A funny thing happens to me after each Web 2 Summit – I tend to curl up for a week or two and shut down my idea receptors. It takes a ton of output to curate the show, and then running it for three straight days is rather like running an intellectual and social marathon. You’re “on” the whole time, scrambling backstage, pretending to have it together onstage, greeting amazing minds, cheering them on, delivering what I hope will be thought provoking interlocution, and, of course, remembering to thank everyone for giving so generously of their time and treasure.

So when people ask me what I thought of the show, or what the key themes were, I usually have something of a blind spot. I can remember everything up to the start of the event – all the preparation, preproduction interviews, the endless research, etc. But once we kickoff (in this case, with an interview with Sean Parker), it goes kind of black. My next memory is usually the final cocktail party on day three. I know my Dad and my wife are usually there, and I know I have a fine bourbon in my hand. And I’m happy. And I want to sleep.

Which I’ve done a lot of these past two weeks. But this last show was too rich to not review a bit, in particular for themes that should inform our collective decisions as we move our industry forward. In this post and I hope in others this Fall, I hope to outline some of those themes.

The first one that really jumps out at me is one I’ll title “You Are The Platform.” That phrase was used by Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation in her talk at Web 2, and echoed by Jeremie Miller, founder of Singly and the Locker Project. But before we get to those two, I want to start with Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan and Canv.as, where he outlines a problem with how we currently think about who we are online.

Poole argues that identity is prismatic, and that both Facebook and Google force a “fast food” approach to identity – one size fits all. “They shouldn’t set the bar” for what identity is, Poole argues, “we should.” (Each of the videos below are just five or ten minutes).

How do we do this? Baker argues we have to take control of our data, away from a “20th century factory model,” where the platform for our data is highly centralized (IE on Google, or Facebook, Amazon, or Twitter). She asks us to think differently about managing our data:

In short, Baker suggests that we should each be the platform for our own data, determining how it’s used and in what context, depending on the kind of data (health, social, family, interests, etc).

Sounds great, but how do you operationalize such a concept? It sounds like a lot of work. That’s where Jeremie Miller comes in. His company, Singly, and associated Locker Project is an audacious attempt to “put the person at the center of the data.”

Singly and the Locker Project are in the early days, and the chances they won’t work are probably high. But the approach they augur, I believe, must ultimately become reality. This concept of “you are the platform” is really, really important, not just technologically, but socially, politically, and culturally. Watch this space.

As early as 2003, which was the first year I began writing this site, I wrote about the idea of “video as grammar.” By this I meant (and mean) that I foresaw a day when our culture communicated with itself using video much as we currently use text.

In order for this to happen, a number of things had to fall in place. First, we needed tools that allow for quick and easy “video processing” – we need the Microsoft Word for video.

Second, we need access to a large “vocabulary” of video that we could annotate, cite, cut, paste, and repurpose.

Third, we needed what might be called cultural resonance – a reason for folks to want to communicate using video.  We have a remix culture, but it’s still pretty much the domain of obsessives and professionals. For now.

And fourth, we needed a legal framework that didn’t sue everyone into oblivion for simply expressing themselves.

It’s clear we’ve passed the first two hurdles – there are tons of great video editing suites, and YouTube et al pretty much took care of the second issue.

In the past week or so, Andy Baio and Kevin Kelly have pointed out what might just be the glimmerings of how we are going to address the third: The Supercut. From Andy’s post announcing his new site, supercut.org:

For the last few years, I’ve tracked a particular flavor of remix culture that I called “supercuts” — fast-paced video montages that assemble dozens or hundreds of short clips on a common theme.

Many supercuts isolate a word or phrase from a film or TV series — think every “dude” in The Big Lebowski or every profanity from The Sopranos – while others point out tired cliches, like those ridiculous zoom-and-enhance scenes from crime shows.

Since 2008, I’ve added every supercut I could find to a sprawling blog post. With nearly 150 of these videos, and more being added weekly, it’s turned from a blog post into a minor obsession.

Thank God for Andy Baio’s obsessions, is all I can say. The Supercut is an extremely powerful form of speech, and I can imagine it evolving into our cultural vocabulary in any number of ways. One to watch.

I recently joined Facebook. Have you heard of it?

I know, I know, that sounds crazy, given that I’m “an Internet guy.”  If you search for me on Google, say “John Battelle Facebook,” you see that I am already there, and that I have nearly 5000 “friends.” (The interplay between Google search and Facebook is worthy of an entire treatise, I’ll leave that for later). You’ll see I also have a fan page, which has about 5400 “fans” – I think that’s the terminology, though now I think Facebook has turned those fans to “Likes.”

