Posts Tagged ‘identity’

Search and Social Sharing comes to .tel Superbook for iPhone

Friday, September 16th, 2011
We’re pleased to announce the latest version of .tel Superbook for iPhone, which can now be downloaded from the App Store. As well as a complete overhaul in terms of look and feel, some key elements have been added to make this app even more user friendly:

  • Telpages search: Now, you can search for .tel information from within the app, rather than having to type in a known .tel name. As well as delivering back search results, a confidence bar is provided highlighting the results that Telpages thinks are the best fit for your search
  • Recently Visited .tel Names: In order to save time, and in case you forgot to save previous searches, a cached version of recently visited .tel names is provided in a list.
  • Pull down to quick refresh: Whether recently visited or saved contacts, up-to-date information can quickly be accessed by a simple swipe down and re-saved with one click to your contacts
  • Share: As well as saving to your address book, you can also quickly share a discovered .tel name, a business recommendation or a new contact by email, twitter, facebook and other services (if you’re following @rikkles or @justinhayward on Twitter you may have seen us testing this). This is yet another great way of easily sharing .tel information with anyone you want
We hope you enjoy the new features on the .tel Superbook and please do leave a review on the App Store if you do use it. You can find it here or visit http://superbook.tel.
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Curation: The key to online reputation

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Those ‘embedded’ within the social media ecosystem have long talked of curation as the killer application that will provide the disruptive force to shift old-school industries into submission or ‘pivot’.  Recently, prolific naughties blogger Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion fame and now consultant at Edelman Public Relations refreshed the debate by moving it into the applications space from the social web.  His argument was that, with the ease and access to apps, whilst the likes of the music industry have already been disrupted through free-to-stream music services that enable people to listen to curated pick lists, now traditional media outlets are being faced by a dilution of their brand through the curation of content from them through new apps for tablets and smart phones.

An Ancient Skill

The fundamental fact is that this type of curation is not new.  In 1996, a small research project that then turned into a search engine called Google, provided an algorithmic curation of web pages presented to the user when searching for ‘relevant’ information (or simply one result if they were ‘feeling lucky’!).  Whilst the format has stayed the same substantially since then, with automation and algorithms at the heart of the service, it’s a poorly-kept secret that Google employs thousands to make sure that the results expected to be delivered are maintained.

In the late 1990s, TiVo started enabling this type of curation of content on television, based on programmes watched, and enabling people to cut out or fast-forward through adverts.  Television did not die; instead, new technology providers sprang up to provide different types of channels based on genres, with services like Virgin Media and Sky in the UK providing ‘on demand’ television.

In music, radio stations for years have been curating music choices, picked by DJs.  Themed channels have also been around for a long time.

Curation, Distributed

What has changed is the ability for anyone to curate some form of content or culture easily.  In the same way that blogging on free platform enabled anyone to start curating information on the web and providing opinion on it, now the medium has changed to enable people to more easily (but yet not simply) create applications that can be downloaded to devices and share that curated content.

Curation in and of itself is not the creation of social media.  Those with access to cheap and standardized technology – pamphleteers in the 1640s for example – were able to curate and present information.  What has changed is the ability to reach a broad audience and, by association, be discovered by like-minded individuals, opposing factions (whether trolls or Governments) or potential customers.

The act of curation and the ability to curate is open to all, and that is the fundamental point.  The scarcity value of information and content – whether it be music, opinion or indeed contact information – has been unlocked, never to be placed back into the box.  Each and every individual with access to an internet connection and a device has the power to begin curation and stands every chance of being ‘liked’, +1’d or shared so that the message is distributed virally far and wide (or indeed to a small, confined community).

Marketing by Curation

No small business or individual professional today should consider themselves to be marketing themselves appropriately if they leave curation of their brand or online reputation to a third party.

Where once the purpose of a press release was to engage and inform the media (which at the time were the only channel which had the power and the reach to influence the people you wanted to communicate with), now it stands as a tool for search engine optimization to be directly discoverable as a piece of editorial by potential employers, partners or customers.

Equally important is the curation of the ways in which people can contact you.  It’s critically important to make sure that your contact information is (securely) up-to-date in the distributed nature of the global business environment.  Curation is potentially the most important tool of any individual or small business today.  Make it work for you.

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Whose Identity is it Anyway?

