[Editor's Note: Coder and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide Jan. 11, 2013 in New York. He was 26 years old. See Wired's early coverage for details.]
When a great baseball or basketball player leaves the game they retire his or her number. That means the jersey hangs from the ceiling, or there’s a plaque at the stadium, and no player on the team ever wears that number again.
On the web, retiring a number would mean the website is permanently registered, and the content is preserved so it lasts as long as the web does. That means the contents of aaronsw.com will be there forever. It will never become a porn site, or a landing page, or whatever.
Right now there is no way to do this. Isn’t that strange. We could fix it if we want. The internet is just software. It would be a small but worthwhile hack and could set a precedent for future memorials.
Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001. Follow @davewiner on Twitter.
What’s in a word? A lot according to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of mobile-payments company Square. Dorsey, who also help create Twitter, believes that the technology industry needs to reconsider the word user and find something less “derogatory” to refer to people that use its products and services.
As he points out, the word user in the context of software has mainly negative origins, often being used to refer to “a person who wasn’t technical or creative, someone who just used resources.”
That’s hardly how most of see ourselves when we log in to Twitter, Gmail or Facebook.
“It’s time for our industry and discipline to reconsider the word ‘user,’” writes Dorsey on his Tumblr blog. “We speak about ‘user-centric design,’ ‘user benefit,’ ‘user experience,’ ‘active users,’ and even ‘usernames’…. While the intent is to consider people first, the result is a massive abstraction away from real problems people feel on a daily basis.”
It’s easy to sympathize with Dorsey’s argument; after all, who wants to be referred to by a word otherwise mainly associated with drug use? Indeed I try to keep the word user out of Webmonkey articles for just that reason, but sometimes writing around user is more awkward than just, er, using it. That combined with the fact that the best alternative Dorsey can come up with the is the word customer, which is better but can still be equally dehumanizing in some contexts.
As with most debates about word choice and language it comes down to the intent the word is being used to convey. As RSS founder and longtime software developer Dave Winer points out:
Every decade or so this question comes up. Why do we use that awful U-word to describe our users? It’s hard to even formulate the question without sounding stupid. And every time the discussion comes up, it lasts a while before everyone gives up because there really aren’t any better words, and this is the word everyone uses so what are you going to do.
What Dorsey is doing is eliminating the word from Square’s vocabulary, telling employees that customer will replace user. He goes on to add that “we have two types of customers: sellers and buyers. So when we need to be more specific, we’ll use one of those two words.”
Dorsey also says he’ll pay out $140 if he ever uses the word again.
Winer believes in a different approach: embracing the word user. Winer even went so far as to name his second company UserLand Software.
In the end what matters is not so much what you call your users, but how you treat them. “The answer” writes Winer, “is to love those users so much that they don’t mind being called users. That’s an art a lot of tech companies have yet to master.”
Mozilla is moving Persona, its online identity system, out of the experimental category and is releasing an official beta.
First released earlier this year, Persona offers a secure way to eliminate individual passwords for users while offering developers a simple way to add support and authenticate requests — think of it as OpenID without the headaches.
After seven months of morphing APIs and various Persona improvements, Mozilla has deemed the project “ready to use for authentication.” Persona works in all major desktop and mobile browsers and, according to Mozilla, the user experience has been considerably polished for this release. While Mozilla claims it’s ready to use, bear in mind that Persona is still officially a beta.
Mozilla Persona is a distributed online identity system. It’s part of Mozilla’s effort to tackle online identity management by shifting the focus from individual websites to a decentralized system that sites tab into.
Mozilla has been playing with the idea of a browser-based identity manager for quite some time, starting with its BrowserID project. BrowserID is the foundation of Persona, but the new system offers quite a bit more for both developers and users, including user-friendly features like an “identity dashboard” for managing your various credentials.
Mozilla has unveiled a new distributed online identity system dubbed Mozilla Persona. The new Persona project is Mozilla’s latest effort to tackle online identity management by shifting the focus from individual websites to the web browser.
Mozilla has been playing with the idea of a browser-based identity manager for quite some time. In 2010 the company launched its Account Manager project, though it failed to gain much traction and was later scrapped.
More recently Mozilla has been working on Browser ID, a similar effort to move the process of managing passwords and online identities to the browser, rather than relying on any particular website’s login process. The Browser ID project offers developers a means of creating a browser-based login system for their sites. The code is available through GitHub and while using it is considerably simpler than similar efforts like OAuth, Browser ID has yet to catch on with many sites.
Mozilla Persona will build on Browser ID’s foundation (Browser ID will continue to be the name of the developer-facing aspect of the protocol), but add in more end user features like “an identity dashboard.” As with Browser ID, Persona will face a chicken and egg problem — why bother supporting Persona when few people are using it, and why bother using it when so few sites support it?
Thus far, aside from the proposed dashboard, Mozilla’s goals for Persona are only vaguely outlined. The closest Mozilla comes to giving it a concrete definition is to say that Persona will consist of “a collection of components and experiences we’re designing to manage the whole of a user’s online identity.”
If you’ve got ideas or opinions about what Persona ought to offer, you can let Mozilla know your thoughts via the mailing list or through Twitter using the #browserid or #mozpersona hash-tags.
For those wondering about the old Personas, the toolbar background images that can be applied to Firefox, fear not, they remain available and Mozilla is already on the hunt for a more fitting name.
Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference yesterday. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.
The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services — say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played — as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.
Once in place, the timeline will be the new News Feed, with friends’ updates streaming past. But not everything will make it into the Timeline: small updates, like what music friends are listening to, may be relegated to the Ticker, the integrated online friends/status update bar rolled out Wednesday. Users will be able to choose which activities are significant enough to appear in their timelines.
Zuckerberg also placed emphasis on the new use of verbs in timelines, which will allow people to sort their friends activities in different ways. For instance, with a status update reading “Casey Johnston is watching Veronica Mars for the millionth time,” users will be able to click both “watching” to see what else friends are viewing at the moment, or “Veronica Mars” to see a list of other friends who like Veronica Mars.
These updates will feed into the second new feature, Facebook Open Graph, which collects and ranks the the activities or items that friends are interacting with. Apps that integrate with Facebook will be sorted in Open Graph based on popularity with a user and his or her friends, including Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, Foodspotting, Vevo, and Nike+, among many others. Open Graph is intended to help with app discoverability, showing users what their friends are doing without flooding their feeds every time a friend kills a mobster or plants a new crop of corn.
When Timeline was introduced, Chris Cox, director of product at Facebook, noted that “there is nothing we love to summarize more than time itself,” stating that with the new features it would be possible for users to create months or years in review.
Of course, Facebook’s entire motivation isn’t just for friends to become more intimate with each others’ past and present. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke briefly at the conference, and noted that “because our [Spotify's] playlists are social, they [users] are more engaged. And because they are engaged, they are more than twice as likely to pay for music.” For Spotify, which boasted 2 million paying members worldwide as of Wednesday, the exposure to the better part of a billion Facebook members could mean big bucks.
The new completionist Facebook is a significant departure from what Facebook’s most avid competitors, Google+ and Twitter, currently offer on their sites. If Facebook can get users to buy into putting their whole life histories on the site, the amount of content there will explode, and create an investment and representation of self users won’t be likely to abandon. And with more content comes more opportunities to target ads.
The beta for Facebook’s timelines begins today, with availability being rolled out gradually. Neither Zuckerberg nor any of the speakers mentioned a timeline for the new version, but we expect it will be sooner rather than later.
This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.
Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
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