We’ve been talking openly about our support of data portability for a while now. In fact, before the term had the cache it does today, matchmine came to life in 2005 as a method for embracing the user’s desire to make their personal preference data portable.

While it doesn’t seem necessarily ground-breaking today, we believe that a user’s information is their own, and they should be in control of sharing it with whomever they choose. It’s easy to talk a good game, but we’re happy to be actively marching to the beat of the openness drum with a few new features we recently rolled out:

• OpenID – One of the most annoying aspects of the proliferation of kewl sites, online applications, and distributed features is the need to create accounts in each new system. Enter the OpenID single sign-on technique that’s gaining momentum in what’s being called the “open web”. Rather than forcing our users to create yet another account, MatchKey.com and other sites within the matchmine Media Discovery Network (mMDN) now support OpenID. So you can now easily manage your MatchKey with your account at Yahoo, Flickr, and AOL as well as specialized OpenID providers like myOpenID, claimID, and Verisign.
• MatchKey Feeder – While the concept isn’t revolutionary, we’ve taken steps to learn from your interactions within your existing services. To avoid the irritation of duplicating what you’ve already done, MatchKey users can now import their preferences directly into their MatchKey from sites outside the mMDN. Included in the initial set of feeders is support for Netflix, Last.fm, Pandora, YouTube and Bloglines. Unlike other services that aggregate account details, we’re paying close attention to the systems that will provide positive value to your MatchKey. This means we won’t be adding every new site that comes down the pike, but only those that will actively enhance your experience.
• MatchKey Streamer – So far we’ve talked about users coming into the ‘mine, but how about getting data back out? We’ve got that covered, too, by allowing MatchKey users to export, or stream, the preference data contained within their MatchKey. Now you can leverage this data in your own mashups, or share it with whomever you choose. Streams are currently available in three XML formats: Raw MatchKey, MatchKey Vectors, and APML (version 0.6). An innovation I’m pleased to announce is that each stream allows you the choice of making it public, or keeping it private for selective use. In short, it’s your choice if and how you want to share the data we create on your behalf. Additional streaming options will be made available over time, including a simple tag cloud format and a context-rich semantic representation.

The new functionality we’ve added underscores our commitment to openness and data portability. On the inbound side, we’re letting users feed their MatchKey with existing preferences from other sites. We’ve also opened the door outbound, allowing users to export the preference model of their media interests we create for them. It’ll be exciting to see what users come up with as they share their MatchKey beyond our partner network.

The most exciting aspect of the new functionality we’ve released is the foundation we’ve built for future expansion. We’ve laid the ground work upon which we can continue rolling out additional feeder sources and streaming formats. With this initial effort complete, we’re looking forward to supporting additional existing and emerging open standards in an effort to give you control over your preferences.

Chris Saad recently posted a succinct clarification of the following questions related to some business issues around data portability:

• Why would a vendor allow users to leave their service?
• Why make it easy for users to take the precious data you have about them and use it on other sites?
• What is the business justification for letting data walk out the door?

He’s got some helpful diagrams that illustrate his point, so I suggest reading his post on “The mythical value of data lockin“. In short, though, it’s this paragraph that seems to sum it up:

Even if you are Google, and you know every search your users do, every document they write, every chat they have - you still don’t know their facebook social graph. You don’t know their tweet stream. You don’t know the books they bought on Amazon.

I wish I could remember where I first heard this quote to attribute the source, but it works as the bumper sticker (or Twitter) version of the same sentiment:

No matter how large a website is, the internet is bigger.

Basically, sites will ultimately learn much more about their users=customers when they plug into the sharing network than they’ll be giving up. Here at matchmine, of course, we’re all about enabling sites to access user interests and tastes (under the control of the user), so we bounce into these questions (and provide the same answers) on a daily basis.

To this point, we’re walking the data portability walk ourselves. We’re not only consuming feeds from various sources, but are also a couple days away from streaming data back out, too. It’s all part of our Openness Roadmap I hope to start talking up in the coming weeks.

In the end, all of us (e.g. users, service providers, destination sites, publishers, etc.) win when we aren’t wasting time constantly reinventing wheels (or filling out yet another form). Instead, we can use that time to focus on the unique values we bring to the collective table.

