Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague.

By choosing images over links, and by restricting markup, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are hostile to HTML. This is leading to the plague of infographics crowding out text, and of video used to convey minimal information.

The rise of so-called infographics has been out of control this year, though the term was unknown a couple of years ago. I attribute this to the favourable presentation that image links get within Facebook, followed by Twitter and Google plus, and of course though other referral sites like Reddit. By showing a preview of the image, the item is given extra weight over a textual link; indeed even for a url link, Facebook and G+ will show an image preview by default.

Consequently, the dominant form of expression has become the image. This was already happening with LOLcats and other meme generators like Rage Comics, where a trite observation can be dressed up with an image or series of images.

Before this, in the blogging age, there was a weight given to prose pieces, and Facebook and Google preserve some of this, but the expressiveness of HTML through linking, quoting, using images inline, changing font weight and so on, is filtered out by the crude editing tools they make available.

Feeds and feed readers started out this way too, but rapidly gained the ability to include HTML markup. Twitter went back to the beginning, and added the extra constrain of 140 characters because of it's initial SMS focus. Now it is painfully reinventing markup, though the gigantic envelope and wrapper of metadata that accompanies every tweet. This now has an edit list for entities pointing into it, and instructions for how to parse this to regain the author's intent is part of the overhead of working with their API.

Image links, however — at least those from recognised partners — are given privileged treatment. Facebook and Google have emulated this too, leading to the 'trite quote as image' trope. The spillover of this to news organisations became complete this year, with blogs and newspapers falling over themselves to link to often-tendentious information presented in all-caps and crude histogram form.

So here's my plea for 2012: Twitter, Facebook, Google+: please provide equal space for HTML. And for authors and designers everywhere, stop making giant bitmaps when well-written text with charts that are worth the bytes spent on them could convey your message better.

Update: My son made a Rage Comic version of this post (with an explanation) why.

Our brains make the social graph real

Brilliant web essayist Maciej Ceg?owski of Two Steaks and Pinboard fame has focused his considerable insight on the area of web standards I've been involved with for the past few years. You should go and read his The Social Graph is Neither now.

Maciej is spot on in his criticisms:

This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails.

Personally, I think finding an adequate data model for the totality of interpersonal connections is an AI-hard problem. But even if you disagree, it's clear that a plain old graph is not going to cut it.

Clearly you can't model human relationships exactly in software. Keeping track of a few hundred of them in all their nuanced subtlety is why our brains are so huge compared to other animals. As Douglas Adams put it:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

It is an act of hubris to attempt to represent such vital things as human relationships in a database, and those who have done so often do resemble Maciej's Mormon bartender - Orkut B?y?kk?kten, Mark Zuckerberg and Jonathan Abrams do seem to have made what danah boyd has called Autistic Social Software.

The thing is, people seem to find these attempts helpful. As Maciej points out, we're good at forming subcultures and relationships even around the most primitive of tools. He pokes fun at opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY, but when we were compiling the OpenSocial Person fields, we found a high degree of convergence between the 20 or so social network sites we reviewed. Despite their crudity, the billions of people using these sites do find something of interest in them.

People choose to model different relationships on different sites and applications, but being able to avoid re-entering them anew each time by importing some or all from another source makes this easier. The Social Graph API may return results that are a little frayed or out of date, but humans can cope with that and smart social sites will let them edit the lists and selectively connect the new account to the web. Having a common data representation doesn't mean that all data is revealed to all who ask; we have OAuth to reveal different subsets to different apps, if need be.

The real value comes from combining these imperfect, scrappy computerized representations of relationships with the rich, nuanced understandings we have stored away in our cerebella. With the face of your friend, acquaintance or crush next to what they are saying, your brain is instantly engaged and can decide whether they are joking, flirting or just being a grumpy poet again, and choose whether to signal that you have seen it or not.

