Tom Morris

Why you shouldn’t let non-geeks write about technology news. Personally, I thought that Apple’s patent application meant that they were encouraging flashers to build applications on the iPhone.

Can DataPortability.org become any more irrelevant?

First, some links to people who’ve been discussing DataPortability: Eran Hammer-Lahav (and an earlier mailing list post), Dave Winer and Scott Kveton. Read these, please, and read the comments.

Now, I’ve pretty much given up on DataPortability. I haven’t written about my opinions on DP basically out of politeness and hope that they may turn themselves around. I didn’t want to say bad stuff about DataPortability, because I agree with the broad aims of DP. But I have to. DP is not going anywhere. The scope is unclear and the whole thing seems to exist more as a talking shop than a doing shop. While people are busy implementing OpenID and OAuth, marking up their pages with microformats, publishing RDF, writing great tools and working on new specifications and vocabularies - both on their own and through things like the W3C and microformats.org, DataPortability just chats. Various people I know have told me in private that they have no time for the DP group. Don’t worry, I won’t be outing them.

The group seems to have attracted a lot of endorsement and coverage - from companies like Facebook, Digg, MySpace and so on. Why is that interesting? Well, it’s really not. At the same time, these companies have started publishing more open data and implementing open standards. That’s actually interesting - because developers and users can start actually using them. The whole thing very much reminds me of the parable at the beginning of Concluding Unscientific Postscript - Oh, dear author, you have published your big book; but when is the next one coming out? You can get as many bloggers writing about a project, and as many Web 2.0 startups endorsing something, but show us the fucking code already! Not to pimp or anything, but this is exactly what Microformats and Linked Data and plenty of other projects do. Developers can’t implement press releases - they need substance. Meanwhile, those wanting to avoid actually implementing the already existing standards and good practices can fob everyone off by joining a talking shop, safe in the knowledge that they will just go on talking forever and never actually force them to do anything the talking shop supposedly stands for. Is this not obvious?

Almost every suggestion made seems to end up with someone getting hot under the collar about privacy, but making no practical suggestion as to solving the privacy problems, and also seemingly blind to all the ways people have tried to do this so far. This kind of thing is depressing, if only because it shows that people aren’t very creative in how they think about data. That’s why I care about the Semantic Web - it’s not a choice. The data is already out there - either it’s public, and being indexed by Google, or it’s private and within a walled garden. If it’s public, it’s usually not very well structured, meaning that you need the engineering resources of a Google to do anything useful with it. If you want a big profound vision of what I think the Semantic Web is, here it is: everyone having their own version of Google sitting on their desktop, chatting with every other shard of Google. Complete parity between consuming and publishing data. Being able to move my friend relationships from Facebook to Bebo is so not the end of the story. This is why I don’t like standards which presume the existence of some Google or Microsoft-like power. You need to get out of the 1980s and realise that the Web exists. The killer app of the Web is the Web. The killer app of the Semantic Web is the Semantic Web! (And porn, but let’s not think too hard about that)

Another big problem I have with DataPortability is that it feels profoundly un-hackery. They have chosen Confluence, a horrible, bloated Java ‘enterprise’ application instead of something like MediaWiki, which is very much un-enterprisey, but just works damnit. Wiki syntaxes are another discussion, but forcing me to learn yet another crappy wiki syntax is a good way of discouraging involvement. Similarly, using a proprietary chat system like Skype rather than something like IRC is a good way to help people like me not participate. I have IRC open a lot more than I have Skype open, and I can run an IRC client on almost anything I can imagine. Some may see these things as piddly. I don’t. They are important. If you want people to participate in a meaningful way, you need to let them participate using open tools. There’s a reason open source software isn’t developed with Microsoft Visual Source Safe.

DataPortability doesn’t seem to have breathed in the true spirit of the Internet. You know, all that warm, RESTy, URI-driven, user-driven, distributed extensibility stuff. I don’t know how many more times I’m going to have to explain to people that URIs exist and are much more useful than numbers and strings because you can dereference them. If you haven’t read TimBL’s Linked Data design issues document, you need to. It’s profoundly depressing to watch the DataPortability get sucked into the void that is all that XRI/XRDS insanity (do read this post on www-tag). An aside: I’m tempted into suggesting we have a new alternative to OpenID and call it ReallyOpenID, and it would be OpenID without all the XRI/XRDS/i-names stuff. Nobody has explained to me why “=tommorris” is so much easier for my poor brain to understand than “tommorris.org”, except that the former I have to buy from an i-names provider, while the latter I can get from any old domain registrar. Anyway.

I’m planning to start working soon on solving a well-defined problem that we’ve been seeing with the way that some people have started using APIs, microformats and Semantic Web data (specifically, FOAF and similar profile description formats and protocols). I’ve identified a clear problem, going to sit down and write out exactly what the problem is, how users feel about it, and how we can solve it - then try and put together a simple, well-functioning way of solving the problem across a variety of approaches. I won’t be inviting mass participation, setting up bloated enterprise wiki systems, having waffly mailing lists or sending press releases to TechCrunch. Committees gave us XML Schema. We had to wait for James Clark to give us RELAX NG.

I hope that the DataPortability people actually do something soon. Go on, prove the critics wrong. Until then, I’ll be hanging out with the cool kids over at microformats and the Semantic Web Interest Group - on our nice, open IRC channels, discussing real stuff. DataPortability needs to figure out what developers want. Hint: it’s something broadly along the lines of rough consensus and running code.