the onda

Bill Burnham, an ex-investment banker of Quatrone fame and one of the brightest business guys covering the technology space, has a very nice summary piece on the importance of syndication, microformats, and search for the development of online marketplaces. Nothing he states in the post is earth-shattering from the insight perspective but it is a nice synopsis and attempt to understand a scenario for how the semantic web could emerge.

Of particular significance to me is how he describes people behaving in order to create the necessary substrate for the evolution of the web. After introducing the central role that sites like MySpace and Facebook will play for users, he extrapolates:

Specifically, these sites (as well as sites such as MSN’s Spaces and Yahoo’s 360) are highly likely to evolve into an all encompassing digital identify for each user. People will use these sites not just as a way to socialize, but as a hub to manage their broader digital identify on the web. Part blog, part digital cubby hole, these sites will provide each human being with a digital homestead from which they can manage their entire digital identify on the web.

What your profile page becomes then is your point of presence online with the social interactions around that page serving to validate and qualify your online identity. I love this notion for two reasons.

First, it is true that people will increasingly need a point of presence online where they can root their digital selves both for online and offline purposes. As Burnham continues:

Today people with their own websites are regarded as either curious or vain, yet I feel quite confident saying that 10 years from now everyone in the developed world will have their own website and the few that don’t will likely be regarded as hopeless Luddites much like those without e-mails are today.

I remember back in the 1990s when I moved to California and set up a website with the express purpose of providing directions to my house. It was such a novelty at the time even that in Silicon Valley, most people would just print out the email and then wonder how they were supposed to use the long link at the bottom to get to me. Nowadays it is hard to get invited to a wedding that doesn't already have a "wedding site" with all the related hotel, travel, and gift registry info.

The point of presence is absolutely necessary as more person-to-person transactions get done online which is why sites like eBay and Flickr (the latter is also about transactions albeit non-commerce related) push the profile page front and center.

This brings me to my second reason for liking Burnham's characterization of the point of presence through sites like MySpace and Facebook-- unlike the normally heavyweight process of using something like Geocities, or Homestead, or even TypePad or Blogger to "set up" a point of presence, most community-oriented presence creation happens as a by-product of other activity in the environment. This is back to the notion of being a casual publisher-- you start interacting with a site in a very task-directed way and before long, you've grown a whole little structure that becomes "you" as represented in that environment (to me, Furl did this the best way before the del.icio.us hype explosion by making a blog-like thing out of your public archive by default). After you've built up the profile, this bit of real estate becomes really valuable because it would talk an incredible amount of work (more than most normal people are willing to put in) to recreate it.

Burnham goes on to talk about the importance of microformats so that people can publish all sorts of structured information to allow search engines to create distributed marketplaces for goods and services. While this makes for a great read, I am not sure I see how we get there anytime soon. The main reason has to do with what makes a marketplace succeed: its value is proportional to the number of participants. People continue to go to the specialized auction sites (like Basehit for baseball cards) despite eBay's attempts to own the category because they perceive a deeper marketplace at these specialized sites. Ebay and Craig's List will always have this over any emergent effort on the part of people who load the contents of their basement on their blogs, at least until the latter get to some sort of meaningful scale.

It's a classic chicken and egg. The microformats guys understand this which is why there are all of these Movable Type and Wordpress plug-ins that process content into structured chunks of XML during the blog publishing process. I haven't tried these but suspect that they are at best as kludgey as the publishing interfaces on the blog tools they support. More importantly, it's not clear to me that even if you take all of the Movable Type users, add them to the TypePad userbase, and then sprinkle in Wordpress and Blogger, you get enough of a population to make even one worthwhile marketplace (10-15M blogs at most?).

Instead it's going to take a big social site (a la MySpace) developing enough expressiveness in the profile-building part of the application (which by some people's standards MySpace does already) in an accessible enough way for the regular folks not normally interested in the overt popularity contest that is the mainline attraction on sites like MySpace and Facebook. In my mind this means the tool should be task-centric (like furl was) and personal in scope (so that its excrement is meaningful in creating a personal point of presence).

The key is that people are encouraged to create a permanent presence as a by-product of the thing that they really want to do, that this presence be something that can be useful in its own right once created, appealing enough to its owner, and customizable so that any lingering expressive desires can be met. Whoever gets this equation right first could both subsume all of the current standalone features of the blogging/personal publishing apps out there today, and really jumpstart the vision laid out by Burnham in his post.

I, for one, welcome the age of the unwitting bloggers.