As danah says:

While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don’t want to admit to our own weaknesses. In other words, we want plausible deniability. We want to be able to blame our spam filters when we failed to respond to an email that someone sent that we didn’t feel like answering. We want to blame cell phone reception when we’ve had enough of a conversation and “accidentally” hang up. The more reliable technology gets, the more we have to find new ways for blaming the technology so that we don’t have to do the socially rude thing.

So here's to approximate, incomplete social web standards.

'with Amazon' replacing 'with Google' on Android?

Amazon is set to launch an Android Tablet on Wednesday. What if they license their code too? Android as experienced on phones is actually two separate software bundles - the Open Source core of Android, and the proprietary 'with Google' applications, including the App Market, Maps, Gmail, Talk, Contacts, Listen and other apps bound to Google services, and requiring a business development deal to ship with a device. Eric Schmidt explicitly discussed this strategy at Dreamforce.

Now there are already more Android devices than I can count that don't follow the 'with Google' playbook, including the Barnes & Noble Nook that probably inspired this response from Amazon, but there are hints of a broader strategy here. What if Amazon offered an alternative to Google's top half of Android? I think Amazon does not really want to be in the hardware design business, but wants to be sure that they can't be locked out of it or forced to pay extra by Apple, Google or any other potential competitor. As well as releasing their own 7" tablet, they could offer an Open Source or lightly licensed version of their stack to other hardware developers.

Why would Amazon do this? Because they are primarily in the shopping and media business. Apple has stopped them selling eBooks and media inside their apps on iPad/iPhone; Google has banned their App Store from the Google Android Market. Amazon could even offer a referral fee for anything bought via their store as an incentive for device manufacturers to ship it.

An even bolder step wold be to actually fork Android. Google has a delayed-open model for Android source, where a new version is released in public after a closed development process, without a clear way to send in patches to Google. Amazon could put their current version up on Github, accept patches, and treat Google's new drops as another source of possible patches.

Understanding each company's core business is what makes this likely. Apple is in the devices business, with the media business as a small side earner designed to make their devices more attractive. Google is in the Advertising business, with their Android business designed to make searching everywhere, continuously more likely. Amazon is in the shopping business, migrating from physical goods to media, with Kindle a way to drive this. A tablet that they can sell audio and video to as well as eBooks makes more sense to them if it as widely distributed as Kindle playback apps are now.

Is Netflix picking the right disruption?

The decision to split Netflix into two companies, with the poorly-named Qwikster getting the DVD by post business and Netflix keeping the streaming business has caused a lot of fuss. Bill Gurley suggests that this is due to the very different licensing regimes the two businesses work under, and Clayton Christensen has praised this an a rare example of a company pre-emptively disrupting itself.

However, Reed Hastings gave rather non-plussed responses to those who complained about not having the two queues (DVD and streaming) integrated. As danah said,

It may seem logical to split the world based on business models from the inside of a business, but if you want your business to succeed, you should be focusing on understanding your users' mental models. And those aren't organized along business lines. They're organized around movies that they like, obtained by the means that is appropriate to the particular context of that user. People understand Netflix through its database of movies and the ratings that they've spent time providing, not its distinct queues.

Hastings clearly isn't thinking about this from our point of view - we want to watch something, and are much less focused on the particular medium. Instead of separating the two modes, Netflix should be uniting them further - help us book cinema tickets too, or buy Blu-ray discs. Encourage us to bring in information on favourite films and TV shows from Facebook, Amazon, GetGlue. They still could do this in an exemplary way by having Netflix and Qwikster share users' information through public APIs that others could use too. Activity Streams was made for this.

Being on the users' side in this way is another disruption, and indeed several startups at TechCrunch Disrupt had this mindset - what Doc Searls's VRM project calls '4th party tools' - ones that mediate between the customer and the vendor on the customers behalf. Cake Health mediate between you and insurers, TalkTo between you and local shops, FlickMunk between you and cinemas, and u4them as a way to donate to others medical bills.

The deeper currents of disruption of the film and TV industry are showing up in music. At SF Music Tech last week, turntable.fm was on everyone's lips, as the site that has got us all sitting round playing music for each other again, like the older label execs fondly remember from the 1970s. What it has done is apply the semi-overlapping publics and sharing models of twitter to listening to music together.

