Photo credit: Rob Pongsajapan.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Lift conference and helping to run a workshop on user privacy. This was a workshop with a difference. My colleague Franco Papeschi came up with the idea of a privacy “game” (“Denopticon“) which would help participants explore the issues around privacy, personal information and data sharing. The game started with participants filling out an ID card with personal information about themselves. Participants earned points for finding out and recording personal information from others and additional points for fulfilling various secret missions. It was enormously fun and I hope to help run it again at other events. But besides being fun, it helped the participants, and the moderators, think about the key issues around user privacy.

This was against the backdrop of enormous upheaval in the area of user privacy on the Web. I remember when privacy on the Web used to boil down to “turning off cookies.” Now-a-days if you turn off cookies, you might as well use your computer as a doorstop, and anyway the privacy conversation has so moved on. In a world where more and more of our communication is happening through social networks and socially connected applications, the whole concept of privacy is being turned on its head, to the extent that some (such as Christian Heller) are claiming that we are now living in a “post-privacy” world. And, of course, Google’s Eric Schmidt is on record saying “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” which (if he truly believes this) I think betrays an almost pathological misapprehension about the human condition.

The truth is, we need privacy, as a society. Anyone who claims we don’t is (forgive me) either terribly naïve, stupid, or a sociopath. Privacy, and a reasonable expectation that some of our actions and communications are and will remain private, is a social lubricant that allows for healthy exercise of denial and other mechanisms that keep us sane. Anti-privacy pundits are quick to reply that “the kids” don’t care about privacy – but this notion doesn’t bear up under the facts. (For evidence, an article from today’s NY Times reporting on the increasing awareness of youth to privacy issues.) In fact, there seems to be a backlash against the “private is public” mentality which has led to over-sharing and social networking fatigue. (Do I really care that you’ve won the medal of the badge of being the mayor of the Duncan Donuts at 33rd and 8th? Maybe that’s something better kept private.)

Over-sharing as promoted by servers like Foursquare may be annoying but it’s basically harmless. You may be opening yourself up to stalking or having your house burgled but that’s a choice you’re willing to make for the benefits that social sharing bring, right? OK, but what happens when you’re not just making that decision for yourself? What happens when your sharing impacts your family, your sexual partner, your children? Emerging usages of  social networks will require more trustable, private environments. With their ability to share structured data, social networks could be a great environment to interact with your stock broker or financial advisor. What about health service communications – such as your blood sugar levels or the results of your AIDS test? What about parent-teacher communications? The list goes on – all of these intrinsically private types of communication could benefit from the rich communication mechanisms that social networks bring to bear. But people would (rightly) be reluctant to use Facebook or other existing social networks in these ways.

Unfortunately, although social platforms like Facebook are adding richer privacy controls, there remain problems both with the implementation of these controls and in making them understandable to regular users. I think Facebook has actually made a lot of progress in making privacy options visible and usabile – at least on their Web site. In fact, my personal trust level of Facebook’s privacy mechanisms has increased enough that I’ve begun sharing family photos and other information with family members on the platform. I’ve been very frustrated by the lack of privacy controls on their mobile clients and mobile web site, but it seems to me they are on the right track. There are challenges on the horizon, though.

One challenge will emerge from the wealth of availability of data that is opening up to Web developers. With a few lines of JavaScript code, a Web application or widget can access your location (via the Geolocation API). Soon, that information will expand to capturing your camera image or digging into your address book. Although browser and web runtime makers are building in privacy controls, are they working and are they the right ones? These are the issues we’ll be exploring at an upcoming W3C workshop I’ll be co-chairing on privacy and device APIs.

Another challenge is going to be implementing trustable privacy in the post-Facebook world. How would my family photos use-case work if my family members were not all on Facebook  but were members of a series of federated social networks? These are some of the problem spaces we’ve been exploring in the W3C Social Web Incubator. The OneSocialWeb project is building an open source platform that uses XMPP to bring some of these ideas to life.

One thing is clear: privacy is becoming a key industry topic and a flashpoint in the intersection between mobile, social and  the Web. The common wisdom is shifting away from the idea that “people don’t care about online privacy” which is good, but it throws a spotlight on the mess that privacy on the Web has become. Cleaning up that mess is going to take some effort.