Monday, March 7th, 2011

I was at the cinema recently and saw a preview for Liam Neeson’s new film ‘Unknown’.  Predictably, to me at least, it seems that Mr. Neeson plays one of his two stock roles; arch-nemesis or, as is in this case, driven character either in a situation of peril or jeopardy or seeking a close relative in such state.  His character in this film apparently wakes from a coma to find that someone else has stolen his identity and not even his wife believes him.

Like the plot for this film, identity as an issue seems to crop up every couple of years.  Like the critics’ opinions on Mr. Neeson’s latest adventure, there’s a mixture of responses as to what the answer to the tricky issue of identity and identity theft ‘should’ be.

What is clear is that there are a number of commercial and large-scale projects ongoing around the world that are trying to address this in a concerted fashion; far more concerted it has to be said than in previous years.  What is interesting is looking at why this is happening and what people feel about this.  There’s no doubt that with the increase in life online, there’s a battle for ownership of identity.

Money Never Sleeps?

Like all consumer technology advances these days, two of the main drivers in the consumer space when it comes to identity seem to be from Facebook and Apple.  Did you miss those?  You may well have done.  Recently, Apple godfather Steve Jobs announced in the iPad 2 launch event that there were now something in the region of 200 million credit cards stored in the iTunes/App Store.  A financial link to a user is obviously an incredibly powerful way of validating who that person is (unless the card is stolen, in which case, that identity will either be short-lived or the person using it to purchase goods or services will soon be relocating to a secure facility).  Given the fact that less than 25% of people alive today have a bank account, this isn’t necessarily the best way of validating identity.

At the same time, in late February, Facebook rolled out Facebook Comments.  Billed as an attempt to enable sites to clean up their comment spam, those wishing to comment on an article with Facebook Comments enabled now have to sign in either using Facebook Connect or Yahoo! ID.  This obviously impacts on whether or not you’d wish to associate yourself with a comment on the site.  With over 550 million users, one would think that this identity provision would scale.  Facebook is obviously keen for people to be who they say they are, as advertising revenue increasingly funds its growth and success and the value behind that is the real-life data gathered in the biggest Truman Show experiment ever.

Both of these models seem based on the individual as a consumer and the value of that consumer to the ecosystem around the devices (in Apple’s case) or the platform (in Facebook’s case).  The first is tapping in to the cash that can be directly extracted from the consumer through providing very simple one-click verification of a transaction, however small.  The second is tapping into the value around the transactions – both financial and interaction-based – that the consumer undertakes and how that impacts on their friends, family and associates.

Face/Off?

Whilst not describing themselves as identity solutions, the implicit aspect is that this is what they are intended to be.  But these systems are built on transactions – What do I buy? What am I commenting on? – inside their own ecosphere.  This isn’t useful outside of that particular walled garden – there’s no personal continuity presented; how someone acts and the persona they are on Facebook may be completely different from whom they are at work.  Indeed, again, people are modifying their behavior when it comes to commenting using Facebook Comments.

Both solutions seem to be changing habits and activity (buying more things, commenting less) online, rather than driving understanding of what people actually need to do (have control over my credit card spending, making an anonymous snarky comment about something to let off steam right now).  This is forcing change on people through a technology service dependent on the moral structure of the service provider.  Many people feel fine about this; they live their lives in public and don’t understand why people might not wish to do the same as a default.  Even reading articles about being stalked on FourSquare don’t seem to deter them.  The problem is that when choice seems to be taken out of the equation as controls get more and more confusing for normal people, the default setting of privacy becomes ‘off’ because it’s too hard to set to ‘on’ and there’s an assumption that if something happens, it will be resolved by the service provider.

Cue the Sun!

In a time when the US government is seeking to encourage people to have a unique online identity in order to interact with Government services online, and having recently sat down with both Jobs and Zuckerberg at lunch, the drive towards online identity is front of mind for Governments.  It’s not just the United States.

The question is, will the systems that are chosen (driven by commercial organizations) inevitably change the individual?  Will we all, like Liam Neeson, wake up one day from a coma to find out that our identity has been taken away from us?  Not by another individual, but by a system that has been introduced as ‘best fit’, that changes who we are by changing what we do because of the lack of flexibility and individual control that we have being represented by that identity system?

Let’s hope there’s enough time to think this through.  I may just have to go and see Unknown now to see how Hollywood has it ending.  I’m certainly hoping it’s more Truman Show than Brazil.

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Developments in OAuth and OpenID

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Two of the things we’re working on at present to enhance .tel services are integrating OAuth (Open Authentication) and OpenID into .tel.  I’m personally excited about this as I think that this will bring huge benefits to many people and realize a vision for .tel that encourages people to see it, not as a traditional domain name, but as more of a communications solution.