The other critique of Netflix that I saw was Megan McCardle saying that they were freeloading on the studios by only paying the marginal cost. Someone has to fund the creation, she pleads with us. Again, the answer was assumed at SF Music Tech, in the form of Kickstarter, which explicitly encourages people to fund production, and not just at marginal cost either. A key part of a successful Kickstarter project is widely spaced payment options, the special deals that are really about showing support with largesse. That these are power-law distributed seems odd at first sight - why would people pay more? But in fact it makes perfect sense. Income and wealth are power-law distributed in the US too, so people can pick the level of patronage that fits their income.

Independent artists like Pomplamoose and Zo? Keating are not served by the commodity pricing of Spotify - many are removing their songs from the catalog; they'd rather host them for download themselves. Zo? reports that her Bandcamp site, which lets you pay as much as you like for an album, has received payments of $8 to $500. Because they want to support her.

Cory Doctorow once said that "If big-budget movies might turn into opera, then long-form narrative books might turn into poetry." Opera has long understood the power-law distribution of wealth, and seeks donations in the same kind of structure.

In some ways, this power-law distribution of price is visible throughout commerce in the US. You can pay anything from $1 to $5000 for a burger, with price points inbetween, similarly for housing, transport, drinks, clothing, shoes, you name it.

The old economic choice between a commodity business that's all about margins, or a fashion business that is about competing for the most popular spot is finding a new accommodation. The discovery mechanisms like Turntable, Spotify, Pandora, and yes even Netflix, need to connect to these artist empowering patronage sites, as well as the commodity playback from the industrial aggregators. They need to lead people to Kickstarter and Bandcamp too. They need to be convenient, comprehensive and supportive of those creating art.

Update:Zo? Keating on Spotify, Apple and Independents (and lettuce)

Google Plus must stop this Identity Theatre

Bruce Schneier in Beyond Fear coined a phrase:

one of the goals of a security countermeasure is to provide people with a feeling of security in addition to the reality. But some countermeasures provide the feeling of security instead of the reality. These are nothing more than security theater. They're palliative at best.

The Common Names deb?cle at Google Plus is a variant of this, where the supposed protections are manifestly not working. Google's stated policy on this is that you should use your 'common name' - normatively defined to have exactly two words in it, in a na?ve English speaking way, that fails in a huge number of common English cases, let alone other languages.

Vic Gundotra has said

he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter.

so it is explicitly designed to exclude 'people not like us' from the space.

Early users can set the tone for a network, but one that has aspirations to include most people will need to support multiple different communities within it. If you want a positive tone, you have to work at it, and empower the tummlers to maintain it. Teresa Nielsen-Hayden put it well:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

More from Teresa and from John Scalzi.

The initial flavour of Google Plus, because it was seeded by Googlers and other geeky folk they invited, was like pre-Eternal September Usenet - it had a cultural coherence because we were all geeks. As it grew to 25 million users, this could not hold.

Blogs deal with this by making it clear who the site owners are, and empowering them to manage commenters. Twitter does it by not showing you comments unless you chose to see the commenter, or if they address you directly. Google Plus is an uneasy hybrid of the two.

You can delete and block commenters on your postings, like a blog, and if you reshare someone's post, it starts a new comment thread, like a blog. However, anyone can @ or + your name and drag you into another comment thread via notification, and then you get notified of other follow-ups too, making griefing and harassment all too easy.

Enforcing 'common names' does nothing to help this; it just means your trolls and griefers will be using plausibly American-looking names that may or may not be their own, while those with unusual names, will either be excluded outright or easily preyed on by the griefers reporting them, which is what I suspect happened to Violet Blue tonight.

Once you are suspended, the verification process is crude and manual, and also easily gamed. Kellan warned about this problem:

If you’ve never run a social software site … let me tell you: these kinds of false positives are expensive.

