BugFrog

Since you’re here, you already know one place to find me in case the bird joint collapses. I won’t delete my account, but who knows what’s going to happen over there. Somehow, almost 3000 people still follow me for some reason, and I follow 2500 or so. I will miss everyone if things don’t work out. I’ve met so many incredible friends there. Heavy sigh. Which brings me to a statement I’ve been saying for a very long time: own your destination for your network.

Here are a few others:

• Ello – I still have my @bugfrog Ello account from the first twitter exodus. They’ve done some interesting things over there, so if you like the creatives, check it out.
• Mastodon – I signed up as @bugfrog@mastodon.social . I need to explore more to find things that match my interests of music, fun, traveling, animation, and making internet things. I’m also interested how this could help the point above – if you set up your own server, you can own your account and use it to grow your network. Will a journalist accreditation organization create a server that they only allow verified and vetted journalists? That could be interesting. There are definite ways to create an identity-linked and protected social tool. It may not be foolproof, but the potential for improvement on current offerings is there.
• Facebook – yeah, still there some. Bryan Giese
• Instagram – this too. Bryan Bugfrog.
• Counter Social – I am @bugfrog@counter.social as well. A more guarded masto community.
• Hive – I bee @bugfrog on Hive as well. Not using it a ton yet.
• Peach – @bugfrog there as well. (Noticing a trend in naming?) I may be one of two people still using this app. It’s quiet there.
• LinkedIn – this is for work of course. Bryangiese is my name there.
• Tumblr – This is still running too! Bugfrog.tumblr.com . I think it mostly feeds from here methinks.
• YouTube – YouTube.com/@BugfrogTV
• Swarm – Bryan Bugfrog there, although I’m more selective about who i share locations with.
• Yelp – Bryan B.
• Twitch – Bugfrog

There are more, like if Venmo if you want to send me money, or Axs and LiveNation if we’re going to a show together, so ask if you need one of those. Slack, discord, Reddit, Teams, Xbox, Spotify, SoundCloud, BandCamp, Tripit, Tabs for guitar, Oro Visual Music, Snap, TikTok, Kik, NextDoor, on and on and on…

Generally search for Bugfrog and it may be me, or just come out to a show and we can talk in person.

Talk to you soon!

All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. All work and no play makes Bug a dull boy.

All Work Work Work

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No Play, No Kid, No Kidding

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Dull Dull Dull Dull

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A Lot of Blood

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Passersby Were Amazed

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Really Amazed

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Comments?

If you have any questions or comments, leave them below!

It’s been a busy week around the homestead. Or beyond the homestead really. Down to the south 40 in the grand ole city of Austin, Texas for a week long company retreat. Why, you may ask? With a company full of consultants scattered all around the country, getting everyone together for a few days a year is a great way to actually get to know the rest of the team. It’s incredibly helpful and allows a lot of interaction we wouldn’t normally get.

For this retreat, I scheduled a photo/video shoot with everyone to get new headshots as well as good interview footage of who we are and why we do the work we do for nonprofits. I was truly amazed (as I am most days) of the incredible people I get to work with. This crew has skills to work at any company, and they choose to apply them at a company dedicated to serving the needs of nonprofit organizations. Thanks for building up a company that people can believe in, Keith. It works.

I’ve also gotta give huge props to Marcin and Tara from ManMadeMedia for all their work on the shoot. If you ever need video work done, give them a call first. From beginning to end, they know their stuff and make it happen without a hitch. And Marcin will change the way he says his name every single time he says it if you are not careful. Great shoot, great footage, lots of editing to be done. Let’s do it.

After an exhausting week at the retreat, what do I do next? Come home, relax, get some sleep? Heck no. I got off the plane and grabbed a shuttle directly to Lost Lake Lounge to catch SF1 (and the amazing Candyman) and Julie Almeria for her birthday show. Love those crazy kids. So much talent all packed into those energetic bodies. Of course it was a class reunion with a ton of the friendlies from around town in attendance. Happy night.

So that was Friday night, Saturday night is time to rest up, right? Oh no. Saturday night is family concert night with Rob Drabkin’s birthday show at the Bluebird Theater. SHEL was there as well so it was another great show. Love seeing Rob’s dad join for the gigs. Aimee was photographing the show, so LilF and I got to hang around and enjoy the scene for a bit. The Bluebird has changed a ton from the porn theater it was when we first moved here! The whole Colfax strip has had a massive evolution. #winning

Now it’s time for sleep, right? Not quite. You see it was also the king of the local music DJ’s birthday, Alf! For his birthday he was spinning an all star gig with his 45 + 1 sets back at Lost Lake, so we walked back up for that. Again, more friendlies, more fun. For the unaware, Alf’s 45 + 1 gigs are great. He spins some great discs while a local artist riffs with it in their own special style. Saturday there were members of the Flobots, Epilogues, SF1, Eldren, and on and on and on. Great lineup all night. After that, members of the Sound and Color got together with Josh Lee for a set of something new. By this time, I was spent, so finally went back to the homestead for some resting before the Bronco game (fail).

