Visual jQuery

Best jQuery manual I've seen so far: Visual jQuery, by Yehuda Katz. Nice work.

Blogged with Flock

Socially mobile

It looks like social networks is quickly picking up pace on the mobile side of things as we read more news about this space, although I think the supporting infrastructure still has some catching up to do.

What's clear is that short and simple messages are the most effective for the mobile user, either on the upload or download. This is due to the limitations of the device, the user's available attention span, the need to fit social messages into what's essentially a multitasking environment (like walking and sending an SMS) and the available infrastructure (download speeds currently are an order of magnitude faster than uplaod speeds, although that will change with the arrival of technologies like WiMAX).

This is why Twitter is so successful - short messages are its lifeblood. And I like Twitter's view of the service they provide, i.e. a channel for messages, decoupling it from the interface, which could be SMS, IM or web.

This will no doubt be a very exciting area to observe as the minimalist and decentralised platform, something that is at the core of SOA and Web 2.0, will very likely sprout many creative output from the developer community.

This is also where I think we will see a lot of innovation, like apps that adjust their modes based on user behaviour and mobility profiles. Possibilities like this will appear when developers realise that the user interface is now intimately connected to the user and "always on, anywhere" is not just an access paradigm for the end user but also for the user's friends and network to gain access to the user himself.

Blogged with Flock

Picnik.com

Who needs Photoshop when you have this: www.picnik.com.

Alright, it's not a Photoshop killer but it's all you need really for basic photo manipulation.

I'm just impressed with how slick the user interface is.

Blogged with Flock

Marrying SOA, RIA and OSS

In "SOA + RIA + OSS = Web 2.0" (stumbled upon it in delicious), Adam Michelson makes some interesting observations on what the next Net apps may look like once the idea of Web2.0 matures and goes beyond it's current buzzword phase.

Web2.0 is today's lip candy, but a lot of people who use this term to refer to its visual or interactive side of the Web2.0 architecture. We see a parallel in the use of the term "AJAX" that most people use to refer to what is usually is simply a Javascript enhanced frontend.

Those who understand the potential of what Web2.0 can bring know that the real power comes from the marriage of the thick client capabilities of the frontend and a standards-based seamless access to data through service oriented architectures (SOA). The result will be the blurring between whether the software we are using is a desktop or web-based app.

There are links in Michelson's article to some interesting developments in OS frameworks that combine RIA and SOA for various platforms, notably the Cairngorm framework for Adobe's Flex.

I think development in this area (RIA + SOA) will be the most interesting and exciting in this whole Web2.0 phenomenon.

Blogged with Flock

Doodle: Scheduling meetings

I realise that Doodle has been around for a while but having recently had the chance to use it, I can see now why it is such a brilliant little thing. All it does is polls. That's it. Plain and simple. And it does it well, without needing any fancy bells and whistles.

The interface is based on a simple grid and the results are shown as poll totals for each option at the bottom.

A poll, as a decision making tool, is great when you have a small selection of answers. I believe 3 is optimum. Anything significantly larger will probably make your life as poll organiser more difficult because, if there is lack of polarisation in the results, it will be difficult to come to a conclusion. Fine if you're doing a general opinion survey, but bad if you're relying on the poll to make a decision. See this example to see what I mean.

Still, Doodle is one tool that's going to stay in my toolbox.

Flock

I've just spent a few minutes downloading and trying out the Flock browser and within that short space of time I have to say that initial impressions are good.

Flock will particularly suite Web 2.0 savvy users as it has all the social networking tools built right into the browser making the user experience of doing things like blogging, sharing media and online bookmarking that much slicker due to the Java interface (as opposed to Javascript). Well, this is what Flock is built for, as the "Social Web Browser" strapline says.

I shall give Flock an informal test drive and hope to report on any interesting features here.

Blogged with Flock

Identity, Reputation and Trust

Although I have researched, wrote and talked to people extensively (but not enough!) about trust and reputation, I have always assumed that within whatever model that is being discussed, there is some kind of effective, secure and convenient method of identifying an entity in the network. It is only recently that I started to look beneath the surface of the topic of identity and it has made me realise that we are still far from where we want to be with this.

Like reputation, identity, or the problem of identifying someone, is an area that we are still trying to graps and there is a lot of debate around it. The timeline looks something like this:

The network community tried to use existing authentication protocols like X.509 for the Internet. This didn't really work for an open network. Then PGP came along, and this made PKI less of a black-art and accessible to whomever that needed it. This worked to a certain extent, but is sill too geeky and non transparent enough for most people. Meanwhile, the web world embraced and marketed SSL to allay the general security paranoia that was created, but the general user never really understood what this is all about. In any case, from the user's perspective, whether the current transaction is secure or not boils down to whether the 'padlock' icon on the browser is 'open' or 'closed' - nobody really bothers to look at the certificate (well, I don't). There were other early attempts to break free from the X.509 shackles, with the likes of SPKI/SDSI and PolicyMaker/Keynote, but the focus was still really around key management, but this time with a deeper understanding of trust management.

But there is a new paradigm in identity management, summarised by this passage by Carl Ellison:

Along the way, we have learned that what is important in certificate (and related) security systems is not the computer-readable data structures and protocols alone. Rather, these certificates, licenses, grants, ACL entries, ..., are a cyberspace reflection of relationships in the physical world - and the security of these systems rests most heavily on the security of the process by which the physical world relationships are bound to their cyberspace reflections. That security far outweighs the more trivial security of private key protection, key length, choice of algorithm, etc., that people have obsessed about for decades.

This brings us to a new wave of electronic ID proposals, such as Sxip (and Identity 2.0), OpenID, and YURL. I'm sure there are lots more out there, but I'm just beginning to scratch the surface myself... I would appreciate any pointers to other new identity management tools out there.

All this is significant with respect to reputation and trust because without identity, it is impossible to reason about them. Furthermore, there is a very intimate relationship between identity and reputation because they are actually two sides of the same coin - you can't talk about one without the other.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we can't isolate the topics of identity, reputation and trust from any fora dedicated to these subjects.

OSCON 2005 Keynote - Identity 2.0

This is old but the topic is probably is as current as ever. It is a video of Dick Hardt's (founder of Sxip) presentation at OSCON 2005. There are two things that are great about this presentation: 1) The idea of Identity 2.0, and 2) Dick's presentation style, which is extremely effective.

Go see it.

Thesis: A framework for decentralised trust reasoning

A copy of my thesis titled "A framework for decentralised trust reasoning" is now available at scribd.com:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21119047/A-Framework-for-Decentralised-Trust-Reasoning-PhD-Thesis-University-of-London.

Also embedded here for your convenience :)

A Framework for Decentralised Trust Reasoning (PhD Thesis, University of London)

A new life

A lot of work and thought has been going on in the background while this blog has been stagnant for a very long while. So, it is time to dust it off and revive it.

The upcoming posts will include the same subject matter of trust and reputation, but this time I will be including also posts on related technologies and real world stuff (enough talk... more action this time ;)

Look forward to your comments and discussions.

European e-ID conference

I'll be attending the European e-Identity Conference on 11 June, and also giving a short talk on the kinds of questions to ask when assessing threats to a reputation system. I've talked and written about identities before but this is the first time I'm attending a forum on one, so should be interesting.

If you're going to be there, give us a shout for a chat.

[Update]
Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, I am not able to attend this event, but I'll be more than happy to forward you the material I have prepared for this talk - drop me a mail.