The document discusses the evolution of online systems and user connectivity from basic connections with few users and systems to today's environment with many interconnected systems and user choices. This connectivity has created issues around accessing and sharing data across multiple systems. Standards like RSS have helped address this by providing a simple format for syndicating content across different systems. The document proposes a new "FeedBack" specification that could help push updates and advertising across connected systems in a standardized way.
6. Evolution (3/3) < SYSTEMS SYSTEMS SYSTEMS SYSTEMS SYSTEMS users users users users users users users users users users
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11. Systems compete for users Users migrate Hundreds of types of systems Thousands of instances
12. Is this some kind of problem? Does this mean anything? Is this some kind of problem? It sounds pretty great to have all this choice actually...?
13. Yes it is a “problem” How do I access all my data? How do I make sure the people I work with see the data I want them to see? What happens when I want to move all my data somewhere else?
14. How have we attempted to solve this problem? Mostly from a system perspective: Ontologies and standards (SCORM, LOM, IMS-* in education) SOA and web-services (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST)
15. But what has been most effective? Good, old, underrated RSS! (and HTTP) Why? Because it's SIMPLE!
16. What do the following things have in common? e-mail blogs forums instant messages status updates ...
17. (some) Shared characteristics created by intended for title and/or description time of creation/modification usually part of a stream/feed/list
18. How are we trying to exploit this? Three dimensions: Target (person/group) Content size Item mean time
Instead of systems, or their physical limitations in connectivity, being the limiting factors, the user's time and requirements rule the roost. As opposed to systems being few, users using whatever they can have, now users have choice, and a system without users is inherently worthless ( Metcalfe's law ).
So the user's requirements are now shaping the world -- systems compete to prove their worth to users, and every year new systems come along, and users migrate. Remember Friendster? No? What about MySpace? Yes? ... Wikipedia lists over 170 different social networking sites, some more specialized than others, out of which I have participated in: Advogato, Facebook, Friendster, Gogoyoko, Hi5, Hyves, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, Twitter, XING... fourteen different social networking sites/systems, just me.
How we have tried to solve this in the past... webservices, huge standards (LOM, SCORM, LMS-* .. in my field..) ... somehow this is still a problem, data doesn't flow between systems... or does it? ... another previously mentioned &quot;solution&quot; to this problem is to flood people's e-mail boxes with system notifications, this is a solution which unfortunately doesn't scale very well.
everybody supports RSS, even normal users are starting to understand and knowingly benefit from feeds. System developers like it because it's simple, but what makes it simple?