Denver and the Front Range has a great music community. Bands and musicians from Colorado Springs up through the amazing scene in Fort Collins all cross pollinating and making great music for us. Large fun sandwiches for all. Really looking forward to the SpokesBuzz stage down at SXSW this year. Jam packed with Colorado bands, it’s going to be a damn amazing week.

Monday was MLK day, so LilF and I headed out on a beautiful day to Denver’s stellar march/parade – marade – to celebrate a man we should all know more about. As I looked at the over 30,000 people around me, it occurred to me that we are in a strange transition point. A good portion of the crowd were alive to witness Dr. King in person, many had even marched with him in years past. Others have only heard of his legacy through books and videos from our history classes. The spirit of his message was still alive in all of us, though, and while some of the younglings probably didn’t quite get it all, the vibe clearly touched everyone. We marched together down Colfax Ave, united and strong, talking about the challenges we still face so many years later. The fight isn’t over, but there is still hope within so many of us. The dream will be realized in time. Sometimes it feels a lot farther off than others, but we’ll get there.

I’ve learned a lot from GLaDOS in the time we’ve been together, and fully understand her deep need for constant eternal testing. That’s why I have another one for you, if you are up for it.

Web Voice Messaging Made (un)Easy

The last one with Google Voice didn’t go as well as I had hoped. It made you put in a phone number, and then it connected your phone to a machine so you could leave a message. Pretty clunky, not really intuitive, and really seemed to feel a bit creepy.

Fail.

A New Hope

This is another on-line voice message system designed to let you leave messages right from a website without going through a pesky phone device. Brought to us by the bright crew at Speakpipe, and soon to come out of beta, this web widget lets you leave a message, and me to hear it. Easy enough. The cool part is I can use the same widget on my blog, Facebook, and all other sorts of places. Care to test if it works?

On this page

On your right, you should see an orange little tab prompting you to leave a message. There are other ways to have it appear, but this one is default and I wanted to get this rolling quickly.

Click it, and a window comes up and starts the recording process.

On Facebook

If you are of the Facebook sort, hop on over to my Facebook fan page here and give the Speakpipe Facebook widget a try. (While you are there, if you wouldn’t mind tapping a Like for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.) They should all come back to the same place.

A Webpage

If you’d like to use a special SpeakPipe webpage, use this link.

Leave a message for Bugfrog!

Let me know what you think

There are even iPhone and iPad apps that work with the whole shebang. Maybe try those, too. The point is I’d love to hear from you, and to see how this system works! If you would share how your experience went, how you felt, what you were thinking, that would be great. It’s circle sharing time. I’ll let you know how it goes, and if you have any questions about it, I’d be happy to share share share back with you.

Until the next test!

bg

If you look back a few posts, you’d see that I was between jobs. I say was between because I have just accepted a position at a company that I am very very excited about. I have been hired as the Director of Marketing for Heller Consulting, a great company that helps non-profits do their caring work faster, better, and more effectively (and with less redundancy). There will be a bunch of new challenges, and new ways to apply all the work that I have been doing for the last 20 years or so, with an added bonus of lots of room for new ideas and creative solutions to interesting problems. Get ready for the brainstorms!

Like I typed already, I am very excited. I have been groomed by fate to be perfect for this position, and am looking forward to it like a frog looks forward to maggot transformation season. I do not have a long sticky tongue, but I’ll be able to make up for that. All I wished for this holiday season was a job, so now I’m set. I plan to spread my good luck around to as many as I can this season, and continue for the rest of the year. See you soon!

NOTE: I found this draft post that I wrote the night before Aim went to the hospital in Austin. Funny to read it knowing what happens next.

This is it. My first trip to South by Southwest Interactive geekfest in Austin. Aim has been there for the last few years an she always comes back tired and energized. There is supposedly a lot going on, but I’m not calling it until I see it. Lots of friends are going to be there from all over the country, so it will be great to see them. There will also be about half the tech population of Boulder migrating to the Boulder of the South, so if I need to get bailed out of jail, we should be able to take up a collection.

There are a lot of sessions about using game mechanics outside of the pure game realm this year, which will be a blast for me. I’m going to see as much as I can on this to apply in my game class. The more references beyond my own experiences the better. Hopefully I can find some more teaching tools this weekend too.

