Re: Question: User Story -- Bootstrapping Facebook

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 22:22, László Török <ltorokjr@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/2/11 Peter Williams <home_pw@msn.com>
>>
>> why would they come? (Im playing the hard ball.)
>
> Whether they will come or not boils down to WebIDs value prop.
>
> An example: The is an accelerating adoption of the GoodRelations semantic
> vocabulary that was invented by a university professor. Search engines that
> make sense of that sematic data produce more accurate results, e-commerce
> sites marking up their data can boost sales. There mutual benefit emerges
> from the fact that everybody speaks the same language and this language can
> be spoken by everyone. (being open)
>

Good example, I wrote about that before [1]. By Google's adoption,
adding semantic data to your pages becomes an advantage in and of
itself, because Google will reward you with rich snippets in the
search results, which probably will lead to better ranking and more
traffic. This will increase adoption, and once enough websites use it,
more semantic services can come along to use the data.

> Now I can see that an internet scale identity system that WebID aims to
> become, can have a very appealing value prop for e-commerce. (thinking of
> transactions, attribution, etc.)
>
> This might be achieved by numerous ways, but since most participants believe
> in the web as integration platform, we are trying to come up with a webby
> solution.
>

To push adoption of WebID, I believe we have shouldn't focus on trying
to implement the entire stack, or on implementation on web-scale. We
need to find a way to get the "sweet spot" of WebID implemented with a
major player. Once people *have* a WebID, I believe, further spread
will follow automatically.

Zero-click sign-on could be such a sweet spot, with additional "free"
security, but I feel that this currently still is too unpolished to
roll out to casual users. This is not a WebID issue in itself, but
more a browser issue, as Henry has long been saying. I do not believe
someone like Facebook would adopt WebID until this is fixed.

I am hoping we can get someone from Google on board, since they may
have all the cards needed: The fastest growing browser (with
auto-update, so they could roll-out this fix to most users), a
somewhat more tech-savvy audience, that might be easier to convert,
and a recent focus on account security (see the 2-step authn they just
released)


[1] http://blog.loadingdata.nl/2010/11/the-semantic-web-is-going-mainstream/

-- 
远洋 / Daniël Bos

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Received on Friday, 11 February 2011 15:20:55 UTC