My Thoughts & Hopes as a Futurist & Technologist

I’ve always had a passion for technology–I love it. In my long career in IT I’ve been exposed to just about every major client-server technology stack in the enterprise. I live to learn. I love to learn and it’s something I’ll enjoy the rest of my life as a mostly self taught IT geek using Google, iTunes University, tech books & more.
The perfect job for me would be one which enabled me to make a positive impact to this world using my vast knowledge of technology & extraordinary capability to anticipate the technology landscape & marketplace. I understand what’s possible with technology before most people & combining this with my understanding of what customer’s will value, has the effect of giving me an uncanny ability to see where technology will evolve in the future before most of the innovator class does.
I have a never ending passion to make an impact on the future of the internet. I have a vision & mission of empowering every person on the planet with the ability to use any information known in any situation regardless of wealth, location, or context. I’ve taken minor steps towards this goal on my own.
I’ve have given an unhealthy amount of thought to novel ways to add value in the mobile space, which is the future of computing; where the computer is nothing more than a physical a logical extension of our lives. I understand this evolution of man. Interestingly, I’m not a picky person, but a man who refuses to give up on dreams and is constantly pondering the next big idea. I am most successful in technology strategy & ideation. I would love to work on some novel ideas I have to connect people to the people they care about through technology, or if helping at building the next big thing, I want to be a part of doing so.
I want to empower people to trust technology & want to be surrounded by people who have greater imaginations than I do the duration of my career–people who are masters of technological conceptualization & people who love to share knowledge and love to work as one team–building each other up, working on a single mission, to make the world a better place through technology. I want to lift up the company or team I work with.
Practically speaking, the perfect job is me working with a team of programmers who are working on life changing technology. I want to share my ideas and learn from them. I want to make technology something that every person on earth loves and not fears, & I want to do this by creating products which enrich every part of our lives. In the computing & geo-social-metaverse, there is a long road ahead, with many with dead ends, sharp turns and bends. I want to travel these roads. I will either join or create this great team of superstars at some point in my life or never give up trying. I am not a me person, I am a we person. I love to work with brilliant people who have a positive, lasting affect on my understanding of technology concepts, thus increasing my ability to be innovative by designing, coding & inventing the future while being true to myself & giving back love to Earth.

Here is my first attempt ever at video blogging so go easy on me. Just wanted to show the new cool UI on Ubuntu 10.10′s Netbook Edition and some cool new stuff on Ubuntu Software Center. Enjoy!

If you like any of these ideas (most are for Google Buzz) I’d appreciate your support in the form of a vote! (AppSpot.com) (I don’t win anything but I’d love to see these three features added as a fan and avid user of Google’s products and services. I am starting to love Open communication as it’s like open source. It’s not only open as in a message from a to b can be read by c–which is fantastic because c now also learns something in the process now, a phenomenon that inspired global trade–but it’s open as in sites and services are all just nodes on the social grid most of which have an input & reader function.

Facebook’s Developer Image is a Series of Dominos Ironically Enough as gardeners often find out too late that walled gardens get less sunshine.

1. “Please add WordPress and maybe Drupal as front end input options to Buzz. (Integration with sites section) Also, consider opening or adding API for the display of one’s Buzz output. Smart RSS so to speak.”
2. “Buzz items: let users pick from multiple interfaces. My ideal interface is Google Reader’s iPad accordion interface. Reader usability & thus usage trumps writer usage in open-com as Reader has more user-meta aggregation & usage.”
3. “Please make Google interfaces for disparate products modular. Input interfaces & output Interfaces should just be templates that can be applied to other products maximizing UI team efficiency while offering users the most flexibility.”

Nothing groundbreaking, I don’t even know if they are novel but I did spend some time voting in some great suggestions.

Hi Facebook, you’ve seen more than imagined unhelpful emotion from your users lately.   It’s very easy to get wrapped up in the emotion but you must remember who helps make you, a group of passionate & intelligent users with tangible insight into what tomorrow may head. And what you’ve excelled at all these years is filling the void of what we all imagined and much of what we’ve feared.

You’ve managed to make a multi-billion dollar power play on advertising. You’ve started realizing the capability of modern innovative communication systems to categorize, stereotype, extract business intelligence & paint a picture of each and every interest we have through years of collection of data in what we thought would be a closed system.

Besides changes in privacy direction, and a what seems to be a company that cares so little about what users want they change it for them without even serving a ballot to let user’s opt one way or another and then claiming that by allowing Facebook to augument our real life connections and interests we are constantly opting in. You let a lawyer tell you what is okay to do to users it seems.