The rush of content and application developers to develop iPhone apps has been impressive and somewhat predictable. The app store is the next big thing. Google, Microsoft and others are now jumping on the bandwagon (probably much to the dismay of the folks at Handango who can rightly claim they’ve been doing an app store since before app stores were cool). Many of the apps in the Apple app store are really good and could not (currently) be written as web apps because they either take advantage of device capabilities (such a location) or because they need direct access to graphics or sound capabilities (3D gaming) not available to the browser engine. However – discounting this need to access the platform functions, there’s nothing about, say, the iPhone Facebook App that couldn’t be written as a webapp. Indeed, if you visit iphone.facebook.com, you get a webapp version that gives you more features, has better usability (in my opinion) and benefits from more frequent updates (but does not, for instance, give you access to the camera so you can automatically take pictures and upload them to your profile, because the browser doesn’t have access to the camera API). Hahlo is another good example of a Webapp that currently beats out all the native application options as a Twitter client (except for its lack of access to the address book, camera, or location). This is the crux: it’s easier to build, update and maintain a webapp than an app (for cases such as the Facebook offering) but native apps give you access to platform features (and other capabilities such as local storage) that webapps can’t.

Enter a new class of webapp: a mobile browser based application. These applications are built using Web technologies (the so-called Ajax platform), can either be deployed as a standard Web application or as a “widget,” and can advantage of platform functions through some ingenous software layers currently being built. Google’s Gears Mobile, Nokia’s Web Runtime platform and upcoming versions of Opera Mobile all are making a start of it, but right now these efforts are all highly fragmented and incompatible. The OMTP, through its BONDI initiative, is attempging to bring some focus to this area, by coming up with a common set of industry requirements for enabling secure access to platform APIs and then driving some work forward in W3C’s Web Applications working group to help to make this an industry standard.

I was interested to read that in all the discussion of the iPhone app store, Apple has also quietly made it easier to write webapps and to surface these webapps to the user as if they were native apps. Essentially, the “web clipping” mechanism allows you to put an icon on your screen to represent a webapp, and with the release of the latest firmware, it is now possible to launch these webapps without the normally associated “browser chrome” (which mirrors the approach Apple has taken with it’s latest beta of Safari on desktop). This approach further blurs the lines between webapp and native app.

In the short term, it means more confusing choices for application developers. But in the long term, at least for an increasingly large class of application (for example, social applications or any app that doesn’t require direct access to platform features like 3D accelerated graphics), it’s clear that the Web will prevail.

W3C is organizing an online course to introduce Web developers and designers to W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices.

In this course you will:

• • * learn about the specific promises and challenges of the mobile platform
  • * learn how to use W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices to design mobile-friendly Web content and to mobilize existing content
  • * discover the relevant W3C resources for mobile Web design

Participants will have access to lectures and assignments providing hands-on practical experience with using W3C’s mobile Web Best Practices. They will have direct access to W3C experts on this topic who are the instructors for this course. Participants will also be able to discuss and share experiences with their peers who are faced with the challenges of mobile Web design.

More information at

http://www.w3.org/2008/03/MobiWeb101/Overview.html

Register now at
http://www.3gwebtrain.com/moodle/

In an hour I’ll be on another flight on my way to Seoul, South Korea. I don’t speak a word of Korean, I have no local currency and I’ve most likely packed the wrong plug adapters. But on Monday morning, I will convene the next face to face meeting of the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group. After that, I plan to participate in an event called W3C Mobile Wednesday, a kind of east-meets-west open conference-style event bringing together people working in mobile Web standardization and those working on the sharp end of the mobile Web in Korea: people from manufacturers and operators, yes, but also entrepreneuers, bloggers, developers. It’s all thanks to the Korean Mobile Web 2.0 Forum, ETRI, and the people at the W3C offfice in Korea. I’m very excited about this event and this whole week. Besides making some real progress on the work of the Mobile Web Best Practices group, I hope to get a real flavor for how the mobile Web (and other digital services) are being delivered in Korea, a place that showcases (according to Jim O’Reilly and Tomi Ahonen in their book Digital Korea) the “Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home”.
That and enjoy some good kimchi.

This week, we have followed up the release of MobileOK with a new document that details exactly that: describe the relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Why should you care? If you’re trying to provide a service on the Web, you need to care about both accessibility and mobility. Both of these topics require some investment in skills, tools, and development time, so understanding where the overlaps are should greatly help to reduce development costs and time to market. At the end of the day, it’s also about maximizing the potential audience for your service, regardless of a user’s disability or the device used to access that service.

I’m interested to see if I get the same vibe at Future of Mobile tomorrow in London.

As for the Web 2.0 conference which is just closing down today, it has been a mixed bag, but on balance I actually think it was better than last year. Lots of the conference has been focusing on APIs and the whole “Web as a platform” concept, which I think is a key area of innovation in the Web. We’re already seeing how efforts like Amazon Web Services and Facebook’s APIs are creating waves of innovation and that’s only accelerating.

I found Facebook’s announcement on allowing users to export their data particularly interesting. Openness like this will be the trend for social networks moving forward and Facebook has clearly decided to be a part of this disruption. Devil is in the details, of course.