But as many of you know from reading my past posts on the subject, I’ve been essentially “Facebook bankrupt” for years. The service has never been of much value to me, in the main because I made an early and fatal decision to accept any and all folks who asked to be my friend. (For details on that, see this post: I Blew It On Facebook.)

So this week, as both research for my next book and because I’ve been meaning to do it for more than two years, I re-joined Facebook under a slightly different name. I created a new account from scratch, and I promised myself I’d really curate this one so that it’d be meaningful to me personally.

It’s not turning out to be easy.

I’m sure this process will yield more posts, so consider this the first chapter. What I’ve experienced so far, however, only strengthens my belief that Facebook hasn’t even crawled out of the sea when it comes to understanding the nuances of how people communicate with each other. Sure, it’s an extraordinary service and platform, etc. etc. And I know and respect a ton of people who work there. But it’s a testament to how utterly thirsty we are to connect that Facebook, in five short years, has captured the attention of nearly everyone in the online world.

Because, let’s face it. The initial experience with Facebook is pretty bad, from a social point of view.

Here’s why I feel that way.

First is what I’ll call The Guilt of Not Connecting. When you sign up for the first time, Facebook bludgeons you relentlessly to connect to others. It’s beyond irritating – a newcomer to the system (like me) gets constant reminders to find friends before you even get a page going. And once you do, it continues, like an irritating beep in the background – all over your page. “People you may know” stare out at you on the right side of my page, forlorn, as if to ask “How could you NOT want to be my friend?!” Large ads at the top of my page, replete with beckoning profile pics, ask “Are They Your Friends Too?”

And you know what? These are certainly people I know. But being forced to chose if you care enough about them to add them as friends is an intrusion at this early point. I’m just figuring this thing out, Facebook. There’s gotta be more to it than just adding friends, right? Right?!

The second thing I’ve noticed that feels broken is The Forced Rudeness. When I set up my page, I did add a few friends – mostly family members. I added my wife, my kids (the ones who are on the service), and my Dad, who recently joined. Come to think of it, I think I started this whole process because my Dad joined and tried to “friend” my old account, the bankrupt one. I knew if I accepted his request, his voice would be lost in the cacophony that was my old identity.

I also searched for a few folks who came to mind – really close and true pals of mine. All in all, I think I sent out about ten “friend requests” under my new name (which is pretty much the same as my old name, I just added my middle initial). I’m pleased to report that everyone accepted my request pretty much on day one, which I kind of expected (I would have grounded my daughter if she refused, after all). But as soon as the first few folks added me as a friend, the Facebook friend machine went into overdrive, and all of a sudden, I began to get new friend requests. From people I know. But…not that well.

And here’s where Facebook utterly falls down. Because while I do know these people, and I even like them, I may not want to connect with them right now. I have my reasons as to why, and I’d sure like to explain myself to these folks.

But Facebook doesn’t really enable me to do this. In the email notification, I can’t even say no. It’s either “Confirm” or “See All Requests”, which forces me back to Facebook to manage my next steps. Since I don’t want to connect, I pick the second choice. On the site, I am given the choice of either accepting, or pushing a button that says “not now” or somesuch. I have *no idea* what that rejected friend on the other end of this transaction is told once I hit “not now.” And that’s a big problem – is the person notified that I’ve said no? How? If not, I’d like to know that – and ideally, before I see them in real life. These kind of nuanced signals are pretty much table stakes in a “real” relationship. But on Facebook, you get black or white. And that’s just not good enough.

Unlike with a real email request from a real person (not the service), or a phone call, or a face to face conversation,  there’s no simple way to respond to the friend request with a short note like “Hi (name) – Thanks for reaching out to connect with me. I’m restarting a new Facebook account, and for now, I’m limiting it to family and a very small group of really close pals. As I figure out how to navigate the service, I’ll be sure to add you. For now, I want to make sure I don’t overshare!”

Now, my messaging would change depending on the recipient. That one above might be for a business colleague who found me through my close friendship with someone who also happens to be in my industry. But I’d modify my message for the mother of my son’s high school pal. This is a person I see at school functions from time to time but who, to be utterly honest, isn’t someone with whom I’d otherwise spend much time (or share personal experiences with via an online platform). I’d wager she feels the same way about me (but I don’t know! It’d be nice if Facebook allowed her to explain why she’s friending me, but … it doesn’t!) We like each other, we’re cordial when we see each other, but why is Facebook forcing me to be rude to her by telling her “not now” (if, in fact, she’s even told – which I don’t know!).

This is going to make for a pretty awkward soccer party next month, I can tell you that.