They’re really expensive. They burn your most precious resources when running a startup: good will, and time. Your support staff has to address the issues (while people are yelling at them), your engineers are in the database mucking about with columns, until they finally break down about build an unbanning tool which inevitably doesn’t scale to really massive attacks, or new interesting attack vectors, which means you’re either back monkeying with the live databases or you’ve now got a team of engineers dedicated just to building tools to remediate false positives. And now you’re burning engineer cycles, engineering motivation (cleaning up mistakes sucks), staff satisfaction AND community good will. That’s the definition of expensive.

And this is all a TON of work.

And while this is all going down you’ve got another part of your company dedicated to making creating new accounts AS EASY AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. Which means when you do find and nuke a real spammer, they’re back in minutes. So now you’re waging asymmetric warfare AGAINST YOURSELF.

This is the hole Google is now in. A surprisingly large number of people I know, who've been discussing civilly online for years, have fallen foul of Vic's Procrustean name rules. When they point this out, they're harrassed by 'Real named' dickheads telling them to shut up and change their name, both in public and by being +-summoned by the trolls, and they have to find Google plus's well-hidden blocking tools rather quickly. Or give up and go elsewhere.

Now, Google has announced that they are verifying some people's names, to prevent impersonation. Trouble is, they haven't said how . Twitter verifies celebrities via an opaque process. Amazon does it by checking your name matches a Credit Card. Google Search uses rel="me" and rel="author" microformats. What Plus does is unknown. One of my profiles is verified, possibly because I went through the verification process on Google Knol before.

This is also Identity theatre - Google saying 'trust us', rather than revealing the rel="me" link from the person's page that we already know.

Vic Gundotra needs to stop digging this hole. Scrap the normative 'common names' policy, add a coherent name verification and linked-site verification so we can tell the people we already know, and make moderation tools visible and available so we can curate the conversations ourselves.

With this, and an apology to those already ensnared by the existing process, he could maybe prevent Plus from being spoken of only alongside Wave and Knol.

More on this:

• my.nameis.me has testimonials on the nuances of names
  
• jwz is shocked by othering of the anonymous
  
• The EFF's case for pseudonyms
  
• Journalists tempted by slumming

David Cameron should heed Douglas Adams and ORG

Widely reported today are David Cameron's comments to parliament on riots and social media:

Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.

Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.

[And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.]

So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.

(the bit in square brackets was in his press statement, but not read in the Commons)

This particular line of reasoning was magnificently rebutted by Douglas Adams in 1999:

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

I was encouraged recently when the UK Govt abandoned web blocking plans in the Digital Economy Act. Understanding that the internet is there for common carriage (a mere conduit, as the EU puts it) is important. Even on its own terms this threat makes little sense: if people are plotting riots on social media, that is surely exactly the evidence you need to convict them under the UK's statutory Conspiracy law. The telephone, the M4 and cups of tea are much harder to use as sources of evidence.

The Open Rights Group, has a typically measured and thoughtful response to this.

Cameron should be careful, or he'll look to posterity like William Cobbett ranting about the pernicious evils of tea.

Should 'Money' be an adjective, not a noun?

I've been following Ben Laurie's thoughts on Bitcoin and now his new paper on An Efficient and Practical Distributed Currency.

He envisages a group of 'mintettes' that can agree on the distribution of coins, transfer them between individuals, and mint new ones, deciding between themselves how to distribute these. I like the idea of the different mintettes having different Public Good type ideas of where the newly created coins get assigned. The key here is to grow the coin supply at a rate that is lower than the growth of value held, so holders of your coinage get some appreciation, and distribute the new money to worthy causes, or to clients of that mintette.

In effect you're doing an end run around Gresham's law, in the same way that the Brazilian Real did - and not how the US Govt is doing with dollar coins. This is the bit that the libertarian summer camp got backwards - although they traded with gold, they set prices in US dollars.

We do have a precedent for this, and it is an encouraging one. In effect, each company stock is a private currency. The success of Silicon Valley has been helped by the ability of companies here to mint this money-like stuff, and distribute it to stakeholders and investors alike. The difference is that they create new tranches of 'coins' at board meetings, though stock option vesting is a bit like the smooth currency growth that Bitcoin and Ben envisage. Again the goal is growing the money supply at a rate below demand, so that those holding it are rewarded.

