All about timing – response to Jonny’s replies for my questions and proposal

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Larry Lan

All about timing.

I think the idea of being part of decentralisation is a little bit early and optimistic for our system. I agree that monopoly (such as Facebook) will be replaced someday by a democratic system but we’re not sure when will that happen. And I do not think it will be in a near future.

First of all, social networking monopolies are in their golden season. With hundreds of millions of live users and hundreds of thousands daily registered users, monopolies are expanding rapidly, the market says YES. I agree that the centralisation (actually ownership) of user’s data actually preventing people from collaborating and contribution. But still people are contribution through suggestions and feedbacks channels FB provides. With the large amount of users, monopolies are able to collect the latest market requirements and improve themselves. Another thing is that most users on Facebook don’t have the concept of ownership of their data. As long as they are having fun and can get what they want when they want them, they don’t care who is managing their data. For those who want to collaborate, maybe open source is a good idea. Monopolies satisfy most users and are improving themselves all the time. They have mature business model and suitable for current situation, and they are not willingly to change therefore when decentralisation will become the main trend is unpredictable. This is a potential risk for us to aim that high.

Secondly, I think decentralisation is more about a concept, a habit but not a technology. Technically, a decentralisation system can be done, but will it be successful in today’s climate? Will it survive in the battlefield of social networking market? We cannot say that for sure because even if we have one system like this, will end users actually benefit more from a decentralised system than Facebook? From a user’s perspective, I can hardly see innovations from the paper “decentralisation – the next generation of social network site”, what it says are protocols that acts similarly like Facebook (of course, the idea was not originated from Facebook as well). Network effect sticks people closely with popular social networking sites. And people are having fun. People may ask, why change? This situation also reminds me a case that Microsoft’s Windows OS was criticized for its monopoly in personal computer Operating System market several years ago. Windows took up too much of the market share that resulted in other companies’ bankrupt. What Microsoft says is we’re collecting latest users’ requirements that make us the best Operating System in the world. I think this is why Windows 7’s advertisement slogan is: Windows 7 was my idea and that’s also the reason why Windows has over 2 decades history. So in my opinion so far, popular social networking users are enjoying, it’s hard to change for now.

And again, I’m not denying the concept of decentralisation. I just think it is a little bit far from us. At the end of the day, we’re not guiding the trend but following it. My suggestion is to keep a low profile and does something concrete. Since from technical point of view, the two things are similar. We keep this dream and do things step by step. Make early preparations and when things come we’ll be the first to embrace it.

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Week 7

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Sumair

This week we discussed the status of activities that has been done and it was decided that in the next meeting, the easter work should be decided . It was also decided that the scope of the project must be defined, rather than inducing new ideas and areas.  Sumair and Bharat asked the mentor about the individual summary that is a deliverable. Deep discussed about the future work of this project. Jonathan and Larry were absent.

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Proposal: Two part prototype

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Jonny

I propose that rather than the simple idea with started with (tagging any image anywhere as long as you use the etags javascript library/plugin) we instead separate this into two parts. The decentralised data store (called… etags) which could act as the tag storage solution for any number of services (social networks, blogs, etc.), and the cross-domain image tagging javascript (called… taggr? ;)… We can discuss the name…) which uses etags as it’s data store.

This would be the first commercial offering on top of the open-source etags and would help to build up the database of tags and hopefully tempt other services to use etags. These other services might include existing or new social networks, or even competitors to our cross-domain service. As long as they all use etags then it is easy for users to switch services or to communicate tags with users of different services.

There would be no requirement that people who use etags have to allow people to tag cross service. Although this would be nice I can’t see existing social networks liking that idea. At least if they store the data in etags then people on other services will be able to see the tags on their own services.

By separating it into two parts, it gives the project both an ethical (freedom of tagging data, open source, etc.) and a commercial (ad-supported service?) domain. This would not require any extra research beyond what we’re doing now as this is still the same idea it’s just a little more modular.

So… opinions?

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OAuth

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Jonny

With so many servers running independently of each other on the etags network, there needs to be a way to give a server permission to access parts of a user’s social networking profile, without handing over the entirety of a user’s account. There also needs to be a way for the servers to allow services (such as social networks) to use the tag data provided by users, or to add a tag of a user, again without needing to have full control. The solution to this problem is OAuth.

OAuth is an open protocol which allows a user to give restricted access to a resource to a consumer. It is already supported by all of the major social networks (including Facebook which uses OAuth2 in Facebook Connect) and it seems unlikely that future social networks will be created without using OAuth

In the case of etags, each server will act as a consumer to the existing social networks, this is to access the user’s photographs and tags which may be stored there already, to publish new tags to the user’s feed (or “wall”) and simply to identify users across different social networks. The servers will also act as a provider to any clients which wish to access the tags stored in etags.

