Entries Tagged as 'The New Web'

Reputation Economies symposium

O’Reilly Radar has a blog post about the Yale symposium on reputation economies in cyberspace.

OpenSocial insecurity – no user to app authentication

I was pretty excited to hear about Google trying to set a standard for social network applications. I wasn’t so happy to notice a serious omission in the way security is handled.

Executive Summary: no user authentication! Any user can forge anybody else’s identity when interacting with any OpenSocial application. As it currently stands, it is not possible to write secure social applications on the platform.

[Read more →]

OpenSocial vs. Facebook API – an analysis

Executive Summary

  • OpenSocial applications will have diverging look-and-feel, from each other and from the containers. This is because the containers do not provide common elements to blend the application into the container.
  • OpenSocial applications may not be vertically resizable, since they will exist in an iframe. However, Google has an API For resizing that some or all of the networks may implement
  • Facebook has additional API functionality that is not present in OpenSocial
  • The Facebook API is server oriented, whereas the OpenSocial/Google Gadgets API is client-side JavaScript oriented

[Read more →]

Stanford Delta Scan and Technologies for Cooperation

Stanford’s Delta Scan makes predictions similar to my take on Web 3.0, including:

  • Trust over Social networks / Social accounting methods (i.e. reputation systems)
  • the rise of computing grids
  • Social mobile computing
  • Knowledge collectives
  • Mesh networks

Giving rise to:

  • Adhocracies
  • Faster innovation
  • Faster/better decision making
  • Increase in effectiveness of online economies

Crowdhacking

Wired latest issue has an article about the emerging arms race between rating systems (such as eBay, Amazon, Digg) and crowdhackers. Crowdhackers take advantage of the naive methods used to aggregate ratings in existing systems.

A crowdhacking proof system will have to use a transitive trust model rather than the naive averaging existing systems use.

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability

Google is a prime user of commodity grid supercomputing.  As such, they are in a perfect position to release a paper on disk reliability, with hundreds of thousands of data points.  Very interesting results, including the failure of SMART to predict failures, and low correlation with usage and temperature.

This will be important as grid supercomputing becomes the preferred way to manage compute resources.

Update: Slashdot points to another storage paper presented at FAST ’07 confirming some of the points in the Google paper, and invalidating the manufacturers’ MTTF estimates.

Supercruncher “web 3.0” applications

Bill McColl writes an article named Supercruncher Applications on his Computing at Scale blog about massively parallel  “web 3.0” applications.  In particular the following caught my eye:  continuous search, complex algorithmic trading and decentralized marketplaces and recommendation agents.

This is related to my previous post about the future of the web.

Found through Slashdot.

Web 3.0, according to Miron

Here is what I think Web 3.0 will have:

  •  A global and open Reputation Network
  •  A distributed and open Computing and Storage Platform

Reputation Network

What does it mean for a Reputation Network to be global?  Currently, we have propietary reputation systems, such as the reputation scores for sellers (and buyers) at Amazon and eBay.  However, that reputation is not portable.  This means that if an Amazon third-party seller wants to start selling on eBay, they have to start from scratch, as if their business is new.  Trust is an integral ingredient to transactions.  It becomes crucial on the internet, when a buyer and a seller are likely to never have heard of each-other.  With portable reputations, a trust metric can be made available in all interactions.

What about the open part?  A global reputation system owned by one entity is a non-starter.  Why would one trust a single entity to provide basic infrastructure that affects all commerce and other interaction?  Reputation should be like TCP/IP – based on open standards so that different vendors can provide different levels of service and create a robust overall system.  The individual reputation systems can remain under the control of Amazon, eBay and others.  However, they can inter-operate so that they can create a global reputation network.
Reputation should be subjective. End-users should be able to subscribe to different raters, and thereby compute different scores for the same target. End-users have diverse values and preferences. One number cannot capture this diversity.

Storage and Computing

What about storage and computing?  Currently, people have presence on the Web through Blogs, Wikis, Storefronts, IM, e-mail, etc. .  However, creating a new Web application faces certain barriers.  The application creator has to acquire servers, manage them, ensure that the data is safe and face scalability issues as the application grows in popularity.  Also, interoprability between applications is difficult.  A standardized computing and storage abstraction will allow new application to be installed by the user into their virtual computing appliance.  Users will have control of which application they run and how the applications communicate.  Applications and data will migrate to physical hardware based on what the user is willing to pay and what scalability requires.

The division of labor is:  the application provider does what they are good at – writing applications.  The computing and storage providers provide efficient and reliable computing and storage (and if they don’t – the application can migrate easily or even automatically).  The end-user does what they do best – connect the dots and provide content.

People Aggregator – unification of social networks?

Federated, single-signon, standards based. What’s not to like?

BroadBand Mechanics presents People Aggregator

Web site is not fully functional yet, so have to wait.

Blogged with Flock

Frappr

Location based social network.

http://www.frappr.com/

and the transhumanist group thereon:

http://www.frappr.com/transhumanists