Nick Vidal

ISS was designed with one interesting characteristic in mind: incoming information only comes from one-degree apart friends through subscriptions. This characteristic provides an architecture which is 100% guaranteed to be SPAM free. You’ll only receive information you want. And if you start receiving information you don’t want, you can either directly contact your friend and talk to him/her about it, or simply unsubscribe from him/her. It’s interesting to observe that the cascading of trustful social networks works as a world wide distributed recommender system perfectly tuned to output a very personalized stream. This trustful network filters out irrelevant information, while still letting good information pass through. Your friends work for you, and their friends work for them, and so forth. Everyone works together to recommend and filter information. ISS effectively unleashes the great deal of untapped potential of the collective intelligence to organize information.

The guys from the Decentralized Information Group at MIT have been pondering about this idea of combating SPAM using social networks. They implemented a FOAF crawler that generates a social graph periodically. And from this social graph they create policies around it, such as, for example, only people x-degrees apart can comment on the blog.

This goes very much aligned with how ISS was designed. When a user receives an entry from a  friend, she can read the comments that her personal network has made about it. She may also download the attached files directly from her personal network, making it easier on the original author’s server in case the entry gets popular. And since the information that reaches the user always leaves a trace, it’s very well possible to choose, for example, to read only the comments for a particular entry from people x-degrees apart.

I updated the ISS policies to make it clear how ISS controls the quality of information that reaches the user. I’ve added a special case, which are friendship requests, since these requests obviously will come from people who are more than 1-degree apart. The funny thing is that eventually we’ll only add friends that are already on our list (not our personal network obviously, but our more wide social graph that was generated beforehand). Friendship requests from people more than x-degrees apart will be dropped, not because of despise, but simply because of trust. The requests that pass through this policy will be displayed to the user as a special channel, where the user can easily see the person’s tagcloud, how many degrees separate them and how much they are connected. He may add this person to his personal social network if he sees it appropriate.

These policies will initially be applied to the Web and I.M., but they’ll be applied to e-mail as well. These three means of communication will eventually converge and have a common interface. We will finally overcome SPAM and information overload, and reach an equilibrium of information-sharing and awareness.

For some background on how ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards) was born, I recommend reading my thesis. I also recommend going through the references.

ISS addresses the information-sharing problem. To come up with a solution, I was mostly influenced by these 6 technologies:

• Peer-to-peer Networks
• Social Networks
• Instant Messaging
• Blogging
• Social Tagging
• Content Syndication

ISS integrates these technologies in a seamless framework and finds the perfect balance:

• Peer-to-peer Networks: Centralized and Decentralized Networks
• Social Networks: Anonymous and Trusted Relationships
• Instant Messaging: Asynchronous and Synchronous Communication
• Blogging: Open and Structured Knowledge Management
• Social Tagging: Expert and User Metadata Creation
• Content Syndication: Pull and Push Technology

Creating the TagLink format was like solving a puzzle. In the end, everything must fit perfectly together. These are some important considerations that were taken to create the TagLink format:

• The channels are chained both ways: incoming and outgoing links. What I’m watching today, I’ll be syndicating tomorrow. A channel is a connection point. It’s to what users will tune in when they want to view information, and it’s to where users will broadcast out when they want to share information.
• For users to share information, they don’t have necessarily to share the same concepts. All they have to do is to show how their friends’ concepts are associated with their own concepts. This is the essence of TagLink.
• The TagLink will evolve dynamically. It’s part of the Discover/Subscribe pattern. You discover an interesting channel, you subscribe to it, and your TagLink gets updated. A friend discovers an interesting channel from you, he subscribes to it, and your TagLink gets updated too.
• The TagLink helps define the color of the tags in the TagCloud. Blue for incoming flow of information, red for outgoing flow, purple for a mutual flow and black for no flow.