I love life. When I decide to give a talk about identity, it ends up being in front of Chris Messina AND it comes off I was totally against OpenID. Crap. 15 seconds a slide needs to be clear and to the point, and I must have veered. I actually changed some of my talk at the last minute based on things Chris said at DrupalCon on March 6. Here’s his slides. Identity starts on #27. Love the direction they are heading with identity on the web.

I’m not against OpenID at all, I’m actually into it and like it, but from the discussions I’ve had, few developers or users are actually talking about what it means to use a centralized identity manager. I want to keep the discussion moving on this because I think it is really worthwhile, for online and offline communications. Since Chris escaped Maloney’s before I could explain this, I can only hope he can telepathically read my thoughts. Transmitting now.

Thanks to John and the IgniteDenver crew for letting me rant. I had a blast and will be back for more. Props to Maloney’s Tavern for allowing us to invade. Check the Twitter stream with the tag #ignitedenver.

Here’s my point which I didn’t make very well last night:

Identity is not solely a technical issue, it is a human issue. Humans are more than a login and password combination, and will need a system that allows for the complexities of human life. We all have different aspects of our lives that we allow to mix and mingle to varying degrees, and in the online space, we need a system that allows us to control our information just as we control our identity in real life. Not just controlling where our streams show up, but also what information we offer to online entities. On the other side of that mouse pad are the sites and services that we register for. They also need certain sets of information to be able to provide their services. You trade your info for service, but you should still own and have control of your info.

When clients tell me to just use OpenID or Facebook Connect for the registration to their site, they are not realizing the position that they could be putting their user in, and all the things that could happen that they (and when it does happen, I) will be held responsible for.

Here are the notes. The first few slides are dull background crap. Find the slides here. Mine start on #57, but take some time to go through it all. Lots of great people and information.

Slide 1

Who I am now. SMS the name bugfrog to 50500 to get a text of this info.

Slide 2

Who/where I have been before now

Slide 3

Everybody has used non-secure ways to remember their passwords. The 3M Password protection system is very popular. Entries in your address book, using the same password for every site, trying to use the same login and password for every site. What have you used?

Slide 4

If you read your terms of service agreements, most sites own your data once you give it to them. And even if they explicitly say they won’t do anything with it, it is very easy for them to change their mind in the future without giving you a chance to pull out your info first.

Slide 5

OpenID is a system available to help address these two issues: Multiple logins and data ownership.

Slide 6

Estonia is adopting an OpenID system for all it’s citizens. Great. Thankfully they’ve also implemented a Data Protection Act to make sure there is no abuse of this new system. They are pretty confident that there will be no identity fraud possible in Estonia. That’s pretty confident. The word hubris comes to mind.

http://www.libertysecurity.org/article959.html

https://openid.ee/about/english

Slide 7

Problems with Open ID

Not universally adopted. Not every site uses OpenID and not every site will. Linking your login to a public standard can limit the information that a site can collect from their users, so not everybody will do it.

Not to mention that there is version 2 of out and not everyone has been able to get their systems upgraded and working. Bigger companies who have the money have been able to upgrade, but not everyone. And if it fails, you are locked out of your site. No second chances. You wait. We see the same failure pattern with new features on web browsers. Some people either don’t or can’t upgrade immediately.

Slide 8

Standard Implementation?

OpenID is a standard, but not all services implement the standard exactly the same. Does everyone implement HTML standards the same? Like any standard, some sources adopt quickly and completely, some lag behind a little, some jump ahead and add on their own special features that they feel should be there.

Open Id is one of the more successful early players in this id space. What else is going on?

OpenID provider Comparison at SpreadOpenID.org

OpenID review at Loudit

Slide 9

Lets’s expand beyond just OpenID. There are other people making a play for the identity management market. Of course. Google, Yahoo, OAuth, and the recently newsy Facebook connect.

Some say that while the OpenID system is strange and confusing, leveraging these other systems that people are already using makes sense. “I’ll just login with my facebook ID.” It’s easy, available and ready to go. Why not?

In the simplest form, we could rephrase this to “Let’s make it possible for everyone from Aunt Mable to the happy hour crew, every person in my friend list, to know about every single site that I register for, and maybe even how often I visit and what I do there. Wouldn’t that be great!”

Slide 10

Let’s expand even more. Online identity managers are not the core problem. Complex human lives are the problem. Just like you don’t go into a job interview talking about your obsession with Penguin figurines and clown porn, you also find sites you want to be a part of that you don’t want connected to your LinkedIn account through openID. So now you need to decide again, do I have many different openIDs? Do I set up multiple identity accounts, one for work, one for friends, one for clown porn sites. We all have different facets of our lives that we might control differently.