Great article here by Jeff Bussgang at Flybridge, on what it takes to win:

…I have come to realize that the true question corporations need to ask is: “How do I get my employees to think like VCs but act like entrepreneurs?” In other words: What’s the best way to impose the challenge of complex, competing priorities on employees who must, in effect, be adroit at living with split personalities? This new frame of mind requires the corporate manager to extract the best from both worlds—entrepreneurs with a bias for action, and VCs with a bias for analysis. Elements of both are required.

Says easy, does hard.

As I’ve said before, for me the basic tension of a new venture is between the two defining characteristics of most successful startups:

1. Commitment to a process of iterative refinement, engaging the marketplace open to the truth, and being mercenary about doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
2. A team that executes with conviction, almost unreasonable in its commitment to overcome inertia and do something that hasn’t been done before.

Too much “1″ and half-assed execution obscures what would work if done well; too much “2″ and you miss the turn that would have made it all work.

I guess “think like a VC / act like an entrepreneur” is another way to put that, if it helps get the concept in more people’s heads all the better.

Which do you think makes the idea more clear?

This is just a quick, off the top of my head post about the similarities and differences I see between the terms “specifications” and “standards” and our approach to supporting them. It’s by no means an exhaustive treatise on the subject, but just common sense thoughts on a working framework about their usage.

When talking with people, it seems as if the two terms are often used interchangeably. In non-technical discussions this is probably a reasonable enough conflation. After all, most folks don’t need to make a distinction between the two. I believe, however, that it’s important to draw a line around each concept to illuminate some of the subtleties of meaning in some contexts.

So, in my style of rough-n-ready definitions to clarify discourse:

• Specification: A formalized definition for the way something should operate.
• Standard: A common way in which something operates.

You can look up more complete definitions in your favorite dictionary, but these seem to be reasonable enough to encapsulate the salient points. Barring any niggling nuances, you can see how the two have a significant overlap in utility. More interesting, and I think less understood, is how the two differ.

In a nutshell, there are a lot of specifications floating around that aren’t being used widely enough to be considered a standard (e.g. most APIs are well-specified, but not a standard beyond the walls of a single system). In general, any newly proposed specification toward common interoperability can’t really be termed a standard until it’s been widely adopted. On the flip-side, just because a technique for interoperability is pervasive enough to have become standardized doesn’t mean it’s backed by a specification (e.g. CSV is a common standard output format but there’s no agreed-upon specification governing its format).

Why does this matter? Well, for those of us working on issues surrounding interoperability between disparate systems need to make the distinction when evaluating various techniques. In some cases it’s likely we’ll opt to focus on an emerging standard, even if the specification hasn’t solidified, yet. In other cases, we’d have to sit on the sidelines before implementing a promising specification until it is widely adopted.

At the end of the day, the name of the game for us is connecting things together. A great specification without proven utility doesn’t really help reach that goal. An emerging standard method for connecting without an associated formalized definition can easily lead followers astray if the usage shifts. Assuming a higher degree of comfort with formalized approaches, there’s the question of how to encourage wider adoption of a new specification so that it has a chance of becoming a standard.

While I’d like to think we live in a logical world where solutions are selected purely on their merits, this isn’t generally the case. Instead, in this chicken/egg game, it’s a matter of being plugged into the discussions and betting on what can be seen within a reasonable adoption horizon.

For us, this means flexibility. Flexibility, in turn, means being resigned to a lack of assured clarity. We’re still in the early days of defining what it means to connect users with their data (in our case their interests and tastes in media). Fortunately, we’ve built a nifty set of tools that are flexible in supporting both nascent specifications as well as adopted standards without a lot of retooling.

These tools are rapidly coming online, and I look forward to seeing them put to the real world test supporting the user’s desire to remain in control over their interconnected data across various systems.

The brilliant pun above (with credit to Mr. Lennon) is only one of the worthwhile things to be gleaned from this great post on the selfish reasons serial entrepreneurs need to be decent people.

Highlight:

Successful serial entrepreneurs know that each relationship they develop is a potential goldmine. As noted in Your Personal Pitch, in order to be successful, entrepreneurs must enlist the help of numerous Donors – individuals who are in a position to give their adVenture a helping hand. Most employees, investors, customers and suppliers prefer to work with people and organizations which they trust. Thus, as noted in Corporate Creed, dishonesty is a major handicap for an entrepreneur, just as honesty and integrity are significant assets.