The TagCloud format was very much inspired by the social tagging phenomenon. Social Tagging is a bottom-up approach to cataloging information. Traditional cataloging of information is done by experts using taxonomies or ontologies in a top-down fashion. Social tagging, on the other hand, is done by common people. People are free to choose any set of keywords that they see fit to describe a specific information.

Social tagging has being very successful for organizing information. They are used for organizing e-mail (e.g. Gmail), bookmarks (e.g. Del.icio.us), photos (e.g. Flickr), music (e.g. LastFM), video (e.g. YouTube), blog entries (e.g WordPress), and reference entries (e.g Wikipedia).

In the context of ISS, tags are used to identify channels. These are some important considerations that were taken to create the TagCloud format:

• People will have a limited amount of channels in any given time-frame. It helps friends become aware of their interests, and it helps them become self-aware of their own interests. Users that just tag anything that they read have huge tag clouds that tells me very little about them.
• The time-frame is very important. The TagCloud format allows me to answer the following question: what are my friends’ current interests? Compare that to APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language). People’s interests shift or evolve.
• A TagCloud is something to which friends will want to subscribe to. This is essential to keep friends aware of new information in a non-obtrusive way. It’s the core idea behind ISS.

Year 2008 has arrived, and I decided to write down my plans for ISS this year:

• Continue working on the ISS standards. Add more examples and illustrations to the documentation.  ISS core formats and services are reaching stability. Time to work more on the extended formats and services.
• Open up the standardization process. ISS should go from a one-man project to a collaborative effort. Bring intelligent people in to work on ISS.
• Bring companies and other organizations to join ISS. Look for sponsors who are willing to contribute to ISS.
• Create opportunities for companies and projects that adopt ISS. ISS is a great technology and being open means that it may be adopted freely.
• Tighten bonds with communities such as SamePlace and Drupal. Offer support to developers of these communities to better exploit ISS.
• Think globally and act locally. Improve ISS adoption at UFRGSWeb and contact local universities to join in.

The Internet has empowered people to share information and ideas in unprecedented ways. It has enabled people to easily and at almost no cost to be both producers and consumers of information world-wide. Nowadays, people are able to have their own channel of information, broadcasting ideas, photos, videos, etc. This is very exciting and brings many opportunities for education, research, business and entertainment. However, it brings many challenges as well.

From the consumer’s point of view, with everyone having its own channel, how are people going to find what they want amidst all this avalanche of information? The Web as it is today, as complicated as it might be to publish something, seems already overcrowded with its billions of interconnected documents. How then are people ever going to find what they want when technology easies the publishing process even further and opens hundreds of millions of hidden worlds all filled with rich personal media?

From the producer’s point of view, how will he or she broadcast his or her channel so that it reaches those to whom it is relevant without interfering with those to whom it is not? How will his or her channel stand apart from the so many others that exist? How will he or she get his or her idea across and be heard in this open and democratic medium, where everyone has gained the right and opportunity to have a voice?

ISS addresses these challenges by unleashing the great deal of untapped potential of the collective intelligence to organize information. It exploits the bottom-up characteristics of successful technologies and finds the perfect balance. The idea is to connect people with news and information that matters to them the most by letting people themselves express what matters to them at an individual level. Each individual connects with their own personal social network to receive and disseminate information. This challenges the top-down model of information-sharing and gives place to a bottom-up model, where each person has a unique voice and equal opportunity to contribute and benefit. In this way, ISS hopes to bring people closer together to discuss common interests and share information in a more open and democratic manner.

I would like to invite everyone to be part of ISS!

What’s ISS?

ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards) is a set of open standards that enable people to discover and syndicate information within their social network.

Why ISS?

We all know how RSS has helped transform the Web. Now imagine an “Instant RSS”, combining features from both I.M. (Instant Messaging) and RSS, linking the concepts of social networks and content syndication.

How can I help ISS?

Developers are welcome to make ISS part of their applications. ISS can be used everywhere: web-based applications, IM applications, etc.

Where can I read more about ISS?

Please access the site: http://iss.im/