Who is the dick on your site: the video

We turned the talk I gave last week at ETEch into a movie again. You can see it here.
 Media Etech 2006 E-Tech-Video-Screencap
I was pretty tired that morning having stayed up late working on the presentation. This is also the first time I have given this talk, so did not have the polish as my Identity 2.0 talk. There is more “meat” in this talk about how it will works, which is not quite as exciting as the more emotive aspects, but is more informative.

18 comments

Yay, finally got sxore to start letting me comment, only took 10 minutes to get working:

First I got:

Oops!

Caught exception "Can’t call method "id" on an undefined value at /www/sxore/current/sxore.com/src/lib/Catalyst/Plugin/SxoreUser.pm line 202."

Then, when it asked me to sign in (despite already being signed in) it told me that my username and password were wrong, so I clicked on the forgot password link and got:

Hmmm …

You have a homesite which means your password is not stored here.
Enter your homesite address above and click sxip in.
You can retrieve your homesite password from there if need be.

Which made me wonder, what if I forgot where my homesite was? That could be a problem.

Then, while I was fooling around, I clicked the "set your blog up" link, and, of course got:

Sorry

sxore does not support your blog yet.

So, basically, sxore is great if everyone in the world uses WordPress. And, given my irrational dislike of PHP, that causes all sorts of problems.

You guys have, however, come a long way since the last time I tried to use sxore, so you get a few extra points, but it’s still light-years away from being ready for primetime.

As for the talk itself, actually, it was very, very helpful, especially with the context of our recent email interchange. As you said, lots more meat on it this time, which is good. But man, you guys really need to work on the user experience thing. Too many clicks to do what you want, too many errors, too many things going kersplat for no particularly good reason. Definitely, you need to hire more pixies.

Also, the fields being supplied thing needs work. If you are asked to supply an image, it should be much, much more clear what’s being asked for. It just says "image". Is that a url, or am I supposed to upload something, can I use my gravatar, etc. Elsewhere in the system it becomes clear that the answer to those questions is "all of the above", but it’s still a complete mystery on the "the site wants these fields" page.

Oh yeah, and "sxiping in" crashed my browser of the moment (Shiira) on the first attempt. I had to switch to Firefox to enter this comment. Talk about lousy user experience. It doesn’t get much worse than "Your site blew up my browser." :-)

Oh yeah, and the way you’re dealing with Gravatars is silly. The whole point of a Gravatar is that you can just autodiscover an avatar with no human intervention. I shouldn’t ever have to manually enter a Gravatar… ever. I mean, you already have my email address. If I have a different email address for the Gravatar, then you should ask me for all of my email addresses. Also, a more LiveJournalesque, "Which avatar do you want at the moment?" That might be nice.

Thanks for the feedback Bob! …

wrt. forgetting ones Homesite — hopefully won’t be a problem. most people remember who gives them their email address. I think this is a similiar thing to remember.

wrt. forgetting homesites, I think I have to disagree for the moment. Until sxip is as ubiquitous as email is, it’ll be a problem. You’ll note that the only reason I took notice of the message at all was because I actually really wasn’t sure what my homesite was. As it so happened, I guessed "sxore.com" correctly, but not everyone is going to guess that correctly, especially when, say, there’s more than one or two homesite choices in existence.

I agree that we need to work out how to educate people on what a Homesite is. People learned lots of harder concepts earlier in their online experience, and how to explain got easier and easier, and in many cases went away.

A lot of that could just simply be rectified by making a big bold message when you first sign up, saying, "Hey you! Your homesite is ’sxore.com’. Remember this, you’ll probably need it later!"

Agreed. We are looking to improve the messaging on that. Thanks!

hey, you gave a very intresting presentation on the conference, is there any change of an online written summary?

Right now i’m starting up my master thesis, and i’m intrested in the ideas of online identity and trust, exactly the subjects you spoke of. But although i like the medium of video, a text or slideshow would be more flexibel to fit in my research.

thanks in advance

no slides right now. email meeting @ dick at sxip dot com to discuss

Nice Presentation.. Good..^^

Fantastic Presentation..

on March 12, 2006 I posted the following thought on my blog…

The Web 2.0 - It’s not about the hype or about the next big thing in the Internet. It’s about the fundamental shift in the way applications are developed, packaged, licensed, marketed, disseminated, supported, and consumed. It’s also about the excitement these small startups have and the direction they are taking applications and the Net.

Imagine a world where you are always connected to the Net. A world where you can rid yourself of your 7 pound laptop it’s heavy hard drive and all the software and applications installed on it. Imagine not having to ensure you have the latest version of your office productivity suite, web browser, CRM app, etc. This imaginary world is closer to reality than we think and these tiny startups are providing the code and tools to get us there quickly.

Look at Windows Live and Google Personalized. Look at the browser-based word processing startup (writely) that Google just acquired. Before we know it, we will be able to access all of our content (structured and unstructured data) and services (applications) remotely from the Web. We will be able to carry out this interaction from any device, anywhere in the world, and we will be able to interact with the network regardless of who we are or our relationship with the Net and other constituents on the Net.

Take Sun’s Sun Ray Server Software thin client concept to the Net and allow the Net to be the server and allow access from any device with connectivity to the Net.

The only remaining service left to be figured out is our identity. That is, an open, utility-based, hosted, and online clearinghouse that controls the authorization and authentication of our content and services. Simply, who we are, what we have access to, and the credentials we need to "trust" that what we are accessing is ours and that we control who has access to our content and services.

If i’m not mistaken - are you not addressing what I wrote about in the last paragraph?

RapLeaf - here is one step in the right direction for one aspect of "trust".

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/23/rapleaf-to-challenge-ebay-feedback/

Just testing out this sxore thang ..

Gavin Baumanis

Hi Dick,

Don’t be too hard on yourself - about the polish.
I liked the presentation none the less.
made things a little clearer to me too, which is always a good thing.

I am really excited about the Identity 2.0 "movement" I think it is a really exciting time to be involved in the internet.

Thanks Gavin!