It’s really a lot of imagination which creates much of the concern, mostly because we don’t know who uses what information from us, and for what purpose they are using it now and in the future. There seems to be an intentional lack of information in the communication from Facebook and third party sites concerning what lines you have drawn in the sand, and at what cost those lines will remain unchanged.

At the heart of the angst is the idea that the worst case scenarios are already in the planning states. By your own CEO’s words your not interested in talking about things when these actions are not completed.

What if? What if Facebook used it’s so many users and so many talented engineers and unmatched innovative wit for the good of its user base. Profit is a powerful motive but what if you actually walked the less travelled route of putting profit behind the needs and interests of those who each morning, each afternoon, each evening make your great communication system possible. If you were not so important, we simply wouldn’t care.

I swear to you: If you let users own their data under a similar following term sheet, I know by fact of my experience and thought you will be able to do so much more while keeping users comfortable. What if you kept that stellar innovation on track while just putting yourself in the shoes of our children. What if you led the way not only via powerful, cut throat innovation which has been second nature to you but you did it while holding the hand of the people who love what you can do but not everything that can be done. What if you in all your might and glory held ongoing, vast, organized communication streams with the .01 percent of your users who not only scream at you but also have given you so many ideas on how to improve your communication system. Communication is at the center of what makes your systems so fantastic, not just the semantic customization, but the order of magnitude you’ve combined real life with virtual life. We are naked & in bed with you, please stop doing what you must do to keep us happy but everything you’ve ever imagined is possible to make us happy thoughtful, social beings we are all trying to be. Your power has made you grow out of reach of ordinary citizens. I invite you to communicate with me. I will (many others would too) give you my word that with hand in hand we can further explore what’s possible in an age where communication systems are so fantastic and scary. We must do it together.

My wisdom and technical wit (I swear I have no conflicts of interest, and genuinely have been brooding for a way forward that’s healthy for the world considering many of you in power will not always be around. Facebook, I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart to do for communication what Google did for information. You are well on your way but you’ve not put your users first every day of your life. Forget about your IPO. It’s really plain and simple what needs done moving forward.
Users need the ability to own their own data & metadata.
Users need access to their own data & metadata in a highly Facebook influenced W3C style standard. Please do this before it’s done for you knowing AOL’s mission is the same as yours except they tried to capture information in their garden as you try to merge human data with you very advanced communication systems.
3. Users need to know what data is collected about them in a way that makes the user comfortable as well and protects trade secrets & protects the company’s interest that serves the user.
4. Users need a comprehensive list of companies which data is or might be shared with.
5. Users need to understand who, how and why their data is being re-purposed.
6. The only way to keep companies honest is having users granted the capability to revoke usage rights retroactively.
100 percent non negotiable understanding of ANY intent ANY company holding user data has that MIGHT have the capability comprise their privacy now, in the future or in the past.

Take a walk with us Facebook, one that shows you care about what your users care about or will soon care about. Take a walk with us Facebook, investors, engineers, designers holding the hands of the users who are now looking at you to take the dumb out of dumb pipe and we will gratefully reward all of your innovations and considerations. We will become and remain fans once we know–undoubtably–that doing the right thing is the most important goal–not obstacle–to you. We all make mistakes but we need to know things you’ve done are mistakes and mistakes from which we will grow and we will learn. I am very open to suggestions and argument on any posted items. The privacy obscurantism must not continue.

There is a huge marketing race to kill anonymity on the internet which is being pushed very hard with a lot of money. Companies loose a substantial competitive edge in most markets by knowing exactly who you are, what you do, what you buy, and according to statistics what this will mean you will probably buy soon. Capitalism is the best, and the most creative and the most powerful force on eath. (Gravity is pretty weak actually) Unfortunately capitalism does so much good that we must constantly stand up against what it does wrong. These are natural techno-economical forces at work. I’m very happy we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have some of the most brilliant minds working on exposing some of the problems we face as we move the world forward in the hopefully right direction. They stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.

From their article: “Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and fingerprints must be considered alongside cookies and IP addresses when we discuss web privacy and user trackability,” said Eckersley.