Due to the very wide support of OAuth there are a large number of libraries available to use as both a consumer and provider. For the prototype (and possibly reference implementation) of etags, the python-oauth2 library will be used.

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A proposal for a decentralised image tagging service

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Jonny

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How can we make better use of tags?

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Larry Lan

1. How can we make better use of tags?

With eTag vision pretty defined, another question comes up, how can we make better use of these tags consumers collaborate.

Tagging systems use descriptive keywords to mark up webpages for future navigation, filter and search. eTag system allows user to collaboratively contribute to mark up images. Collaboratively tagging offers an interesting approach for classifying resources on the web comparing with conventional web ontology. It allows almost everyone – especially consumers – to freely attach keywords or tags on resource. This is most useful in the scenario that there’re too much information to classify. In eTag context, we maintain the tags of images which results in ranking system and recommendation system.

Considering a typical user of eTag system, as the number of tags he or she uses increase, we might find pattern regarding to how he marks up image by calculating the intersection of his tags with the rest of users’ tags (for filtering) and union (for recommendation). What’s more,as tagging is neither exclusive nor hierarchical and therefore can be used combined with conventional ontology to work out a very interesting and accurate image recommendation system.

People may feel interesting of some of the favourite tags. As we can easily find out which tags are popular and latest. Then we can recommend users to have a look.

2. Difficulty for eTag

There’re three problems in making our tags useful: polysemy, synonymy, and basic level variations.

A polysemous word is one that has many (“poly”) related senses(“semy”). For example, a “window” may refer to a hole in thewall, or to the pane of glass that resides within it . In practice, polysemy dilutes query results by returning related but potentially inapplicable items. As users expects accurate results, this may result in unwanted filter or search results.

Synonymy, or multiple words having the same or closely related meanings, presents a greater problem for tagging systems because inconsistency among the terms used in tagging can make it very difficult for one to be sure that all the relevant items have been found. For example, if television is searched, TV could be neglected. Another case is the plural form of words and spelling differences. For example, if dog is searched, dogs could be neglected or if colour is searched, color could be neglected.

The basic level variation closely relates to user’s expertise. For example, for a C++ programmer, when he searches C++, he might expect some very specialised C++ articles returned. But for ones don’t know about programming, he might want to just read some basic background knowledge of C++. This causes inflict.

3. What to do next?

I’ll dig more into currently working tagging system such as delicious and some app in popular social networking sites. This helps us to justify how mature tagging systems perform in reality.

I’m sorry I am in hospital all the time this week, I’ll help Jonny with the database design diagram and wireframe.

4. An interesting idea

Well, during literature search, I came across a paper, in this paper the author mentions a cheeky idea, but I think it’s very interesting. In a website, you can describe what kind of girl you like and the system will search popular social networking sites for you and find your dream girl, you can register and talk to her then. Good luck:). Lol.

5. Question:

Decentralization: The Future of Online Social Networking – I dont quite get the idea. What’s the difference between facebook and decentralization of the social networking sites.

Answer by Jonny: Current social networks store all of your data in closed off worlds, separate from the rest of the internet. You need to be a member of those social networks to see this data, and this means innovation is stifled because the only people really able to innovate are Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/etc.

An early (failed) example of this strategy was AOL. At the time, for many users the internet was AOL and they didn’t know about the many interesting websites outside of those walls. A lot of non-technical users now rely on facebook for everything – subscribing to news feeds through facebook pages instead of using RSS, etc.

AOL failed because the walled garden strategy can’t really innovate as quickly as an open system. Eventually, Something will come along to replace Facebook (as the web replaced AOL), and a distributed image tagging service is going to be part of that.

Decentralisation means that no single body controls everything – in my proposed model of etags it would mean anyone could start up a competing image service without effecting anyone else and people could move to that one, still get updates from their friends, etc. without much hassle.

I thought the more users tag one content, the more helpful for the accuracy of the recommendation system, but research done on delicious, the more tags, the worse accurate. It’s strange.

6. articles read this week.

The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

Long Live the Web.

Understanding navigability of social tagging systems

Linked Data – the story so far

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Proposed Architecture

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Jonny

(Note that this is proposed before we have completed the research on linked data – so this is subject to change)

This first thing to notice is that there are many eTags servers in existence – the “official” one existing simply for people who don’t wish to host their own or can’t find another public one. Each eTags server hosts potentially many sites – in the case of Facebook just hosting their own photos, but Google hosting the Picassa photos, photos in GMail, and also photos on Blogger blogs.

