Parenting in the 21st century

I spent most of yesterday in London at the DCSF's Parenting in the 21st century event - another well run event from the department and Digital Public. The speaker line-up was well worth the trip with a great success story from Sally Russell at Netmums who is doing a wonderful job of raising awareness of non governmental organisations' ability to bring parents together through social media, and achieve outcomes that still remain out of reach for many government run projects.

It was interesting to hear that although Netmums seem to have very good relationships with government, they still hit the same barriers of access to government data sets and information, which many in the private sector believe they could add value to if only they were public. Hopefully Sally's involvement with the Power of Information group will move this issue along.

Niel McLean from Becta was also on fine form, painting a convincing picture of the power of technology to revolutionise our schools system, and in particular the relationship between pupils, their parents and teachers. His ideas around the blurring of boundaries, between home and school, the roles of teachers and parents, and the worlds of work and home, through the use of inclusive and ubiquitous technology raises interesting questions around how schools should embrace technology at a process level rather than purely as a tool.

In the breaks I caught up with Louise Derbyshire from Contact a Family, who's doing some very interesting work, supported by the parent know-how innovation fund, into the ways that social media can support parents of disabled children. Working through social networks and even Second Life she seems to be having significant success demonstrating the power of self-organising networks to provide high quality peer-to-peer support in this area, and I look forward to following the results of this project over the next few months.

I also bumped into Mark Weber from Attic Media, who have been doing some great work for the DCSF in the last few years. Mark had an interesting point to make that the ability of young people to fully use the Internet is often over-egged, something that we've seen ourselves in our research with young people who are often fairly limited in their exposure online to a small number of key websites and services (youtube, myspace, msn etc). It certainly seems to me that there is either a transition that happens in the late teens where the Internet expands from being purely a social tool to being an information resource that can be mined, or that there is a straightforward generational gap between us web 1.0 players who see the Internet through a library metaphor, and current crop of web 2.0 digital natives who experience it as social media.

This is a question that needs further research since, as was pointed out at the conference, the young people of today are only ten years off becoming the parents of tomorrow and we need to start planning now for the support they'll need.

A Lovefilm lifestream hack with Dapper and Pipes

So I'm a big fan of Lovefilm the online DVD rentals service. But for a while now I've been reviewing and rating my moveis in Flixster because that is a more open system with outputs such as Facebook apps and Opensocial.

This is less than ideal as I really should double-enter my ratings to ensure Lovefilm recommendations are accurate, so I was pleased to see that Lovefilm have launched a user public profile which allows you to publish some of your data to the world, see mine here. However, as is so often the case the way the data isn't portable, so I used it as an opportunity to try out a new service I'd heard about called Dapper.

I'd come across Dapper when they spoke at FOWA this year and have had them on my list to try out ever since. Dapper is enssentially screen scraping software, which allows you to feed it some example pages which it then pulls apart to work out what is content that you might want to repurpose. It's a very nicely built web application with huge potential given the output formats (XML, RSS, Netvibes, flash widgets to name a few). So I booted it up and fed it my Lovefilm profile page.

My first hurdle was that I had difficulty getting it to recognise certain parts of the page as content chunks. It couldn't grab the review separately from the list of stars and director, so in the end I have a little more information in the RSS description than I would have liked, I'm guessing this is down to how well the HTML is written. My second issue was that with the RSS option enabled it only allowed me to link data to the fields; title, description and pubdate. I was keen to take the movie artwork in as an RSS enclosure, so I went back and switch to XML output and just grabbed everything into an XML file. After bit of neatening up my finished 'Dap' was ready and published.

After my Dap was finished I wanted to clean things up and sort out the enclosure. So I jumped over to Yahoo! Pipes and took in the XML output, renamed a few fields and performed some regex's so that everything was how I wanted it. The final RSS feed output can be seen here.

Finally I wanted to get that into my lifestream. Currently I'm using Jaiku for this purpose, so I jumped over and added in the new RSS feed which in short order appeared nicely into my stream with my first review. As I use this to wire updates into other systems (e.g. through the Jaiku app in Facebook), my new review quickly perculated into my social network.

Overall this probably took me two hours to setup, but a lot of that was learning and fiddling around the edges. Dapper is certainly a very powerful tool and combined with the more programmatic functionality of Yahoo! Pipes, which allows me to start making my locked up information more portable. The one restriction at the moment is the current inability to automate any logins, so if you don't have a shortcut private URL for your data you're out of luck on an automated login. I think this is possibly an opportunity for OpenId in the future.