Because, really, that’s what it feels like should I decide not to accept her request. It’s rude. So I am going to go out on a limb here, and say that Facebook seems to be counting on this fact to drive connections. And you know what? That’s a house of cards. It insures a lack of truly honest social instrumentation when it comes to building your “social graph,” and down the line, I’m going to predict that will come back to haunt Facebook, if it hasn’t already.

Now, I know many of you are snickering at this post, because most of these issues have been raised and settled, so to speak, over the past few years. Heck, I’ve even made similar points on this site from time to time. But through the fresh eyes of my recent experience, I sense something far deeper is at work. Most folks only take one run at crafting their digital identity on Facebook. I’d reckon most of us don’t want to spend hours going back to rejigger our “graph” once it’s created. That’d be way too much work.

But that graph is based on a extremely rudimentary set of social rules that break down over time, and will fail to reflect our true selves as we extend our identity online. And as Facebook moves to leverage that identity through the Open Graph to nearly every action we take online, I can’t help but think the brittleness of this system will be exposed. It then becomes a race – between Facebook’s ability to reverse engineer more nuanced social interaction back into its platform (and it is, I can see attempts in the interface already), and some new startup (or, OK, maybe Google) that allows us to do the same with far less work.

Of course, Facebook has what amounts to a “moat” around social platforms due to its network effects – as Sean Parker pointed out in our conversation at Web 2 last week. It’s really hard to leave, because you want to bring your “real friends” with you, and asking them to step over to a new service is too much of an imposition. If they leave, they will want to bring their friends, and now you have a real shampoo problem on your hands.

But I predict that we’re racing headlong into a cultural moment when we realize we need more control and nuance in our lives when it comes to what Facebook currently represents for us (if you think this isn’t related to #occupywallstreet, it is, in a really interesting way. That post is coming). Facebook works really well for folks who are just beginning to define who they are in the world, like my kids, or college kids just learning what it means to be out on their own. But those kids ultimately grow up, and become deeply refined social creatures. The question is, can Facebook?

I’m not sure. The DNA and core driving principles of the company have been set. The entire system seems driven by the maxim “only connect.” I wonder how our culture will interpret the first word of that phrase, and whether Facebook, as it’s set up today, has the capacity to redefine it.

There’s so much more to say, but I’m pushing two thousand words. Best to press “publish,” and hear from you.

Tons of folks have asked me for the “official” playlist this year. Each year I choose music to sample while folks are coming on or off stage, or as the audience comes in or out of the main room. This year I was hit with a wave of nostalgia – for reasons that I’ll explain later – and I made a list that spanned nearly all eight years I’ve been programming the event.

I have to say, I’m really, really proud of how the event came off, of all the folks who made it happen (including our speakers, staff, advisory board, and my partners at TechWeb and O’Reilly).

The playlist is 109 songs, and I’m way too lazy (or tired) to figure out how to put them into an actual live app. So here’s a picture of them. If any of you have suggestions for how I might create a playlist, I’m all ears. I’ve been looking for a good app for that for some time, and I keep not finding the right one….

I’m late getting this up on my site, but in case you have not seen it yet, you can watch the livestream right here:

If there was a theme to Day One at Web 2 Summit, it was this: We have to start taking control of our own identity and data. And this is not just because we might be worried about how the government or large platforms might use our data (though both issues certainly came up in talks with Chris Poole, Senator Ron Wyden, Genevieve Bell, and Sean Parker, among others). But also because of the value and benefits that will accrue to us and to society in a culture that values individual control of data. Problem is, it’s not simple or natural to do so….yet.

This reminded me of a post I did a couple of weeks ago, called I Wish “Tapestry” Existed. It elicited a very thoughtful response from Jason Cavnar, co-founder of the important Lockers Project and Singly, the startup which hopes to drive this trend forward. So for a bit of light reading, go back to that link and peruse my musings, then read this, which Jason was kind enough to write up based on the points I made (in bold) and agree to let me post:

JB: Services don’t communicate with each other; and # of services (apps) we use is skyrocketing
Cavnar: they don’t talk to each other, but what all apps do talk to, is you. You should be the protocol around which those things are built and data flows.

Also important: data doesn’t do us justice. This is about LIFE. Our lives. Or as our colleague Lindsay (@lschutte) says — “your story”. Not data. Data is just a manifestation of the actual life we are leading. Our data (story) should be ours to own, remember, re-use, discover with and share.