In effect we already have things that are more or less like currencies, and these new ones have some encouraging precedents.

Which Companion is the BBC treating us like this year?

A while back I complained that the BBC's parochial attitude that was making Neil Gaiman furtively obtain Doctor Who - expat fans were being treated like Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace, only getting the Doctor on DVD, after waiting long enough to die.

They solved this problem for Neil by having him write The Doctor's Wife, so he gets to carry round the series on a flash key. It almost seemed like the BBC got the message, boasting in the New York Times that the US premiere will not be delayed. But that was like the promise to Amelia Pond that they'd be right back, while we pay iTunes or Amazon for the new series, and are left sitting on our suitcase in our nightie and wellies, while nothing downloads for us.

Instead, because they fret archaically about TV ratings, we're supposed to wait 13 hours after the UK sees it, and then, like Rose in Journey's End, we're stuck in a parallel universe with a pale imitation of the Doctor - BBC America's letterboxed, pillarboxed, advertisement-infested, scenes-cut-for-time version that I truly hope Steven Moffat, Russell Davies, Neil Gaiman, and everyone else who worked so hard to imagine these adventures for us, never gets to see. It's like the Dream Lord from Amy's Choice seized control of the Tardis from us.

So what can we do? We can be like River Song in the Impossible Astronaut, and fly the Tardis properly, sweetly warn of spoilers, and get the episode from BitTorrent instead.

If the BBC were smart about this, they'd offer the diehard fans a pay-to-download package that started downloading during the UK premi?re TV showing. If they were even smarter they'd charge a super premium to get access the same time they do the press previews the week before.

RIP Elisabeth Sladen, like us fans in the 90s, dropped off in the wrong place, with just memories and a bad robot dog to keep us going, but we held out hope and saw the Doctor again.

Ev's identity map ignores what we say

Ev Williams wrote a good blog post on identity yesterday, that I suggest you go and read. The odd thing is that he leaves out the publicly articulated thoughts that we use blogs, Twitter and other services to publish as an expression of our identity. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to connect his facets back to the open specs that represent these aspects.

Authentication

Ev mentions OpenID here, and is essentially correct that it is not helpful on its own. It was designed to verify URLs for blog comments. If all you do is use OpenID, you just replace logging into your site with logging into another, adding extra confusion without much benefit. However, once you have a URL for someone, you can then discover further information about them, by examining that URL and its links. Microformats can encode this directly in the webpage, or you can use related links to discover API endpoints for more.

The distinction between Authorization and Authentication is elided by Ev, and in practice OAuth has been winning out over OpenID as it is explicitly an Authorization APi that had Authentication as a side effect. The new OpenID Connect proposals try to remedy both these failing by using OAuth and by standardizing on how to list other endpoints.

Representation

Here Ev is looking for what is commonly called profile information. We have some mature standards for this - vCard is widely used by email clients, and is currently going through another standardization round to add modern features. The hCard microformat gives a simple way to embed profiles in web pages. Also, the rel="me" part of XFN makes it straightforward to link web pages together that represent different aspects fo your public representation. This is supported by Facebook, Twitter and Google, but sadly not by about.me whom Ev praises.

If you want a general data format for profile data, Portable Contacts is what you need.

Communication

Ev's emphasis on email addresses here illustrates the problem with them; they are primarily write-only; though we persist in using them for log-in IDs, they are not readily discoverable. The WebFinger spec gives a way round this - a way to go from an email to endpoints for other readable identity standards. Other communication standards have piggy-backed on email address, such as Jabber and Wave.

Personalization

This hints at the glaring gap in Ev's model, the expression of personal taste and preference. This is commonly done by reviewing, and we have the hReview microformat to express that, but it can also be useful just to track a history of media played or places visited to derive preferences over time. Here Activity Streams are an obvious fit, and it would be good to map such proprietary formats as Amazon purchases, Last.fm scrobbles, iTunes played songs and so on into a common format to derive this.

