Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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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Is 2010 the end of ‘free’?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

With the global recession’s milk teeth dropping out, some much sharper ones have replaced them, or so it seems.  As economies struggle with sovereign debt, there’s a general sense that we might be getting to a stage that there’s not enough money to go around.  And it seems to be starting to impact on the services that many of us take for granted – and take for free.

Some social networks that were the shining example of social media just two years ago are struggling.  Take Bebo in the UK for example, which at one stage was larger than MySpace UK and which was subsequently acquired by AOL.  Founder Michael Burke sold Bebo in 2008 for 850 million dollars.  Having invested so much, it has been left to wither on the vine, prompting an announcement from AOL earlier this year saying that it was looking for a buyer.  If one is not found by the end of May, it’s likely that Bebo will be shuttered and will join the dead-pool.

Other social networking sites are taking heed in this change of temperature.  It takes revenue to create a momentum, and that revenue was missing from Bebo after it was acquired.  It also takes a business model to get acquired in the first place, and some are finally waking up to the fact that their users are the ones that are the low-hanging fruit.  Take for example the recent announcement from Ning, the platform that enabled anyone to set up their niche social network for nothing.  Unless you’re an educational institution, it’s the end of the free ride, with fees from $3 to $50 per month to run a platform for your members and no free starter option.  This is a complete about-turn and has had some strong impacts on the favourability of its brand online.

Whilst this is a transparent move into a commercial business model, and one that is of course necessary for organizations to succeed in the long term, moving from a free to a paid-for model without any prior indication is a huge issue for people relying on the service to communicate with customers, partners or friends.  Ning however is not the only platform making this move.  This week, after purchasing and releasing ‘official’ Twitter apps for a number of different devices over the past month or so, Twitter also announced a change to its terms of service, stating that it would be blocking the injection of paid advertising into the twitter stream.  At present, this remains undefined and could quite possibly be used as a step into generating revenue from businesses using twitter in any way to profit from its services.  The difference with Twitter is that many have seen this move coming and others even speculate that a paid model by end users who don’t want to see adverts in their Twitter stream might also be a possibility.  Even so, with the success of Twitter and its increasing penetration in countries that don’t use the computer as the first point of entry to the internet, this business model by stealth again has a reputational issue and the uncertainty may turn both developers and ultimately end-users off.

There is of course another organization that is trying to create revenue from its users ‘by stealth’.  One cannot help also see Facebook’s flip-flopping over its privacy rules, “features” and controls, as well as its recent security scares with the integration of the Like button, sharing information with other sites on the web.  We know how it makes its money, and any attempt to close down information about users is going to impact on that ability.  If the issues are big enough to focus the attention of many Governments around the world, Facebook may just become – along with Google – this decade’s equivalent of Microsoft in the previous decade for legal wrangles.  These can be quite expensive and long-fought battles, and the revenue needs to be found to fight these from somewhere.

But do all of these signs add up to the end of ‘free’?  It’s perhaps a little too early to tell quite yet.  Certainly, there are many different services that provide basic free services with additional paid-for access to additional features or other low-cost communications channels.  But these again don’t command the same level of interest that ‘the big guns’ do from the media and consequently struggle to gain a large enough base in order to become a de facto standard that a majority of people can use as their main communications channel with confidence.

What this does lead to is that 2010 is going to be the year of further disruption in terms of communications choices.  As those disappointed that services are shut down (Bebo users are, it seems, very loyal) or charged for (the jury is still out from Ning’s users’ perspective), many are looking around for alternatives.  The question is, how willing are people to get burned by free services again when it comes to making a choice?  How easy is it for them to port their social graph to other services?  How important is it now to people to be discoverable through more than one service?  And how much investment have they made in terms of their time in investing on those services that the now, for one reason or another, cannot use?

So perhaps whilst this still may not be the end of free, it may well be the beginning of the end of trust in free to be around for as long as people want it to be.  And that trust is an important factor in being able to commit to services with time and value invested in those services.  At the end of the day, it’s interesting to note that recent statistics showed that US teens now prefer texting over any other form of communication with their friends.  Certainly not a free service, but one that’s established a level of trust worth the investment.

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Posted by Justin
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What’s your online reputation like?

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Currently, a number of eminent thinkers are releasing thoughts on reputation and engagement online. In past few weeks and months, books and businesses which have obviously taken time to gestate in the minds of people coming from several different directions have been announced.  What is interesting is that they seem to be converging on a central thesis, explicit or otherwise, that, like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, search is becoming, if not has become, the central player in understanding and defining what is true. That truth, whether it be about the collective listing of information about who a person is, or the collective sentiment about what people feel about a particular business or product, is being defined by trust developed on the basis of search rankings, the popularity of the sources and the ability to interpret individual pieces of information within the context of the sum of search.  This means that, whether consuming or promoting, everyone is in the search business, either pulling or pushing, these days.

The most recent piece to emerge is from ex-Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski, who postulates that ‘Every Company is a Media Company’ (EC=MC) in his new thesis which he writes about here.  His position is clear; regardless of the business you are in, you’re also in the business of media publishing.  Content, communications through social media, advertising in the non-traditional sense, open customer services models letting the world see you deal with your customers in a transparent way, reacting and acting online to maintain positive feeling with your existing customers and utilizing fan pages to grow your potential customer base.  All of these are employed with increasing energy as businesses transform into what they need to in order to survive in the competitive marketplace that has become global and virtual.  And if you’re not publishing, and controlling, what you want people to see, or engaging in the conversation, you’re not long for this world in business terms.

From a completely different angle, taking the individual and non-technical perspective, Antony Mayfield, an ex-PR man and now VP of i-Crossing here in the UK, has come up with a constructive discussion of the importance of managing one’s own ‘web shadow’ – the sum of the parts of the internet that you once played with and forgot, blended with the sum of the parts of the internet that other people played with tagging you in a photo of a drunken party, with a dash of some of the professional stuff you might have done or still do, all served up without empathy on Google’s front page.  Luckily for most, Antony also outlines what you can do about it even if you’re not technical, in his excellent and thoughtful book Me and My Web Shadow.

Stuck in between the large organizations and the individuals, are 90% (if not more) of the rest of the business world.  Small and medium-sized businesses at a loss to understand how to deal with all of this reputation and search stuff, knowing the importance of being found online but struggling with the time-poor aspects of developing and growing business from a day-to-day perspective.  Luckily again, another book This is Social Media, written by business journalist Guy Clapperton, outlines in a very simple way, what can and can’t be achieved with various social networks and technologies.

What it comes down to is this.  No longer can you take the chance to ignore search results.  There’s little or no time to be able to retrospectively fix negative customer sentiment already on the web, but it’s not too late to begin to engage.  Skins need to be thickened.  Sleeves need to be rolled up.  Taking control is not out of the reach of the individual job-seekers concerned about employers finding negative impressions of them on social networks, nor is making sure that you can be found as high up the search results in order to be the authoritative source of information about you.  Businesses can take control of all of the ways in which they can interact with different constituents and be more open on the internet whilst maximizing their investments in their social media channels.

The time is definitely right to look at a .tel name as a way to help with all of these issues, especially, but not exclusively, if you’re not technically inclined.  Online reputation matters – it’s time to do something about it.

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Posted by Justin
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