JB: Cool idea…but Tapestry would be hard to do b/c of policy, not tech
Cavnar: the technology actually isn’t trivial – most startups are spending 3-6+ months just doing data aggregation and cleaning — creating common reference points between data sets; (we have talked to 3 dozen + startups about this including sophisticated folks like the people down at SRI). More important than data reclamation and organization would be: how it gets stored; where it gets stored; who do you trust to hold onto it; ensuring the format “operable” (can developers do things with that data?) no matter where it lives; etc. The Locker Project (a placeholder name) is a community that will make sure the data structure gets figured out — the standards for “me” data. Singly is going to be the storage and access brand that you trust to store and empower you with your digital life.

JB: Tapestry = snapshot of what Dr. J is up to; Dr. J doesn’t use social services b/c value doesn’t exceed time invested
Cavnar: the point about Dr. J using those services more if Tapesty existed is very true and interesting — I wish more people recognized that; Also cool: if Dr. J were assured permanence of the data he is creating, he would likely create more liberally.

JB: I have only 5 social platforms
Cavnar: a ton of the data we create as individuals doesn’t take place on those 5 platforms first. The growth of apps is outpacing the growth of those platforms. Ex: most of my photos on Facebook are now originating from Instagram. My listening on Rdio/Spotify. My location data takes place at the service provider level (ATT, Verizon) first. Health Data…Car data…purchase data, etc.

What I really hear you asking are these questions:

Where do we combine and take with us all of our data?
Where is our data home? (a phrase coined by @mdzimm)
What will be our data address?
Shouldn’t that address be mine?
How is that related to our identity?
Shouldn’t the life I lead wind up with all of it’s memories stored in my home?
Shouldn’t someone provide me with home security?
Who is watching the kids when they are home alone and someone (app) wants to borrow milk (data)?
Does the proverbial USPS decide who I am? Or do they just ensure I can be found and send/receive?

JB: An option = pour all of this into Facebook
Cavnar: the problem is not just that it isn’t under your control, but that a 3rd party with interests other than solely and objectively empowering us then dictates how that data is structured and re-used, if at all. Should we, as a society, around such an important issue (our lives), trust a single company to decide / perform those functions? We haven’t, as a society, decided to all live within the same planned communities, home models and use the same interior decorators.

Tapestry can only be built if Facebook decides to enable them to develop it’s own feel/look/value. And you’d only be able to instrument Tapestry to you to the degree that Facebook decided. IE: not developers and not the end user. No home remodeling allowed. Facebook wants to empower developers and is grappling with how to create a win-win for developers and FB. As an industry, we’re at a point where we need to start thinking about win-win-wins (companies with data, developers and you/me/us). Your Tapestry example is one of thousands.

JB: If Tapestry gains traction, I’m worried Facebook would ban it
Cavnar: A few thoughts:

1) Facebook has actually expressed (including this year at f8) their conviction that people own their data. (Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post). John Doerr at KPCB (a Facebook investor) reiterates this belief (37:20) Facebook allows people to download their data from them because of this belief, and their TOS is a license of your data. And there will be more solutions they can offer people coming into play that will let them live out this belief even more elegantly.

2) Ecosystems win: Given that Dr. J, and a lot of other people don’t use Facebook zealously, would Tapestry suffer without Facebook as an experience? And if Tapestry took off, or Dr. J uses Facebook more because of Tapestry, won’t it behoove Facebook to be a part of that experience rather than absent from it?

3) Empowerment wins: once each of us have a digital home, and Tapestry is built on top of that data, along with a whole world of useful, personalized apps, this worry fades. What Jeremie experienced with Jabber is not dissimilar. Utility and empowering people to do more, connect more, etc will win the day and I don’t see Facebook ignoring the AOL history lesson, especially after they go public. Their leadership is sharp.

4) Inalienable rights win: I refuse to believe we are at a point in history where it is a forgone conclusion that people aren’t fundamentally entitled to the data they create. At the foundation of our country’s heritage is the Lockean notion of “Lives, Liberties and Property which Men have in their Persons as well as Goods”. In a worse case scenario, this issue goes to Washington. The folks there are deeply aware of people’s rights in this space. Look no further than Aneesh Chopra and Danny Weitzner and you find people who truly “get it”. Not just on a policy level but an innovation/economic opportunity/systemic problem-solution level.

5) We’re in this together: the leaders of our industry are decent people. We innovate because we care about people’s stories. And making the world better through technology. We are all part of a narrative far greater than those spelled out in Terms of Service. Not only has Facebook said people own their data, but of course Google is starting to make that easier (Takeout) and Dick Costolo tonight reaffirmed Twitter’s core belief that people should have a copy of their Tweets and it’s simply a matter of time to get the history off disk.