Moving from a web-view to a multi-modal view

The majority of the work done to date is with the traditional web and mobile web in mind.  To an extent, this has been driven by a requirement that .tel is still being perceived, purchased and utilized as a traditional domain.  This may be due to its relative ease of set-up and its pure functionality – that of providing information online in a basic format for easy discovery and access.  It can be set up in minutes, is accessible from mobile devices ‘out of the box’ and now, with the support of AdSense and TelAds, can provide a revenue stream in addition to the contact information displayed that many find easy and simple to action.

But this is not the ultimate vision of .tel.  The above functionality will be enhanced, tweaked and supported as we move forward of course.  However, the use of DNS for storing of that information is the power behind the vision for .tel.  As it’s stored as data, it can be accessed, manipulated and utilized by many means.  As can be seen from the applications we’ve developed for the iPhone and Android, .tel is the first domain that can be managed completely from mobile devices.  With the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Outlook applications, one can lookup contact information from the DNS without leaving your address book, and import it there and then also.  And through third party soft phone applications, the same can be done, enabling the global directory to serve really fast contact information that is updated in real time.

Moving from online to offline access

All of this is done with an internet connection.  We must remember however that there are instances where we may be without internet connectivity (my iPhone service drops out even at major London train stations) and many in other countries with either no or low access to the internet, either through coverage, government regulation or poverty.

This is where it becomes interesting.  With OAuth support, services can be linked together without having to share usernames and passwords, creating a strong bond which will then allow .tel and other services to interact.  This we know will help those in the community who are developing management solutions for .tel to provide a trusted online service and we hope deliver them much success.  But at the same time, it will enable ‘offline’ services to interact with .tel.

What do I mean by this?  There is a proof of concept running on Twitter (see http://twitter.com/2tel) at present which shows Henri Asseily and my .tel names being managed by Twitter, and the both of us looking up information from other .tel names.  OK, fine, Twitter is an online service.  But what we’re actually doing is managing our .tel names and looking up .tel information via the Twitter SMS gateway.  We’re simply using the Twitter service as a bridge at present to enable us to utilize their SMS gateway to do this.  It could quite easily be a stand-alone SMS gateway.  OAuth will therefore enable .tel owners who don’t have continuous access to the internet to manage their names, and enable those with no internet access at all to access real-time updates from .tel names via SMS.  The first top level domain you can access and update without an internet connection.

This is what excites me.  I have to admit, I’m excited because I came up with the idea.  But if I can come up with that idea (and I’m not a real technologist, I just like and talk about technology) then what can the real technologists come up with?  The future of OAuth and binding .tel names to SMS I think provides a significant opportunity to telecommunications companies to begin to offer these to their customers, and a compelling business model for them to embed these into their offerings.  There is a huge market out there of people who wish to be found online but don’t have access to the internet all the time; India is just one of those markets and virtually all communication is done by SMS or mobile.

Moving towards a single uniform identity that you can own

At the same time, OpenID will also provide a compelling case for .tel to start to become used as an identifier for people online.  Many people don’t have the skills or desire to build a website of their own.  They use free services – Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook – to communicate with people when they want to (as well as still SMS, which remains the biggest surprise to mobile companies who never expected it to be successful as a communications tool).  But at the same time, we increasingly see that individuals need a place they can ‘own’ online – the ‘go to’ resource so that, if they leave one or more social networks, they won’t lose their ‘social graph’ (or, in non-jargon, the friends they really want to keep in touch with whom they re-discovered through the social network).  Additionally, the pervasiveness of these services and networks is leading to complexities in remembering usernames and passwords for all of these services (especially if security is front of mind).  OpenID makes a .tel domain the username that people can utilize to sign in to other services.  It then provides one place to bind all services together, and also an increase in the ability for people to utilize their .tel names more than just as a web address to give to people.  Sure, you can get a free OpenID from third-party service providers, but you’re back to the same problem; how long can they continue to provide this as a free service, or as a service at all, without a revenue stream?  With .tel becoming an OpenID provider, you own your domain – it’s not yourname.openidprovider.com, it’s simply yourname.tel.

So I believe the next six months will open up the ability for existing owners to re-engage and potential owners to re-evaluate .tel as more than just a web-based service, and I’m looking forward to seeing the developments that existing members of the community and new participants will develop.

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