One model we can use for this is tagging - associating keywords with things. Many feed specs have tagging built in, and the rel="tag" microformat is a way of indicating these publicly.

Reputation

As Ev says, this is problematic, and also often highly contextual; I may trust someone's advice on restaurants without listening to them about which programming language to use. Reputation and trust are subtle, deeply human and very hard to model. The best answer here may be to rely on the power of faces and following; if we attach the face of someone we know to their public statements, we can decide for ourselves how much weight to give them.

Which brings me back to my opening point. When we decide who to pay attention to online, we tend to rely on what they say; if you get an @ reply on twitter, clicking on that person's name to see their most recent comments is hugely useful in deciding how much attention to pay to them. Similarly, the history of public blog posts, or their reviews of movies, music, books or restaurants arre other reasons we may follow them, and our identity is most strongly formed from the stories we tell and retell about ourselves. Feeds, whether in Atom, RSS or hAtom, and Activity Streams give rich representation of our thought, opinions and actions.

Whom we choose to associate with or follow is also an expression of our identity, and a useful signal when deciding how much attention to pay to someone, and XFN and Portable Contacts are both usefule in discovering these connections.

Dare Obasanjo also responded to Ev's Identity post, and added in payment as well as the friends as missed aspects. I'd love to discuss this further with both Ev and Dare at the Internet Identity Workshop next month, which is where many of the specs mentioned above were conceived and agreed. Maybe Ev can bring some others from Twitter with him too; their past contributions to OAuth were highly useful and there is plenty more to get our teeth into, as Ev's post shows.

How the w3c invented the ‘semantics’ logo

Today the w3c launched an HTML5 logo, that includes sub-logos for different technologies included in or associated with the standard. Here's my parodic view of how the semantics one was made:

Jeremy is upset that they're using 'HTML5' to include CSS3, SVG, WOFF too. I've seen SVG and CSS3 versions of the logo - who's got a WOFF one?

Update: I made a version of the logo in HTML only for the purists.

Two faces of Android

The most remarkable thing about Android is that it is the first widely adopted Open Source client operating system. It's long been clear that Open Source is the best way to preserve infrastructural code from the vicissitudes of corporate and governmental volatility, but using it for client applications has so far not taken off as well. There has often been a separation between an open source underlying layer and a proprietary user experience that is built atop it.

Android does follow this pattern to some extent - the underlying OS code is fully Open Source under an Apache License, so anyone can bend it to their own uses, but in order to get the "with Google" logo on your device, you need to conform to Google's Compatibility Definition Document. That has changed over time; for example the 2.1 version specifies that your device MUST have a camera and 1.6 requires telephony.

If you do this, you might then get access to what I call the top half of Android - the closed source Google apps that integrate the device closely with their web services - Contacts, GMail, Talk, Android Market, Google Maps, Navigation, Listen, Earth, Places and so on. However, this requires an explicit partnership with Google.

The fascinating thing here is that there is already a Cambrian Explosion of new Android devices going on in China and India. You can buy iPad lookalikes, things that look like a huge iPod, TV-based video game systems and more that run Android, often for under $100. I fully expect most digital photo frames and mp3 players being built this year will end up running some form of Android, with cameras following on too.

This means that more and more devices will be naturally web-connected, able to run browsers, and to plug into web publishing ecosystems naturally - the Android Intent model means that Apps can plug together neatly, and replace system features if desired.

However, a lot of the day-to day utility of an Android device is in the proprietary, partners-only layer - that you only get after doing a business development deal with Google of some kind. What we will start to see is alternatives for these Applications being developed. To some extent we're already seeing this from US carriers, but I think this year we'll see both an Open Source suite of apps to swap in many of these functions, and other proprietary offerings to compete with the Google upper half.

Who could build such a suite? Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft clearly have most of the necessary pieces, but how about Baidu, Tencent, Vkontakte or other companies with strong regional ties?

Now we have a truly Open consumer OS, a world of possibilities open up.