6) Innovation wins: Nobody in the business of innovation and human advancement/potential would argue that innovation takes place at the edge of the network. Closest to people. From mainframes to PCs. From landlines to smartphones. The closer to people that you put information, processes (apps), and power (tech), the more creative and economically productive we get. It’s that simple. We need our data. Closest to us. Apps, running on that data. Building Tapestry shouldn’t be hard. Tapestry existing makes the world a better place. Again, Terms of Service cannot argue with that narrative.

What’s Next:
Let’s suspend belief for a minute that we all got a digital home. What we then need is:

- a standard way to organize our data (this is why Singly is open source – so structure isn’t a point of control)

- a place to store all of our data (a home) that we trust and who is aligned to protect us, not use our data for other means. This doesnt have to be a single company, by any means.

- a medium you trust through which you can transmit the data

- a platform that can “address” your data home and mine all the same no matter where we choose to host it, so that Tapestry can have both of us as users and neither of us have to be locked into a single storage choice. Don’t trust Apple anymore? Cool, go to Singly. Don’t trust Singly? Go host your Data on your home server. Etc.

- a rich developer ecosystem adding value time and time again both to the underlying core software, as well as at the application layer.

(image) Early this year I wrote File Under: Metaservices, The Rise Of, in which I described a problem that has burdened the web forever, but to my mind is getting worse and worse. The crux:

“…heavy users of the web depend on scores – sometimes hundreds – of services, all of which work wonderfully for their particular purpose (eBay for auctions, Google for search, OpenTable for restaurant reservations, etc). But these services simply don’t communicate with each other, nor collaborate in a fashion that creates a robust or evolving ecosystem.”

I noted that the rise of AppWorld only exacerbates the problem (apps rarely talk to each other or share data).

This must change. Not due to my philosophical problems with a closed web (though I do have that problem) but because yesterday, while driving back from an afternoon in the Valley, I had an idea for a new service, which for now I’ll call Tapestry, for lack of a better name. And then I got depressed: I figured making such a service would be really, really hard to do. And it shouldn’t be. And I hate getting depressed so quickly after having a fun idea.

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Thanks to Brian Solis for taking the time to sit down with me and talk both specifically about my upcoming book, as well as many general topics.

Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley will give his first 1-1 interview on the Web 2 stage on the conference’s second day, following a morning of High Order Bits and a conversation on privacy policy with leaders from government in both the US and Canada. After Crowley will be a conversation with noted investor Ben Horowitz, then a discussion with leaders from both Visa and American Express.

But let’s focus on Crowley for this post. He and his co-founders have a tiger by the tail in Foursquare, the location-based leader that so far has resisted either demolition or acquisition by larger players like Google and Facebook. The still-young company (two+ years old) recently celebrated its billionth check-in, not to mention a $600 million private valuation. That kind of pressure is continuous and very real, I’ll be asking Crowley about living up to his investor’s expectations.

I’ll also be asking about business model, of course. Foursquare has done a ton of deals with many different kinds of brands, including publishers, but so far does not have a model that scales – though it’s clearly building out a platform for merchants. This puts it in the Groupon business, so to speak, at least in terms of competing for retailers’ time and treasure. So I will clearly be asking about that. Too bad Groupon had to cut out of the agenda (IPO issues), or I could have asked their CEO about Foursquare.

While I could go on, this is where I aks for your input. What do you want to hear from Crowley, about his company?   

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (including Paul Otellini, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others.) The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

Previously: Mark Pincus, John Donahoe, Marc Benioff, Dick Costolo, Michael Dell. Next up: Mary Meeker.

Not unlike Steve Jobs back in the 1990s, Michael Dell returned to the helm of his company at a crucial moment, when his namesake was seemingly rudderless. Back in 2007, Dell was losing marketshare to HP, Apple had not yet proven the monster it has since become in mobile, and tablets were something used on factory floors.

Since then, Dell has redoubled its efforts in tablets and mobile, reworked its product line to compete with Apple’s resurgent MacBooks, but seen his stock price only slightly recover since the 2008 recession. Why? Dell faces competition from China, for one (Lenovo has claimed it will overtake Dell in market share this year), and from tablets, for the other (Amazon’s new Fire might hurt Dell’s ultralightweight offerings, and its Streak Android tablet).

That said, Dell has to be happy about the on again, off again approach taken to the PC business by its primary competitor, HP.

In short, we’ll have much to discuss – Amazon, Apple, Android and Google, HP – and the future of device computing in general. Not to mention what it’s like to come back and run a company you had once thought you had handed over to a trusted lieutenant.

So I’d love your input. What do you want to hear from Dell, about his company?   

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (including Paul Otellini, Dennis Crowley, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others.) The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

Previously: Mark Pincus, John Donahoe, Marc Benioff, Dick Costolo. Next up: Dennis Crowley.