Amen. The rest here.

Great article in the New York Times about how the nature of leadership may be evolving. Leaders themselves are stuggling to integrate their professional and personal lives, just as people within companies are more hungry for authenticity and a personal relationship with those they choose to follow.

This ties very tightly to the twitter / blogging sensibilities I’ve discussed here, about trying to be a real person and sharing your true feelings with others. I’m not sure which way the causality runs (did the blogosphere create this desire for a personal connection, or did the desire for more personal connections create the blogosphere?) but I find the topic pretty fascinating as both a leader and a student of human nature.

What do you think?

With much fanfare and dancing bears, we’re announcing a new virtual team at matchmine that’s focused on issues related to being open. Yup, that’s right, we’ve talked a lot about our view that data should be free to roam the digital plains and now we’re letting folks know we’re walking the walk.

We’ve pulled together some of the folks in the ‘mine to tackle some of the complexity covered by the broad stroke of data portability. First and foremost, of course, is our ongoing commitment to being user centric. Inherent in that approach is the need for us to provide the user with transparent control over their media preferences and how they’re to be used. Interestingly, the past year has shown that people dig the vision we’ve been laying down and are actively embracing the “share-and-learn” model upon which we’ve built our platform.

As an active member in the DataPortability Project, I’m often asked about matchmine’s position on the technologies the group is evaluating. And while this post is kinda’ vague on details, I wanted to publicly (get the openness theme here?) let the community know we’re on the ball. Among the initiatives under way are:

• Plumbing the KeyFeeder so your MatchKey media preferences will feed off of your other public lifestream feeds.
• Working out the OpenID details so you won’t need yet another login to manage your MatchKey experience.
• Developing KeyStreams so you can take your media preferences and mash them up (or mesh them up, if you’re Kingsley Idehen) with your other services.

As many in the extended DataPortability / SemWeb / LinkedData communities already know, I’m also cooking up a couple open standards ideas… but they’re much further out than these. If all goes according to plan, you should see tangible output of the matchmine Ministry of Openness by the middle of the summer. Follow my tweets if you’re interested in the play-by-play (mixed in with the standard micro-posting nonsense).

By the way, I’m not sure I like it, but I’ve been dubbed the “Ministry of Openness Czar”. In our indomitable need to turn everything into an incomprehensible acronym, I wonder if this means I need to add MoOC to my LinkedIn profile.

It’s always been part of the matchmine mantra that encoding your personal interests and tastes in a portable MatchKey would benefit everyone involved. It’s obvious that users appreciate easily dancing among their favorite sites, knowing their preferences are following along. Content producers are similarly pleased with their ability to find their specific audience.

Beyond the borders of our community (defined by our partners and users), it’s gratifying to see others knocking on the same door. The most recent example of this was in a chat with fellow DataPortability Project member Phil Wolff, managing editor of Skype Journal:

I interviewed the CEO of a white label social platform provider yesterday. Their business for the last three years is you call them and they give you time-to-market for a private Facebook, 2L, blogosphere, whathaveyou. Lots of intranet, b2b, rarely a consumer focus.

They just finished implementing OpenSocial (such as it is). They think this is a move for flexibility and for interoperability. They don’t have an immediate need, but figure that when it happens, they’ll be ready.

The big payoff for their customers is that when they deploy next generation ads or services on a social network or other web site, that instead of someone just clicking through to one of their sites, the person brings identity and whatever else they like from their social graph.

My take: click based advertising will take a big hit vs. rich identity advertising.

It’s this last point that really struck me. I’d never heard it expressed quite so clearly before. In today’s In-Motion Podcast I host (along with Steve Greenberg), he expanded on this thought in light of discussions at the Ad:Tech Conference in San Francisco.

Two things struck me in the conversation. First, there is a lot of similarity between what he was describing and what Doc Searls et al. are up to with Project VRM (especially as I’d just spoken to Joe Andrieu about it a couple weeks ago).