This is very true. The “Fingerprint” also known as a cookie, or tracking cookie has been one of the top concerns of privacy advocates for over a decade.  With HTML 5 location info we are walking into the unknown. None of these issues need to be so, we should push back especially because these problems are relatively easy to solve. I believe this is yet another reason why we must push as hard as possible to own all our data. We should choose the sites which are allowed to do what we feel is responsible with our data and retain the power to truncate ourselves intelligently when we feel a site has crossed our line. Advertising targeted between our eyes is getting smarter. Now they can and do “joins” (a database operation which intelligently selects attributes from one data source with another usually yielding more useful data.) with cookie data they’ve amassed for decades where allowed by law with new emerging data sets which leave very little to the advertiser or data miners imagination or margin of error.  When Google was facing a hell storm for privacy many years ago I was asking why no one cared what Facebook had been collecting. I’m pretty sure that even though search engines must delete data about you after a retention period social networks including Facebook get to keep it forever.

If I can understand what data who has of mine and how it’s used, then it’s possible to have a win-win situation. We need an open-standards compliant format which houses, exposes, rates, grants, revokes, & tags all of our data and the types of companies who have a license to it. We simply must own our data moving forward from this day on (and retroactively) because if evil mart knows everything about you, there is not a procecutor who even needs to get a warrant, how long until wholesale data warehouses are available to anyone with a dime and a bad idea? If we own our digital selves, the protections our forefathers put in place would help to keep this country and others the right side up as far as freedom and the people who died for are concerned.

It must have been about five years ago or more I blogged about my thoughts on user data and it should be a user defined hub which was replicated to competing services which would prevent lock in. I didn’t have too much concern for privacy at the time as I didn’t understand databases nearly as well & I didn’t understand RDF (semantic data) as well as I do now. I didn’t do research and totally understand that the mobile and location based world would trump the sitting at my publishing computer world until some time in 2004. Later on (a few years ago) I tried explaining to my company that this was going to happen and how digital advertising was about to get a shot of mobile & user relevancy.

One of the things I started pondering before I quit Facebook & giving a lot more thought to the future of Privacy was getting my blog going again. I’ve been a blogger for the better part of a decade now. In Retrospect, my biggest regrets were letting Facebook fool me–I sincerely thought it would always be private for some reason. I thought now here is a company that has things right, slowly let people into little bubbles with only relationship data & location data connecting them and keeping all of the juicy details of the person private so that the same users would have a safe haven to share their inner lives with their inner most circle. I always framed my concept of privacy around the fact that I really don’t have anything to hide. Then I became a father & I realized that my ability to control my digital self had slowly been on a disastrous decline & I worried about my (now 19 month old) son’s future in a world where you increasingly don’t have to be a sociologist to understand and respect the fears & concern that were being placed on the world at the expense of compromises to freedom.

The hardest part of leaving Facebook is I do genuinely trust and look forward to communicating with my network. I even had no problem with keeping my account open until some point, web spiders do not scare me as much as the transfer of ownership and pure power of my information to a company who was perhaps founded on premises which remind me of everything which is wrong with capitalism today. Capitalism without integrity or morality–if you subscribe–is that it can be the lowest common denominator of these values which is also the most successful. I had no idea how my data would be used with applications. I had no idea what would happen to these companies with someday decades of information about my friends, family and myself should they go belly up. That’s a huge difference from about a year ago when I had started working on documents & written concepts on how a kitchen’s tablet PC configuration would be set up differently than the same sofware when you took your tablet with you.

The largest threat to digital privacy in the long run is not just Facebook, a user’s privacy is most protected if that same user owns their data. Microsoft wanted to be a part of the solution in China. Many companies willingly have handed over data which has lead to life in prison for speaking one’s mind & even most likely death. At least at Google the founders have first hand experience with no freedom of expression and how awful that is to a society. Over two years ago I set out to start a web company which would let users define what they like and dislike. I was going to start with concerts & other interests. I had two friends from work who were all going to start on this start-up with me. I thought long and hard about it and in the end I didn’t pursue the because of lack of time with all three of us and some thought in the back of my mind that I would be under great pressure to share great bits of this info with just about everyone.

Today I did a reboot of jasonbogovich.com and for the time being I’d like to concentrate on a series of ideas which I think can foster even greater innovation without sacrificing privacy and user lockin–in what I call the geo-semantic-meta-verse. Augmented reality will be like this but I think users should have ownership and ability to control how this forms. Facebook probably understands least of all that if you build it and give users ownership and build trust, you will be able to build the best open communications model. Instead either Facebook will suffer and/or the entire world will suffer.

Without further thought I’d like to ask for feedback on my thoughts. I can’t state how much this (privacy) could end up meaning to the world & I can’t do this alone.