Well you’ve heard the story, Google launched the Social Graph API. Google searches and indexes all the social connections on the web and opens it up through an API, so that any web service can ask Google who you are and who you know. Like in Google search, a web crawler reads your web site, finds your public personal information, and stores it in a Google database. More specifically, when you add rel="me" to the links for your accounts in social web services and rel="friend" to the links for your friends’ website, you become a machine readable socialite.

This is definitely an industry cranking step, but it disappointing to see it as a centralized Google API rather than an open distributed system that anyone can host. Here I would like to look at what it means for different actors of the web:

• Users – When you sign up to a new social web service, you will get a recommendation: “12 of your friends are also using this service, add them as friends.” No more search for who is in.
• Service Providers – Provide more context to the new users, know what other things they use, what else they focus on. Monetize based on their interests.
• Google – As the aggregator, store all the social connections between people and capitalize on the massive trust network (see the edge types and 50,000 queries per day limit).

I agree that Social Graph API has more potential for user control and empowerment than in Facebook like closed models, but here I think Google uses brute force. We know that all that public FOAF, XFN data are collectable and servable through an API (I guess mybloglog has been doing it), but it is a huge cost to index and serve all that data. Should we applause this informational brute force achievement or should we focus on open/distributed solutions for the same problem?

For me being exploited is not a big deal, I am against it, I experiment with it, I’ve already disclosed my financials to the whole world with the MYPOCKET project (see what I’ve bought yesterday and what might I buy tomorrow). So I’ve just added a list of MACHINE READABLES on the side bar of this blog to experiment with this new system.

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A new open web API called OpenSocial enables developers to create social web applications that can run on any social network platform that has the Open Social interface standards. It is released by Google and a wide range of partners including Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Viadeo, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide. The list is growing, you can read more about Open Social’s business implications elsewhere including O’Reilly Radar, Techcrunch, Techmeme, New York Times, and Marc Andressen’s blog. It is confirmed that MySpace and Six Apart are also joining the club. No news from Facebook yet.

Apparently OpenSocial has a three part API that will enable people’s information flow on a network of service providers and third party applications across the web. Here is what they are and what they mean:

• Profile Information (user data) => Myself
• Friends Information (social graph) => My Relationships
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff) => My Life

As cheered elsewhere OpenSocial solves various problems for the three network actors:

• Service providers open their user database to other platforms. In turn they get more users (~100 million and more with MySpace) and more applications which generate more context (like in Facebook today). Obviously they increase their advertisement income significantly.
• Developers develop once, distribute on every social network. They provide context to platforms and in turn they get advertisement income (depending on the service provider’s policy).
• Users export their social graph to other services rather than re-declaring their friends again and again. They open their social relationships and their living activities to a variety of service providers and third party application developers. In turn they keep connected to their friends through various contexts, in other words they get “better services”.

So service providers will not OWN my data anymore?

First, what is “my data”? Is it my name? My education info? Is it my photos and videos? Is it my contact list? Is it how I am connected to my friends? Is it what I do together with my friends? Is it how I live? These are not clear.

Second, how much users get based on how much they give is also not clear. Our intellectual property that is generated by our labor, through our social relationships, and our living (activities) is not measurable by us but only by the service providers, who charge advertisers based on detailed stats. As these “networks of social networks” grow, complexity rises, and the value we generate becomes just more ambiguous for us.

I am looking forward to try the new OpenSocial API when it goes online and see how we can use it in Meta-Markets.

UPDATE: OpenSocial API is up and hacked by some guy already. I am currently reading the protocols. From what I understand, Google servers are the gate keepers between queries among the social networks. This makes the data ownership issues even worst.

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“Temporary Land”, 2005

This was a study for exploring the relationship between the city grid and the typographic grid. In the summer of 2005, I designed a type face and a process to type. The image above is generated by three processes: me typing those words, the program deciding on the size each time I hit the key, and the instructions for the fonts.

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I’ve been developing a new online stock market for the past two months. The alpha version will be up soon. Hopefully it will help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services. This is the continuation of my A Stock Market in Life project and experiments done in the Physical Language Workshop at MIT Media Lab. I will post about it later, for now this post is about some inspirations and recent observations that motivate me.

While building the stock market system I got inspirations ranging from my childhood experiences to my observations on today’s Internet economy and techno-cultural genres.

When I was around 15, I worked at a currency exchange office in the world famous Grand Bazaar (satellite view), Istanbul. At the time, Grand Bazaar was the center for determining the gold and foreign currency exchange rate in Turkey. There were no electronics in the heart of the bazaar back then. Just bidders cheering the price of dollars at their hand. My job was to get in this crowd and learn the recent exchange rate between US Dollar and Turkish Liras, and report it back to the office. So that the office can update the exchange rate and sell or buy dollars from this new rate. There was no agency to track and announce the recent price. People were just learning the recent price from each other, face to face, right there in the crowd. Dynamics of this humane structure was one of the inspirations for me to implement a peer-to-peer stock exchange system.