(Also note that I don’t realistically expect Facebook to ever be on board with opening up of tagging data. Google is perhaps more realistic as this would cause problems for Facebook’s growing monopoly on image data).

When a user visits a website using eTags they connect only to the server specified by that site. This may result in one image (identified by the unique URI) being indexed on two websites with different tagged data. This will need to be synchronised, the process of which I will detail in a future post.

The basic mechanism for notification of tagged images (“Jonathan was tagged in a photo on Jamie’s Blog”) is that the service wanting to show the notifications would register with an eTags server, then when that server is informed of a new tag it would call back using that services api. As it is unlikely the big social networks would be on board early on there would be special handlers for these networks to allow them to work without changes to their code. This is designed in this way so as to allow for future networks to emerge and avoid cementing the monopoly a few social networks already have.

When viewing photographs the site viewing connects to a single eTags server, which then contacts its trusted partners to see if they have any tags of the specified user, they contact their partners… etc. This ensures that there is no central server which holds all of the data and if one goes down it is possible to route around it and still get the majority of the information.

Privacy
With so many services involved (multiple eTags servers, multiple social networks, and multiple people) privacy is very important and establishing trust is vital. There needs to exist a secure method of users selecting which other users, and which services can view their photos, and there also needs to be an assurance that rogue servers will not intercept the data and avoid the security settings.

This needs to be considered in depth and ideas will be published in a future post.

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Week 6

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Jonny

This week we were joined by Web Scientist Phil Waddell as a “critical friend” (basically someone to provide an unbiased opinion of the project… give ideas which we might not have thought of… etc…).

His main contribution was questioning the motives of the project (a technical challenge or a crusade for a more open web?). This focused our minds on what the goals are and how we are different from what exists.

The main problem this raised is “If we are trying to stop everyone having to store their data with facebook – why should everyone have to store their data with us?” and this led us to think more seriously about open data and how it can be achieved.

Our mission goals have now been more firmly targeted on removing the monopolisation of image data from the large social networks. Rather than images being trapped in Facebook or Orkut or Flickr, we believe people should be able to host their photos anywhere and still be able to tag them in the same way. Moreover the choice of where the image is hosted shouldn’t restrict who can see or interact with the tagged photos. Phil mentioned this article by Tim Burners-Lee which expresses this sentiment well.

I have a few technical solutions to this, the designs of which I will post shortly, but the important part from this week is that our research is now going to be more firmly focused on distributing the data across independent servers, and linking it together when needed. With this in mind it was decided that for the next week; Deep, Sumair, Bharat, and Larry are to concentrate on researching Linked Data and decentralisation of social networks (eg: http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/decentralization.pdf) while Jonny will modify the designs and update the prototype to take some of these new ideas into account.

This week Bharat presented a video on a location tagging system which brings in relevant data about the world around you through augmented reality, and also some information about the ways in which social networking ideas such as tagging are now entering the enterprise domain. Deep presented the Microsoft Tag format which allows tagging of points of interest in the real world, and also TaggingRobot which aggregates tagged data from social networks and presents them in a more useful way. Jonny presented his mockups and use case diagrams of the system as it stands (although with the decisions made today they will probably change). Larry was absent.

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Use Case

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Jonny

Show above is the first use case diagram for etags which shows that a visitor needs to be able to View, Add, and Remove tags, and also view images of a visitor, while a site owner needs to be able to remove any tag and configure the software.

It also shows that all functionality communicates with the eTag database (which will store tags, etc.) and also that when adding a tag it communicates with facebook to make a post on the user’s wall “You have been tagged….”

I will post more UML diagrams soon. Stay tuned….

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Mockups

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Jonny

This is an attempt to roughly show the typical flow of the application

This shows a user visiting a blog. This blog has no association with tag4fun except that they have chosen to use the etag software on their site to allow visitors to tag (or perhaps the visitor has installed the browser plugin).

The visitor clicks the “Start tagging” button on a photo which shows the tagging interface similar to facebook, allowing the visitor to tag their facebook friends

This is then posted on that user’s facebook wall indicating that they have been tagged, in a similar way to how facebook alerts the user that they have been tagged.

When a user next hovers over the photo they will see that John Smith has been tagged, with a tag box around his head and links to his facebook profile and photo albums at the bottom. Clicking the “photos” link will take the visitor to a page created by us which shows all of the photos of John from around the web

If using the browser plugin, when viewing a user’s photos page on facebook the “on the web” album will be automatically added if that user has been tagged through etag.

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