Slide 11

Human Upgrades. Our lives change. What happens when a site or service transitions from a hobby to a work related identity? Twitter for example. How many of us picked a twandle based on some goofy animal hybrid and then started using it to make contact with people that you actually do real work with? Trust and community is rooted in the concept of identity and recognition. Can you change an identity and still have that trust? If you set up an identity intending it to be private, and then need to change it over to a public realm, does every site you’ve used it for also come into the public realm also?

Slide 12

Humans in general are lazy. Most people are lazy when it comes to internet security. People who hide a house key in a fake rock aren’t going to worry about 16 random character passwords. For most people, convenience is key. They will choose the easy route over the secure route almost every time. If they are logging in to a site, they just want to get in right then. They don’t want to sit and think and consider the implications of which ID they should use. Usually they realize later “Hey. Maybe I shouldn’t be posting all my personal photos where my employer can find it. How can I change that?”

Slide 13

If there is one standard, then there is one sweet target for any hacker who needs a goal. Maybe they could all pool their resources and work together to find an exploit. Instead of having to figure out what type of obstacles each site puts in their way, they’ll be able to focus all their time on one single protocol. Keep this in mind if you bank offers standard identity system compliance.

Slide 14

Ethics and identity. Business executives have found out that what they say online, whether intended or not, is increasingly considered part of the company communication stream. If James Andrews comments on Memphis before meeting with his FedEx client, it’s considered a comment delivered by his company, not just him.

Even more murky and extended, the people who are connected to executives through Facebook or Twitter are obviously aware of and possibly connected to the company as well, possibly even shareholders. What if this executive comments about a contract issue, or the failure of a big supplier. Suddenly, there is a very real possibility of insider trading if they were to act on any information.

And what about HR issues? If your work identity is aware that you go out and drink, smoke, and party on the weekends (not on work time, but on your time) how well will they be able to disassociate the work you from the weekend you? If mandatory drug testing is a hot issue, mandatory social network registration is going to get touchy too.

Slide 15

Geolocation. Here’s another wrinkle to think about. More and more services are adding geolocation ability into their apps. At first, this is great. Find the people you know when they are nearby. Get notified of a special offer when you are near your favorite store. Cool. But lets say you are with a big client at a work dinner and your auto updating Latitude or Brightkite app tells the members of one of your less than publicly known social groups that you are present. Suddenly, 2 facets of you world collide in a way that you were not expecting or intending.

Think of the marketing mishaps that are waiting to happen. What if you opt in for special deals from some Personal Lifestyle store (whatever that might be), and as you go by that store, you get a batch of marketing messages and special offers. Normally, that is fine. But this time, you happen to be with your boss, grandmother, or friends who aren’t aware of your connection to that unique store. Could get dicey.

I love Brightkite and use it as much as I can with my clunky Q. Latitude is cool too. But the mass market is a different audience and doesn’t think the way that tech early adopters do. They still worry about things like “Who is looking at my photos on Flickr? Who knows that I am at the mall today?” We say Who cares? But the answer is They Do. And they are the users who will make your site or service successful.

Slide 16

Who are you anyway? This brings up a question: what the hell is identity anyway? Who are you? Do you talk and act exactly the same way in all situations? Probably not. You may be different with your famliy than with your friends than with your boss and coworkers.

As far as those groups are concerned, their PERCEPTION of your identity is made up of what they know about you only. Here’s a way to look at it.

If you go to your twitter page, a valid argument could be made that all the tweets that you find there make up your identity. We could construct a picture of you based on what you follow and what you tweet. Just like in real life, the people around you tell us about who you are or may be at that moment. It might not be 100% accurate, and it can be very easily taken out of context, but it is what people do – make generalizations and evaluations based on the facts at hand. It’s what we do.

Extending from that, here’s another interesting fact: some companies are experimenting with scanning the content of an employee’s email to determine what that person does. Basically trying to build a map of who each employee is and what they do based on the content of their emails. So instead of giving you a title, putting you in an org chart, and telling everyone what you should be responsible for, you will be identified by what you have written in your daily mail. In theory, you should be able to find out the go to person for a specific task by searching for that task, and the people who deal with it most will top the search. That’s sure to cut down on those non-work related messages.

Slide 17

I’m not trying to rip the idea of openid apart. But it is a young technology trying to work with an old concept of identity. The issues and behaviors that we are trying to model are things that haven’t even been worked out completely in real life.