While building the trading interface, I did a quick visual survey about stock markets in different cultures. Of course, most of the stock markets function electronically, but I found interesting scenes from stock exchange centers. I didn’t have a chance to get in the actual NYSE floor (closed to public for “security reasons”). I just found other people’s stock market photographs on the web, mostly on Flickr.

NASDAQ. World’s first electronic stock market NASDAQ is fully abstract. It has only a vitrine for feeding the tourists in Times Square. Photograph by mlesn on Flickr.

Baghdad Stock Exchange. Brokers gathering around hot stocks on the whiteboards. Trades are conducted by hand. Photograph top left, photograph top right, and Photograph bottom by Baghdad Chris on Flickr.

Hong Kong Stock Exchange. People on the floor are for backup – most of the activities occur electronically back at their main offices. Photograph by heycreation on Flickr.

Tokyo Stock Exchange. Although everything is electronic, it seems the agencies are actively serving the traders. Photograph by majurcic on Flickr.

Considering today’s Internet economy and world’s network infrastructure, it is hard to understand why we still have physical centers for stock markets.

What is “the market of spectacles” anyways?

In The Society of Spectacle (1967) Guy Debord says:

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

There is a difference between Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle and today’s networked society of spectacle. Today, the spectacle is digitally measurable.

I went out and took pictures of some iPhone crowd in front of the Apple Store the other day. I put them on the Flickr and this picture got 1,500 views in 12 hours. Many excited people did the same thing. They uploaded live videos to YouTube, they bookmarked iPhone applications to Delicious, they posted the most interesting iPhone stories on the Digg. They generated tons of views to their profiles and traffic to these domains. Their profile’s rankings increased. People linked each other’s iPhone posts. They got more hits on their blog. As a result the whole spectacle was digitally measured and generated value. Once we have a measured value at hand, it can easily change hands in a market environment.

This iPhone happening was called eventstreaming at TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar blogs. Considering the measurability of spectacles and their critical relation to capital, I call it an instance in the market of spectacles.

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“Angling in Troubled Waters” map by cartographer Fred W. Rose shows the European geopolitical situation in 1899. If you look at the details (see the larger version) you will see some countries such as Russia, UK, and Ottoman Empire are fishing. What do they catch? Blogger Catholicgauze says:

“…their ‘catches’ are in fact colonial possessions.”

This map, found via Boran Güney, is a neat example of the micro macro visualization technique. You can read through human figures and symbols across national borders.

What about today?

Architect Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA/AMO make dadaist montages of todays sociopolitical scenes on timelines and maps and they align them with architectural and cultural products. OMA/AMO’s 2004 book Content has an excellent article, “An Autopsy“, which is an annotated spatial montage of events and figures on a timeline from 1989 to 2003. Here are some pictures from An Autopsy article (taken with my cellphone camera):

An Autopsy is authored by Theo Deutinger, Maja Borchers, Matthew Murphy, Nanne de Ru, Max Schwitalla, Sebastian Thomas.

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After the feed stats company Feedburner is acquired by Google, the AdWords integration to feeds became the dominant discussion. Great! Your blog business can now be managed from a single Google interface right. This also means that your blog traffic data change hands. Feedburner puts a notice in their sign in interface saying that you have a right to opt-out, delete your data. If you take no action by June 15, 2007 (9 days as of today), the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google.

“Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via accountx@feedburner.com, provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.”

When YouTube acquired by Google no one asked YouTube users if they wanted to delete their YouTube account or videos. The same thing applies to all those small fish social data aggregating web 2.0 companies eaten by the whales (e.g., recently StumbleUpon swallowed by Ebay). It is nice of the Feedburner team that they are asking if we want to delete our accounts. Although I think that this notice is a legal enforcement to Feedburner since their clients are not only individuals but also companies.

So will you delete your Feedburner account?

I don’t think I will. Although I want to have control on my data, I can’t resist using Feedburner services currently (because of some embedded protocols). But watch us for an alternative action soon. I think this is an important moment to pay attention to how inhumane the data ownership laws in USA: One who aggregates data owns it.

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Yesterday I participated in the Intel/IFTF Humans, Sensors and Sensemaking workshop in Palo Alto California. It was a day-long expert brainstorming workshop to create a roadmap of 5-6 year opportunities in ‘Sensemaking’ assuming humans interacting with sensors using non-trivial amounts of computation. I had a chance to interact with visionary researchers such as Eric Paulos, Jeff Burke, Anthony LaMarca, David Pescovitz, Andy Greenhalgh, and our Dave Merrill from the MIT Media Lab. We discussed the future applications, enabling technologies, and opportunities.