The web2.0 stack

There has been considerable activity on standards around the web2.0 software stack in recent weeks, and this year's conferences had had little else to talk about. Here's my take on the current state of play:

To start with there's my lifestream published with Jaiku - my digital footprint which encompasses blog posts I'm sharing (google reader), comments I've made (coComments), sites I've bookmarked (del.icio.us), location and presense updates. This information gives a view on my attention and is ideal for marking up with APML for intelligent reuse around the web.

Then there's information I want to publish and synidcate out such as events I'm attending (upcoming), places I'll be (dopplr), photos I've uploaded (flickr), blog posts written (blogger), videos uploaded (YouTube). This is more static information, content I've created, which is generally feed based through standards such as RSS or iCal and can be proxied through services such as feedburner to overlay analytics.

To pull all this together I need a concept of identity (OpenId through ClaimId) and cross site authorisation (oAuth).

Finally I want to share all this with my social graph, which I need to define with microformats such as xfn and hCard, deliver the content to container sites such as social networks through Google's recent OpenSocial and make it platform agnostic with widget apis such as netvibes' UWA. This is the standards coalface where the apis are still being cut, a few months from now we'll see the first fruits of this work as the major social software players being to support these standards.

This slew of technologies and web applications almost fits together into a portable digital presence spread across the net and integrated with my social graph. With a bit of hard work its with us today, and tomorrow it will extend even further onto my mobile through Google's Android.

Exciting times for web2.0 developers.

The agile approach

It seems that every conference I have attended this year has had several speakers passionately advocating an agile approach to web application development, something that a few years ago was the preserve of an evangelical geek sub-culture, now seems to have hit the mainstream with the next generation of Internet entrepreneurs.

I believe this is partly due to a shift in perspective, from seeing the web primarily as a data repository where the discipline of information architecture has primacy, to a vision of the web as an application platform which forces us to draw more heavily on interaction design and usability concerns in our designs. This has naturally favoured a shift towards development methodologies that focus on the user experience and which exploit usability testing to explore this realm.

Agile methodologies seem to align very well with the web 2.0 philosophy, centring around the customer as an integral part of the development process and allowing projects to evolve through usability testing and customer feedback rather than being up-front requirements driven. Agile also supports the rapid turnaround needed for web development, dovetailing effectively with the 'beta' culture and the drive to be first to market and hence to establish dominant market share. What would be difficult to implement in other businesses of packaged software development or critical b2b systems, is in its element with b2c projects over the Internet where rapid feedback and a 'release often' philosophy are underpinning a successful model of RAD development.

Partly this success seems also to be supported by the rise of a number mature web development frameworks such as Rails, often based around the MVC pattern, which support rapid prototyping and an approach which leverages the strengths of the HTTP protocol rather than necessitating reinvention (every web developer should be forced to read RESTful web services before developing any web app). This is all the more interesting for me in my work as we run a Microsoft stack throughout which is only now seeking to replicate this success within the .Net framework and is certainly aligned more with SOAP than REST.

Over the past few months my development team have been rolling their own agile methodology, combining elements from several sources but most closely aligned to extreme programming. This approach is now having its first outing to deliver a social networking project (currently in stealth mode) which we're due to launch at the start of next year. I will be acting as the customer proxy during development and will try and blog my learning from the inside as we give the new system a spin. Iteration one was this week and tomorrow will see our first bullpen as we evaluate the outputs and see how we've faired. I'll let you know how it goes...

Adventures in web 2.0

Lately I've been doing some research into the current state of the art in the resurgent Internet economy. In particular I've been experimenting around the web 2.0 community, a concept I've previously had doubts about, relegating it to the overflowing dustbin of hyped concepts alongside 'push technology'.

However, after several weeks spent repeatedly entering my profile into every site that will have me, I have to say something is emerging from the pastel colours and ubiquitous tag clouds that captures my interest. I'm beginning believe there really is something to it, a new zeitgeist which genuinely does have substance. Even the economics seem more sustainable with many web 2.0 companies exiting through acquisitions rather than through the over-hyped IPOs of the first bubble.

In particular two trends have particularly caught my eye. The first is the rise of the widget companies; technologically nothing new - personalisation through the use of web page components and gadgets has been around for at least a decade. However, the key difference here is the move from personalisation around a single portal, to network personalisation through multi-site syndication. User generated content that was once trapped within sites dealing within a specific verticals such as photos, is now freely accessible through a multitude of front-ends through the use of widgets.

