Chris Messina and Open Web Workshop

Centre for Social Innovation and Torch Partnership brought Chris Messina to Toronto for a 1 day workshop from which I learned quite a bit. Chris is a heavyweight, having co-founded BarCamp, developed the Flock browser and is now on the board of the OpenID Foundation. It was nice to have access to his brain for the day. While the conversation drifted into the realms of backend technology and architecture, there was enough layman stuff for me to sink my teeth into. Here are some of my thoughts from the day while they’re fresh in my head.

1. Objects+Social=Social Objects. In Chris’ parlance an object on the web would be something like a video on a website. It’s a noun. You upload it, it’s on a server, people can watch it. That object becomes “social” when verbs can be applied to the noun. When the video can become rated, shared, reviewed, commented…that is now a social object. I liked that framework. It’s a quick and dirty way of thinking about your website, user experience and company at large (which I’ll get to in a later point.)
2. The Importance of Owning Your Data and Social Residue. There was lots of kerfuffle when Facebook changed its terms and conditions recently to suggest that they would own your photos, videos, uploads, etc. The terms were changed back and people are back to owning their data. The idea of “social residue” is an interesting one. Getting back to point 1 about social objects, let’s say you want to switch from Facebook to the next big thing. Facebook might trumpet that you are free to do so and you can export your data. So you get your “objects” back but you will lose the “social”. You will lose your “likes” your relationships, comments, ratings and all of those verbs that people have applied to your nouns. Chris describes this data as social residue because it’s left behind if you choose to move your data around, but in reality it’s probably the essential glue that keep people engaged in social sites. So even though you own your objects, the company that is hosting your objects owns the social, unless there was a way to liberate the residue and reclaim ownership of it so it’s in fact truly portable.
3. What is Open Web? Chris didn’t have a fully articulated answer for this, but I thought his answer was excellent: You’ll know it when you see it. He likened an Open Web to a natural ecosystem. If an ecosystem is open for new players to emerge, for old players to wither away and the playing field is level for new entrants to come in with few barriers to entry that is a sign of a good ecosystem. If it is a closed system there are a few players who control who gets in, how much they pay to play and it seems like they spend just as much energy preventing innovation and growth as they do improving their ecosystem. Music industry, anyone?
4. Porter Airlines. Kind of Anti-Social, For Now. The last exercise of the day was to think about a business and how to make it more social. One of the folks at my table was a web developer for Porter Airlines and we thought about the entire travelling experience from start to finish and how it could leverage the social networks of its passengers. We made a couple of assumptions: 1) Porter, in its positioning and branding, has developed an active community and loyal customers who trust them to deliver a great service. 2) Travel, especially air travel, is often a stressful experience. You might be running late, traffic might be bad, flights get delayed, luggage gets lost, boarding card won’t print, security line is long and so on. Given that, here are some things we had in mind for Porter:
   • Seat assignment is an object (see Point 1). Make it social by pulling in a passenger’s Facebook interests during the booking process and if they want to be paired with someone who has similar interests, make it happen.
   • Tie seatback entertainment options to a Netflix account (movies) or Last.fm (music) so each person’s entertainment experience is customized.
   • Pull data from Facebook interests to proactively suggest an entire weekend itinerary with flights, hotels, attractions, concerts and email people with a “Click to Buy” feature.
   • Have people pay for a customized itinerary that they would receive at the gate before boarding that would suggest hotels, restaurants, etc. based on their TripIt/Dopplr data.
   • Luggage tags are objects and your bag could potentially Tweet from wherever it is in the airport.
   • Flight recommendations based on which flights people in your network happen to be on. Maybe you would switch your departure time if you knew that a contact was on the following flight.
   • Help coordinate travel to and from the airport by suggesting travel buddies.
   • To the point on stress during travel, John Maeda writes in his Third Law of Simplicity that waiting for a task to finish is more tolerable if you can witness its progress. (See the progress bar on computers, estimated hold time with customer service, wait time signs while in a line at Disney.) Is there some information that an airline could give you on a mobile device regarding traffic (geo-location), weather, checking in, security, flight delays…that would help reduce the stress of the travel experience?

Those are a few ideas generated in 30 minutes on how an airline could leverage its customers social activity streams to provide a more social experience during travel.

Thoughts on how a favourite business of yours could be more social?