The second interesting tidbit was Phil’s response to who else is building a “rich identity advertising” solution. To his knowledge, there are a lot of people talking about it (especially among advertisers who want to use something like it when it’s available), but few who are far along on a market-ready solution.

Of course, I couldn’t resist tossing a little plug for matchmine into the mix. After all, we’re alive and kickin’.

In the beginning, starting a business feels like pushing a rock uphill.

The first few months is all about infecting individual people with your vision, and each time you have to start from zero. Nobody knows who you are or what you do, and all you have to get them on board are the track record you start with, a few ideas that make sense to you, and a handful of slides that no one wants to look at.

You build some stuff, hit the road like a standup comic working the kinks out of your act, and slowly add people, one-by-one, to the list of Those Who Believe. The team grows, and your act evolves. Your vision and your pitch come into focus, and if you get lucky before you run out of money, somebody gives you a shot to do what you say you can do.

Desperate to prove them right, you and your posse try to do something you’ve really never done before, and realize how stupid and shallow your thinking was. You listen, learn, and work your ass off to fix problems before the whole thing goes sideways. If the team you’ve built to that point is really good you manage to keep things on track, and you get the first one out the door without pissing off the people who trusted you first.

By then you have something real, something live, so with renewed energy you go back out there to try and sell another one. It’s hard like it always is, but at some point you lift your head up and realize it’s just a little bit easier than it was before. The second one launches, and it gets a little easier. The first round of improvements drop soon after that, then somebody writes something nice about you in a blog someplace. It feels good. You tell your Mom.

One day you realize the rock is the same, but the hill is flat. And even though that day begins and ends pushing a big giant rock from here to there, it is a great day indeed.

By sheer force of will, through heroism and hard work, by being smart enough to see what others could not see or too dumb to recognize a hundred defeats, you will have changed the very curvature of the earth. At least it will feel that way from the narrow perspective of, say, a few smart folks crowded into a little office in Needham, MA.

This is that day for matchmine. I am first overwhelmingly grateful to Fuzz and FilmCrave for giving us a shot when we needed it. I am second hyper-actively excited to add the incredibly smart people at Odeo, Blogdigger, Blogged, MediaMelon and IODA to the list of Those Who Believe. And I am finally chest-burstingly proud to be standing at the top of this hill with the team of talented, committed people who got this rock to where it is now.

We’re going to get this rock rolling now, and in the not too distant future we’re going to feel it start to roll on its own. I’m sure looking forward to that, and I hope you are too.

Today we’re announcing a whole bunch of product changes and the launch of our first two partners, technically on schedule in Q1. What it’s taken to get here has been anything but according to plan, though, in a way I think sheds some real light on what it takes to build a successful startup.

Starting a company is like setting off on a journey, headed true North in the direction of your vision. You map a path to get there, called your strategy. Along the way you encounter obstacles, new lands, people and opportunities, all of which change you as a person. Your understanding of yourself and your goal changes. Sometimes you find your way around these things to get back on your original course, other times your destination itself changes.

One of the hardest thing about running a startup is separating the “signal” - feedback that indicates the need for a change in your path or your destination, your strategy or your vision - from the “noise.” Noise is the friction that any new idea needs to overcome, the inertia of the status quo and the way things work today. Signal and noise are streaming in constantly… from employees, partners, investors, competitors, the press, your family, everywhere. Follow the noise and you’ll be lost. Miss the signal and you’ll march resolutely in the direction of nothing.

The volume of signal/noise amped up for us significantly at DEMO, and we’ve spent the time since then trying to determine what we needed to change and where we just needed to improve the quality of our execution. We’ve made a bunch of 30º course corrections since then, which startups need to be able to do with relative ease. We can improve our internal communication on this stuff, but on balance we’re pretty nimble within that 60º arc.

By late in Q4 it was obvious, though, that the calls to make a couple of 60º turns - disruptive, dis-continuous changes in our product roadmap - were signal, not noise. It hurt, but we did it, and it feels like we’ve grown up a little bit as a result.

Anyway when you look at our new release, one which features:

• Focus on origination within a single partner application,
• “One-Click Key Creation” if that partner already knows what you like,
• The elmination of the need to download anything, ever,

Know that it’s taken a lot of hard work from a lot of smart people to get here so quickly, and that the signal is coming though loud and clear.