture that resembles a college dorm (until his PayPal account connection is terminated) provides the insight that it is simply a service business that transcends distance and privilege.

Warcraft makes user-generated content globally accessible.  And despite efforts to the contrary, the result is a service industry in support of the game.  Second Life affords a role, but favors a different kind of player that relates to other players.

These are only two datapoints that could make up a rich ecology.  But today the ecology is not there.  There is an ecology of shared experiences with gaming, and a far greater potential with non-gamers.  And most game design provides negative incentives for what is outside worlds. 

Sometimes I wonder if anything like the Web will happen again.  It was a glorious triumph that such interop and culture happened before it was taken disruptively.  Today almost every game acts as though it has its own monopoly in its own world.  But I have to think that users have had a taste of how things should work, even if not rich in experience, and even with the limitations of how portable identity, relationships and content are in the web today.  And the next disruption could force worlds to collide.

Human CopyBots

Raph Koster applies the impact of CopyBot on SecondLife's intellectual property economy as a broad lesson for the industry.

In the last decades, we have seen the content business have to adapt to a frightening new reality: The cost to create a minute of content has risen exponentially, but the fair market value of a minute of content has plummeted. In our brave new world of digital assets and user contributions, we tend to forget that this will be hitting not just media companies in the pocketbook, but also all those Web users who are merrily uploading their creations to platforms that by their very nature are fundamentally defenseless against copying.

While I believe this is generally true, there are notable exceptions for more open systems.  And all systems trend towards open.  The gaming industry is bifurcating into content creation and game engines.  A split driven both by the cost of content creation, but mostly the complexity and cost of creating the game engines that power it.  SecondLife is one of the most open virtual worlds, but the tools for creating content within it are still limited.  Especially when compared with the diversity and accessibility of our standards-based web.

In some areas of the media sector, the cost for creating content is plummeting.  It may still be expensive for a single user to create quality content, be it amateur or professional.  But it is getting cheaper:

• create crappy content
• sift through said crap to discover gems

How?  Well, its made of people, silly.

In more closed virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft, content creation is largely the burden of the toolmaker.  And copying is expressly forbidden.  So what happens?  The arbitrage condition is so strong that people are applied to the problem.  Chinese gold farmers are human CopyBots.

Badgeware

Bruce Perens calls web applications with attribution provisions "badgeware."  Somehow this seems familiar.

The original quotation comes from the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is where a Mexican bandit leader (Gold Hat, played by Alfonso Bedoya) is trying to convince Fred C. Dobbs (played by Bogart) and company that they are the Federales.

Dobbs: "If you're the police, where are your badges?"

Gold Hat: "Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!!"

Source: Wikipedia

I hereby issue the Gold Hat challenge.  Find me a mashup of open source applications (not infrastructure) with attribution requirements that adversely constrain the interface and I'll send you a legal copy of the Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Badgeware is oh so catchy and cute.  But the underlying issue is attribution is an incentive for innovation with freedom, or a burdensome constraint.  And if the deputizing body functions. I'm with Bogart on this one, you are either one of the Federales, or not.

Don't Bogart that cert from me, pass it over, my friend. 

Socialtext Proposes Attribution Provision

When going through the process of opening Socialtext, we need to choose a license that is a fit for a commercial open source company.  Commercial open source strikes the balance between freedom and profit motive, and the license you choose becomes a contract not just for the company, but a community. 

The decision to open is easier for vendors than it was just a few years ago because of the common practice of Mozilla Public License-based licenses by companies such as SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, Scalix and about 10 others.  MPL is the most popular OSI license and it allows for extensions (MPL section 6.1 says "However, You may include an additional document offering the additional rights described in Section 3.5." Section 3.5 ensure that the modifications must apply equally to every developer or contributor.). 

Good thing too, because in my humble opinion no other licenses are a fit for commercial open source web applications.

For Socialtext, we made three modifications:

1. Attribution: We believe that attribution provides positive incentives for creativity and innovation, as witnessed by the success of Creative Commons attribution licenses. Trademark is attribution. We require the display of the project's mark within the UI, not just the code, with a link back to the community that contributes to it.
2. Network Use: Delivering an application over HTTP should the same as compiling, burning and distributing on a CD.  If you distribute over the network, you should share your contributions with the community.  See this wiki page for more details.
3. Trademark Use: Section 6.3 says that if you make a modification to the license, you cannot use Mozilla trademarks within the license. So we called it Socialtext Public License, but we can reference MPL publicly or in the license expressly to point out the first two differences between SPL and MPL.

We put SPL out into the world after a lot of research and conversation, but decided to be open to granting more liberal rights in the future if demanded by the community.  More importantly, while SPL is consistent with the Open Source Definition, we firmly believe in the mission of the Open Source Initiative and desire to submit to their process for sake of license proliferation.

While it is inside baseball for some, David Berlind has a very well researched post that asks, are companies using MPL extensions are abusing the term Open Source?  I've spoken with David about this several times.  I think his article provides a balanced view of those who believe the licenses are OSI compliant and those who do not. I'd also like to highlight OSI board member Danese Cooper's blog post on attribution.

But unfortunately I haven't had a chance to talk with David in a little while, as I would have highlighted that Socialtext submitted a memo to the OSI board for consideration on November 14th -- proposing a Generic Attribution Provision.  I've shared the attribution memo on a wiki page, where you can find additional background information on the issue and the proposal to resolve it through a standard attribution clause that OSI could certify for any OSI license.  This structure would be similar to how Creative Commons enables attribution as an option.

AboutUs Gets Funding

Congrats to Ray King for getting $1M for AboutUs, a wiki-powered index of the web.  One step closer towards Wikipedia eats Google. 

If you haven't tried the AboutUs domain directory, it mashes up all kind of information about a given website and lets anyone build upon it.

wikiCalc Screencast

Dan Bricklin just put up a new screencast of wikiCalc that shows off some of the features in the same release that will become SocialCalc.

The screencast shows the latest version. (The last one was done in June.) In addition to the normal run through of the product features shown in the last screencast, this one has a short introduction that positions the product and adds a few minutes of demonstrations of the work flow, Live View functionality, embedding on other web pages, etc. For example, it shows viewing a consolidated report, clicking on a link to a divisional report, logging in to view that page, clicking "Edit This Page" on that report, making a change, and then viewing the updated consolidated values. It also shows using a normal web page with a form to call up another page with an embedded spreadsheet that includes calculations that are based on values provided by the form.

Press Conference in World of Warcraft

UPDATE: GAME ON

TechCrunch reports the big new trend is for companies like Sun and Dell to hold their press conferences in SecondLife.  To further advance the state of the art, the next Socialtext press conference will be held in World of Warcraft.

• Time: December 1st, 5pm server time
• Location: Goldshire, Elwynn Forrest, Eitrigg Server
• Rules of Order:
  
  • No ninjas.
  • Questions will only be taken from journalists in PvP mode   
    
  • We have developed means of determining if you are a Chinese Gold Farmer, so do not outsource your participation
  • Safe passage will be provided to Horde characters, but your questions may be lost in translation 
  • Keep your armor on, do not /dance unless you are an orc, use of other emotes are encouraged
  • If the spokesperson is not forthcoming, you may duel for information
  • Those that survive the experience will gain 1 gold piece and a Socialtext tabard