This was the promise that syndication standards such as RSS have failed to keep up with, leading unfortunately to an abandonment of standards in favour of presentation. Where RSS still dominates in textural content supporting aggregation through tools such as readers, widgets are inherently presentational delivering rich media content beyond RSS, but in a way that is inherently difficult to aggregate. It is interesting to see the rise of services such as Feedburner that are taking up the challenge to integrate these streams together, providing ways to encapsulate rich media within the constraints of RSS.

Secondly, the opening up of the Facebook Platform to third parties to develop applications upon is of major significance. With a stated goal of creating a social software operating system for the web, Facebook has certainly latched on to something with great potential.

After registering and linking up with friends, filling in my profile and joining a few groups, I found myself wondering what I'm supposed to do on Facebook. I seem to spend many hours fiddling whilst not achieving very much, keeping track of what everyone else is doing and essentially killing time quite unproductively. However, when I look at Facebook as an underlying infrastructure for building a network, upon which applications can be layered, it suddenly becomes much more of an attractive proposition. If Facebook can match the explosion of development within its borders with an adoption of is core concepts of identity, profile, presence and network in external applications then I think it can achieve its aim.

This leads to the coming conflict - on the one hand you have a closed network of friends producing content within applications built upon the Facebook platform, primarily local, but with a number of external integrations such as the movie site Flixster. On the other side you have specialist verticals such as Flickr doing a much better job within their narrow focus, syndicating content, via widgets, through open forums such as the blogosphere. Currently I have to choose - do I manage my photos in Facebook and get the advantages of the the network but no visibility beyond it, or do I manage them in Flickr with better tools, open syndication, but a duplicate profile and an inferior network?

Two social perspectives seem to be developing, on the one hand you have the individual; their restricted profile, their closed network and around that a whole host of information, on the other you have the blogosphere; content focused, open, surrounded by that same web of information. These don't need to be exclusive if they both build on the power of the specialists; rather than looking at the Facebook platform as an opportunity to build an application within Facebook, look at it as an integration platform that allows specialist environments to be syndicated into a successful network-centric environment, and use that network platform as an infrastructure component for those specialist sites (Flixster does this close integration well).

Finally here's the roll call of the sites which have kept me occupied while exploring these concepts: social networks by Facebook and Linkedin, blog by Blogger, syndication by Feedburner, social bookmarking by Del.icio.us and Addthis!, events by Upcoming.org, images by Flickr, movies by Flixster, videos by YouTube. You'll notice that almost all of these are now owned by either Yahoo! or Google.

Surface computing

A couple of days ago I picked up this video from TechCrunch demonstrating Microsoft's new surface computing product. Surface computing is an admirable attempt to deconstruct the prevalent user interface paradigm and introduce more natural human computer interfaces into our everyday lives. The video is certainly impressive, reminiscent of Minority Report's gestural interfaces, with seamless integration with mobile devices.

Certainly when I've given these kind of interfaces a go on traditional computers, I've initially been impressed by the eye-candy, but have soon reverted to the traditional interface for quickly and easily performing everyday tasks. However, when you move away from power-users, and workhorse tasks, these interfaces could genuinely lower the barriers of technology - I can see my parents managing their digital photos on such a platform, whereas I dispair of them ever emptying their SDcard currently.

More importantly, in the long term such interfaces will become vital as embedded computing becomes more ubiquitous. When your clothes have embedded CPUs and you carry your personal area network with you, interfaces will need to evolve beyond windows and menus. It's reassuring to see that Microsoft of all companies, is thinking outside the box here and is going beyond just embedding a computer in a table (think the failed promise of kiosks) to produce something which delivers us new interactions and sets us thinking that maybe we've all been lured into a dead-end local maxima of interface design centred around the diminishing returns from the refinement of windows, menus and more recently ribbons. The field is wide open for innovative ideas to become tomorrows de-facto standards; just maybe this product could herald the start of some real progress in interface design after years of stagnation.

The 14 faces of innovation

Over my holidays I managed to find time to get through Moore's latest book focussing on innovation. In my opinion this is by far the best of his works; much more applicable to the everyday SME with a practical methodology to underpin the theory.

One of the difficult areas for most companies is to understand their existing products and determine how to innovate around them. As Moore details, it is usual to see a scatter gun approach of competing brand themes which don't come together into a strong identity. Moore advocates an analysis based upon his familier technology lifecycle model, but tying in 14 varied types of innovation. For each product a company should be majoring on a type of innovation which is appropriate to its place on the lifecycle.

It's a very compelling book, bursting with examples whilst still being easy to read. I'll let you know how the methodology fares after I've given it a run.