Authority, ontology, and Freebase

Something I knew about but hadn't thought through until Kirrily Robert pointed it out to me yesterday at the Vancouver Freebase meetup is the importance of the 'as_of_time' parameter in freebase.  This allows developers to access views of freebase data at any point in time.  The important consequence of this is that it makes it easy to create authoritative versions of data in freebase.  This means that if, for example, the gene ontology were loaded into freebase on a particular day by a particular trusted authority, users of freebase could access versions of the GO topics exactly as they appeared at that moment.  This answers the common worry from biologists about trust and authority.  The 'oh no, I wouldn't use anything that could be edited by just anyone' phenomenon goes away and the best of both worlds becomes a possibility.  With an open app like freebase you get the wikipedian potential for rapid, parallel, collaborative knowledge formation.  With this kind of versioning, it should be possible to create trusted, authoritative versions at any point in time.

huge.

(Very) personalized medicine (everything)

You have to love their tagline at the top of their website,

don't panic, we're here to help

So, do you trust Google/23andMe to find and hold all of your genetic secrets? I'd trust them a lot more than Joe Shmoe in I.T... Seriously, if you are afraid Google is setting up some secret clone army bent on world domination, your genetic information really isn't going to help them much anyway. The truth is, they don't really have any incentive to do anything malicious with your personal information. Their famous moniker "don't be evil" isn't just could p.r., its good business - and thats why I actually do trust them. Not too mention that if anyone could actually keep your information safe from those that would do evil with it (perhaps certain governments..) they are about the only group in the world that might stand a chance.

I absolutely can not wait until I can have my whole genome sequenced and can start playing with it. I want to see specifically what differences exist between me and my sister, my cat, my dog, and my plant. I want to know what pills I should take when, if I should be getting tested sooner for prostate cancer, and whether I am more closely related to Socrates or to Gandhi. I want to go to a party and play the 4th cousin game.. who in the room is my closest relative? I want a t-shirt with the damn thing on it!

Never fear knowledge.

“Software intended to shape culture” - on talk by Stowe Boyd at Web2.0 Expo

This entry is about a talk given by Stowe Boyd at the Web2.0 expo about "building social applications". Stowe appears to be essentially a professional blogger/high-powered social computing consultant.. His talk was engaging, discussing some simple formula for developing “software intended to shape culture” (apparently a phrase he coined way back in the day when the web was young) and ultimately ending with a slightly sublime insight. Like just about everyone else at this conference, he must have mentioned twitter.com about 20 times in his two hours. He also spent quite a bit of time on last.fm, basecamp.com. Some highlights

“individual is the new group” – so you need to satisfy them (duh.)

“buddylist is the center of the universe” – your connections define you. (See touchgraph.com for a cool visualization of Google’s view of a website’s universe).

Reputation systems are crucial. See eBay’s afterthought system, DIGG’s extensively thought-out adaptive system. “Swarmth” – using the WoC for establishing reputation (which is tightly, importantly related to identity).

Seek successful motifs and add them to your site (tags, wikis, ... ) (duh)

Add mechanisms to import existing social networks into yours
o also related theme is that mashing up various successful apps into yours is no longer just a good idea, it is crucial.

3 steps – “me, mine, market”. Start with an individual purpose (e.g. buy a dress), move through a social space (e.g. ask your ‘friends’, ask experts, talk to people about it somehow..), satisfy purpose in the market (buy the one you want). Very simple recipe for building a “social application”.

Ok, those were the basics for the talk, but this was the interesting bit. I’ll have to go dig out an exact quote, or you can find it in his talk, but his idea is that people’s primary motivation for using the Web (or likely doing much of anything) is discovery. In particular, discovery of self.

As I’m learning now from an identity woman , “identity [self] is and has always been socially constructed” (which reminds me of the book “The Social Construction of Reality”). Web2.0 is enabling this social construction to happen online. So what.

Communities in reality operate based on trust. {If||when||already are} online communities are to really succeed, we need mechanisms for establishing trust. Stowe points out that this is already sort of achieved via things like linkbacks to blogs. Clearly there are lots of ways to approach this, but there is one crucial thing that they are all (as far as I can tell) dependent on – unique identification.

Trust is built on past experiences. To link multiple experiences together, you need something unique, like a face or (), to associate with those experiences. Now, trust can be associated with a person/ online agent within the context of a particular social application. I can estimate how much I might believe what bgood @ linked_in has to say based on his network and how well it might overlap with my own, but so far it is quite challenging to carry this reputation, this identity across into something new – say a new account like benjamgo on some new web2.0 application like blogger.com.

This is, of course, a standard data integration issue that is solvable in principle via unique identification. Here is where ‘user-centric identification’ (e.g. OpenId) comes to play. Forget that database of logins and passwords you keep, the day is approaching where you will only need one. Because of this, it will be easy to bring your social network, your contacts, beliefs, actions, your ‘self’ with you wherever you go.

Cool right?

I think mostly yes, but there are things to think about carefully.

We are talking about the potential end of anonymity on the Internet - and eventually everywhere else.

Is this good? Bad? Why? How?