All the invitees were asked to bring an Artifact from the Future. My artifact was an “Entertaining Virus” from 2015. This virus lives on the servers. It messes with your online profile on social networks. It sends itself to your friend list. It copies your photographs from Flickr to MySpace, it copies your MySpace videos to YouTube, it picks up your YouTube video tags and copies them to your other account on some other future web service. The future generations will enjoy this virus. This social network profile messing virus is the new entertainment in 2015.

After these artifacts, we did Pecha Kucha style short presentations about our current research. I showed Open I/O, how it works, its architecture, creating networked compositions, and protocol authoring as an artistic process.

We had a put-the-idea-on-the-timeline session. Among the other ideas I also placed micro-contracts of Brent Fitzgerald’s Promiserver on the timeline as one of the enabling technologies in 2015.

Overall the most striking thing for me was the graphic artist who sketched the entire session in real-time, and with a consistent graphic language. When I was describing my artifact from the future, it was being visualized in real-time on the white board.

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This is a contribution to the discussion started with Trebor Scholz’s “A critique of sociable web media” email on the IDC mailing list.

So what can we do against networked exploitation?

I think an obvious strategy is to exploit those exploiters. Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) and Amazon Noir are good examples for finding the holes in sociable web media systems and using the holes for reverse exploitation.

I think another strategy is to stay in context for collective action while all those sociable web media giants are fighting with each other for your attention (aka attention economy). There are many ways to stay in context such as email lists, forums etc. and all that social software actions as Trebor Scholz mentioned: commenting, tagging, ranking, forwarding, linking, moderating, remixing etc. Tools and environments for such actions are mainly provided by giant corporations, and under US laws, one who aggregates information owns it. But we can make our own web services for staying in the context, just like the way we can setup and maintain an old email list technology.

So this brings in the discussion of “open service provider”. As open source software development communities demonstrate, we can collectively create value independent from the capitalist exploitation. If we are in the software-as-service era, support and use open service providers as much as you support open source software. It is very important to intensify and redirect our collective techno-cultural production to a territory that is formed more by individual’s free-will than capital’s interests. But of course making one open alternative for each commercial-social web tool/environment is not all that relevant, it sounds just like making the free version of MS Office. So open service providers can use existing techniques but I think they should invent new types of interaction and aggregation for the good of the community.

I use software-as-service strategy in my artwork. They are not commercial services nor utilitarian. I believe that building an open service is closer to making a cultural product than making a commercial one. As Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble puts it here, the relation of the creative expression to social processes is as important as the materials, processes, and products.

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MIXED REALITIES is an international juried competition that will result in the commissioning of 5 networked art works to be exhibited/performed at Turbulence.org; Art Interactive, a gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A; and Ars Virtua, a gallery in the online 3D rendered environment, Second Life. Each commission will be $5,000 (US).

Deadline is March 31, 2007.

Bridging multiple realities while maintaining autonomy, engaging the user as a participant, and having both one-to-one and one-to-many communication within the work are among the investigation fields.

I was looking at the SecondLife Economy Graphs the other day, the numbers are justfying the hype about SL. Well such simulated social environments need comprehensive critiques for sure. It makes me think of how deep we are engaged with the computer networks. Can we talk about networked art within a networked simulation?

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Yahoo! launches the Pipes service for everyone to reprogram resources on the web. It is a visual programming environment for aggregating and manipulating feeds, a “Mashup 2.0″ application in a way. Pipes derives its name from UNIX pipeline where the output of each process feeds directly as input of the next one. With Yahoo! Pipes output of web services can easily be hooked up to filters and manipulators, so you can chain a set of web services and processes.

A Pipe connecting two feeds from different news alerts based on the search query (simplified version of Aggregated News Alert).

There are already comprehensive Pipe reviews here, here, and here. Also check out the Aggregated News Alert pipe as an example to see how a pipe can be used. I will just point to details I found interesting. Each pipe has a permalink. You can run, clone, view the source of each pipe from the web interface. Any url can be used as an input, so RESTful urls become more important. A pipe can also be hooked up to another pipe as input. Pipes aggregates metadata similar to a usual web application. Run counts and Clone counts make a pipe hot or not. Yahoo! Pipes probably tracks the programming activity such as the counts for most used filters, resources, operators and their combinations. So Pipes aggregates metadata about programming as well.

Yahoo! Pipes will sure open various directions in the informational space. It will also accumulate capital through unpaid surplus labour performed by the Yahoo! users. Tim O’Reilly says: “What’s really lovely about this is that, like the Unix shell, Pipes provides a gradual introduction to web programming.”

Yeah that’s true, prosumers (producer + consumer) will learn how to program, so in a way Pipes enables programming for prosumers. I think Pipes is a powerful step for making the programming as part of the immaterial labor.

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