Of course, the mobile content at the summit has been very superficial and disappointing. The panel on mobile social media could have been interesting but it was a little too much Nokia-focused (how could it not be as it was sponsored and organized by Nokia and featured Anssi as a panelist). It still could have been interesting but the panelists had to spend too much time explaining the mobile social space so we couldn’t really get into the meaty issues.

Another low-light was the “conversation” about the 700mhz auction between Verizon Wireless (Thomas J. Tauke) and Google (Ram Shriram). Martin Varsavsky from FON was incongruously placed into this conversation as well but really this was an argument between Google and Verizon. (As a sidebar, what FON is doing is really really cool, and I am especially excited about their partnership with BT, which Martin unfortunately was not able to get into in any detail.) The problem with the 700mhz discussion is that Google is trying to frame this as them championing the little guy (“no blocks, no locks” is their mantra) and Verizon is trying to frame the discussion as their crusade against government intervention and regulation. This might seem like a big story in the States but from an international perspective, I am scratching my head a bit. I don’t think the spectrum auction has anything to do with open access (which is an inevitable trend). The whole thing seems to be about control and money — it’s a crass power-play by Google into the carrier space. Which is cool, but call a spade a spade.

Anyway, I’m now sitting in probably the most interesting session of the event, stuck in at the tail end named “The Semantic Edge.” (Presumably Tim O’Reilly couldn’t stand to name it “Semantic Web” which is what it’s about). What’s exciting about this panel is that we are hearing about cool new technology available now that is leveraging the semantic Web. Twine is a semantic application just coming out of stealth that ties together information from other sites and social networks. Very cool. Freebase (interesting choice of names) provides a semantic search which can provide impressively deep information using a combination of natural language processing and semantics. This is easily the most interesting stuff that’s been presented at Web 2.0. Taptu (who came out of stealth at Mobile 2.0 on monday) should be up there as well as they are actually using some of the same technologies to enable a remarkably better mobile search experience.

Another side-bar: it’s very good to hear people talking about the importance of W3C semantic Web standards as an interoperable glue between these semantic platforms.

James Pearce (CTO of dotMobi) wrote a great article yesterday about the impact of the iPhone on the industry and what it means for them. Of course, he’s right. What the iPhone is doing is helping the Web along to become a mobile medium. Does this make dotMobi or efforts like the W3C Mobile Web Initiative obsolete?

Let me pose the question another way. In 5 years’ time, when the majority of Web usage is from mobile devices, will we all be using the browsers on these devices to pan, scan and zoom around pages that were designed for large screen desktop PCs? I think we can agree that this would be a kind of dystopian vision of the future of the Web. Apple certainly agrees. That’s why they released a set of guidelines on ptimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone. These guidelines, while developed by Apple in house specifically to match the capabilities of the iPhone browser, bear a striking resemblance to the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and the dotMobi Developer Guide in their approach, language and purpose. All these documents are trying to change the mind-set of developers to get them to think about both the technical differences between mobile devices and PCs (for example, Apple saying “a touch-screen is not a mouse”) and also the differences in usage and behavior that need to be taken into account in designing for mobile use.

The main difference between the Apple guidelines and the dotMobi and W3C documents are the level of browser technology assumed. Because the dotMobi and W3C guidelines are targeting a wide range of form factors, devices and browsers (some of which are fairly bare-bones) they encourage the developer to not rely on scripting, advanced CSS or other technologies that are usually not well supported in these devices (while encouraging developers to use these capabilities when they do know that the device/browser in question supports them). Apple’s guidelines are targeting only one browser on only one device, so they can afford to tell developers to use Web technologies like CSS, scripting and AJAX.

In two weeks’ time, however, the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices working group (which I chair and which includes dotMobi as a member) will be meeting in London. This meeting will be the kick off of a new phase of work for the group. We will be working on a successor document to the basic guidelines document issued earlier this year. The new document will provide guidelines to developers targeting more advanced devices, like the iPhone; devices where you can assume a higher level of capability. I have called on Apple to contribute their developer guidelines into this effort. Why? Because it’s in their best interest to make sure that Web sites and applications developed for the iPhone also work across a range of other devices, and that mobile Web applications designed according to industry standard guidelines work seamlessly on their devices.

The iPhone will herald a whole generation of advanced Web-capable mobile devices. In this context, a converged set of Web developer guidelines for such devices will be a boon to the developer community and will help create the necessary conditions for the evolution of the Web into the Mobile space, an evolution which Alan Moore, in a very thoughtful essay, calls the dawn of the 7th Mass Medium.

It’s the Web. But not as we know it.