Gabe Wachob

The Thrill of the Hack (TOTH)

If you are a developer, you know what the thrill of the hack is - when your building something, and you sit down and implement a new feature and all of a sudden, your stuff plugs into a bunch of other people's stuff and what was once a cool standalone thing is now part of an ecosystem of interoperating cool stuff. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And you, the developer, are part of it.

I think the "Thrill of the Hack" (TOTH) is a key factor in the success of technologies like RSS, tagging, and XMPP and I see it making OpenID successful even as I write this blog. I don't think I'm overstating the value TOTH to say that the web wouldn't have happened without TOTH.

But TOTH doesn't just happen by itself. Its enabled by "busy developer guides", robust open source development efforts, community support,  hangouts for developers and curious users, and friendly easy-to-understand IPR  policies (see sec 10.2.3).  All of these things take deliberate effort, and yet in isolation may not seem to have any direct value for those investing time and effort. However, I think the evidence is clear that one of the best ways to enable a new open network technology is to enable TOTH and open source development around that technology.

TOTH also helps the technology move forward - developers who become hooked through TOTH go on to innovate on top of the technology to build things that were completely off the radar of the  original promoters of the technology (again, think about the web here).

I'm concerned that the INames community has failed to enable TOTH.   We have efforts in most of the directions (hangout, open source, a good IPR policy, a busy developer guide, community support), but they all need more work. Much of the effort on inames has focused on communicating how inames are usable to end users. But we haven't enabled developers to make INames (and even XRI, which doesn't necessarily rely on the global root directories) ubiquitous and we haven't enabled developers to go beyond what we've envisioned and come up with the really killer apps.

I've heard a lot of the frustration from folks who are interested in playing with INames, and I want to you know that we hear you, and we understand. In fact, I share that very frustration with you.

Things are definitely happening, especially in response to IIW 2006B, and i hope to highlight them here. Stay tuned...

XRI is a Network of Nodes

In a recent private discussion list, Phil Becker made an assertion that if your digital identity topology isn't a network of nodes, it isn't going to work.

I couldn't agree more. Here's my reply amplifying how this "network of nodes" concept has been at the core of XRI from day one:

Candidate/Campaign Relationship Management

Doc Searls has recently been talking a lot about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), the user-centric business concept that a potential customer of several vendors can express their interests to a set of vendors (in the form of a RFP) and have the vendors respond to the potential customer with competing bids for their business. He's even convinced the good folks at the Berkman Center to house ProjectVRM, where this idea can grow.

In a session at IIW2006B on politics and digital identity, we discussed the concept of Candidate Relationship Management (or Campaign Relationship Management) "CaRM" - a concept inspired by VRM that takes a person's political interests (as opposed to product or service-oriented interests) and invites campaigns or candidates to bid for their attention, time, money, or opinion. Just as in the consumer retail space, political campaigns spend a ton of effort trying to reach out to those who are willing listeners and can be turned into active supporters (at whatever level of support). CaRM lets me express to candidates and campaigns what issues and topics I'm concerned about so that I can have a more meaningful two-way exchange with the campaigns seeking my support. It seems really obvious to me that this is just like VRM...

I'm curious what other people think, and whether the VRM discussion should be expanded to include non-monetary intention harvesting (i.e. political intention harvesting)?