Ever run into your Aunt Sally when you are out drinking with your friends? We all have work, social, companion, recreation, and many other circles of people that we interact with, and they all intersect to varying degrees, some a lot, some not at all, and each person has a different need and a different way to maintain those associations.

Some people would never dream of inviting work friends to a party at their house, others only have work friends, and once they leave a job, they no longer associate with those people. This is a personal choice, and a mass adopted identity system should be able to handle any degree of that choice.

Slide 18

Where can it go wrong? It never goes wrong by people doing what you expect them to do. In the geo location example, maybe the marketing messages are originally programmed to go be triggered when you are within a very short radius. One day, a programming tweak increases that radius to 5 miles. Or bad weather confuses the triangulation so that it thinks you are closer than you really are.

What if you just set up your ID account and missed a setting, or misunderstood how it worked. Again, MOST people work with convenience and ease. Going through a huge tutorial on how to properly set up your account doesn’t quite fit there.

These are not things that could happen, they are things that WILL happen. Look at some of the goofy disclaimers that are on products lately. People don’t think about what they are doing in the moment the way that a develop thinks when building a site. Developers focus on the task and how to solve a problem. Users focus on talking on the phone while they are driving, eating, reading a text message, giving a toy to their child, and trying to find a shopping list.

When considering a login schema, don’t think about a using doing what they should do, test in the ways that a user should absolutely not do, because they will.

Slide 19

Proponents of single identity systems have said that if we all have one online identity with our real name attached, people will be less rude and disruptive on the internet. Sure, because the internet is the only place that people are rude and disruptive. There ARE people who do things that they probably wouldn’t do in person, but they would also do those things in real life if they thought they wouldn’t get in trouble. How many people turn into complete assholes when they get in their car? That’s not even annonymous, just easy to get away.

Let’s be honest, rude behavior is a human thing, not a computer thing. If you’re a jerk, you’ll be a jerk online, no matter who sees you.

Slide 20

I bring all this up because if you build or advise on websites, there are no login silver bullets. Any solutions to online identity issues will be found by looking at human social behaviors, not by building on traditional computer protocols.

Until that time, Make sure you give you users options. Don’t have just way to login, let your user do what’s best for them.

That’s it.

I can see why someone might think I’m bashing OpenID, but I’m really not. I just want it to continue evolving to work with human behavior, not computer needs.

If you haven’t yet, I suggest you go get some OpenID variant. Have it ready and get familiar with it. Consider where you implement it, and why. And if someone tells you that it’s the next great thing that will rule the net, send ’em here. I’ll be waiting.

Here are some reference links you might be interested in.

OpenID for Google Apps

Poll on OpenID use

Yahoo Updates to Challenge Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect

Twitter and Ethics

Bad News for OpenID

I’m presenting at Ignite Denver tonight at Maloney’s at 14th and Market. This one’s on Human Online Identity. It started off solely about OpenID and my issues with it, but as I put it together, it expanded a little. The problems aren’t with OpenID or any other technology, they are with the human social creatures that use them.

I wrote way too much for the 15 seconds per slide, so afterwards I’m going to put up all my notes, links, and comments, so if you are interested, check back.

Hope to see you there!

Ignite Denver

Here’s a link to a short post worth a quick read on the SiriusDecisions blog. Maybe the writing is not the most conversational, but the important point is to go into partnerships, relationships, and co-workeredness with the attitude of “What can I share and give in this gig?” Here’s the post —>

We’ve all been there. We enter a relationship whether it be for business or personal reasons, and we end up giving a ton more than we get back. So for the next one, we protect yourself and hold back. After several rounds of this, we end up going into a relationship with a protective attitude. “I’m not going to give anything unless I am guaranteed to get something back equal or better.” It’s logical and completely understandable, but it eats our hearts out.

This is just a suggestion, so think about it. Go into relationships and partnerships ready to give. Be a source of thought, energy, and discussion. Sure, you may look stupid sometimes. You get used to that, and it lets you know how many things you really don’t know in the world (I am King of the Stupids). Go into a room ready to offer helpful perspectives to anyone who is interested. Make it a habit, and it will never dry up. You have thousands of great ideas a day. Let them free and they will return like spawning salmon until you ooze idea roe from your head. This is the feeling I got at the few Boulder.me events I have been to lately and it has been great. People willing to talk and share and generate real discussion. Not polite conversation to feign interest, but people really talking and listening. Offering perspectives, thoughts, arguments, criticism, and guidance to anyone willing to hear it. This kind of community is something special. Take advantage of it. Hope to see you there. (IgniteBoulder and IgniteDenver are coming soon.)