Fluidinfo

I’ve been asked what Fluidinfo is hundreds of times. I’ve never really known how to answer because it can be looked at from many different angles. As I try to answer, I often feel like I’m holding up a large opaque crystal in front of me, turning it this way and that, until I find an angle that makes sense for this particular listener. I came slowly to the realization that there is no perfect answer, and that Fluidinfo can be many things to many different people. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope: keep turning it until you see it in a way that’s attractive.

I’ll try to explain some of these points of view in later posts. For now, I’ll just give the flavor of some of them.

The many possible views of Fluidinfo do not mean that it is complex. It’s actually very simple. But it has a flexibility and generality that obviously make it difficult to grasp. Even when you do understand it, it’s common to be able to imagine two or three ways you might use it to solve a particular problem. I’m going to save a description of the object model for later, too.

In no particular order then, here are 10 ways of thinking about what Fluidinfo might be, or become.

1. A database with the heart of a wiki: The wiki analogy is strong in some ways: Anyone can add data (but see below), applications can collaborate, data put in a shared place is more valuable, and abstractly there are Fluidinfo objects for every purpose just like there are wiki pages for every subject – all waiting for someone to create them. But the analogy is very poor in others: Fluidinfo has a strong permissions system that can prevent others from changing or even seeing your data, there is a query language, and content is typed. So Fluidinfo has the flavor of a wiki, but when you get right down to it almost everything is quite unlike a wiki.

There is an interesting related question here. The world of encyclopedias was tightly controlled, and very few people were allowed to write – the encyclopedia was the ultimate read-only authority. Comically, it seemed, Wikipedia was the exact opposite. Yet in the space of a few years, the unthinkable had happened: Wikipedia had eclipsed even the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica. Can Fluidinfo do for applications and traditional databases what Wikipedia did for humans and traditional encyclopedias? You don’t have the rigid tables or schema, anyone can write, content can evolve, and there is no top down control.

2. A metadata store for everyone and everything: Fluidinfo has a special about tag. You can use it to ask for the object that’s about something, like a URL or an ISBN number. That gives applications an easy shared place to put things about other things – i.e., to store metadata. The metadata can be users’ customization or personalization information, ratings, opinions, whatever.

3. A store of concepts: Concepts are very fluid: they don’t have owners, you don’t ask for permission to add to them, they have no formal structure or central piece of content, they can be organized in many ways, and they have no pre-defined set of qualities or attributes. Exactly the same can be said of Fluidinfo objects.

4. A platform for mashups: When a programmer makes a mashup, combining information from different sources to create information about something, where should that new information be stored? The usual answer today is to put the new information in a database, behind a new API, to document it, to get a server, to keep it running. In effect this is just making another hoop for future programmers to jump through to make an additional mashup. In Fluidinfo you can put the new information with the old—because objects don’t have owners. And that’s where it’s probably most valuable, because it’s then immediately available to be mashed up with other data on the same object, and search can target heterogeneous (i.e., mashed up) data on the same object.

5. A way of storing social graphs: Because users each have a Fluidinfo object associated with them, it is very easy to build social graphs. For example, user Andy might put an andy/i-follow tag onto the object for user Betty. If you have a few people doing that, interesting queries are then immediately possible—both within and across social networks.

6. A new way of organizing information: When we organize things, we are creating new information. Normally we store that new information elsewhere. When you can store it on the objects that are being organized, lots of nice things happen. I have an upcoming blog post that I’m tempted to title “Multiple simultaneous non-conflicting dynamic sharable organizations.” A bit of a mouthful, but nevertheless true.

You can also build all data structures from tags in Fluidinfo. They’re slower to use than data structures in a typical program, but where you lose in speed you gain in flexibility.

7. Something that frees us from APIs/UIs: APIs and UIs are usually regarded in a positive way: they make getting to information easy for programs and people. But they also control us. We can only do what they allow and what they anticipate. Tight limits are imposed on us in getting to our own data. Fluidinfo can change this: you can own your own data, you can always add data and customize, and you can directly search on anything you like.

8. A communication system: You can look at Fluidinfo objects as places for cooperating applications to exchange information. The information could be messages, jobs and results, etc. Nicholas Radcliffe, who has understood Fluidinfo for years, today found a new pleasing angle to look at it from, as a Twitter for data.

You could easily use a Fluidinfo object as a voting box, with some nice properties (e.g., retract or change your vote, verify that someone voted without being able to read their vote). And you can do more complex things, too.

9. An evolutionary data system: Fluidinfo allows reputation, trust, and convention to evolve. Its namespaces, tags, and users all have objects, and these give natural places to accumulate fitness information. Conventions will evolve for naming and tag values, just as they do for tags and hashtags. Selection pressure will take care of fixing ambiguities exactly to the extent that it’s important and worthwhile to fix them.

10. An alist on everything: One of the oddest moments ever in trying to explain Fluidinfo came when talking to Paul Graham. After at least 10 minutes of trying to find an angle for him, he finally said “oh, I get it. It’s an alist on everything.” I smiled, breathed a sigh of relief, and said yes. Well why didn’t you say so? replied Paul. Just goes to show you can never have too much background in computer science.

This is the first in a series of posts that will describe why we’ve built Fluidinfo and what we think it’s good for.

Fluidinfo exists, in part, to address an increasingly apparent mismatch. Humans are extremely social, almost inescapably social. I won’t go into evolutionary history, though. Many of us also use computers that are connected to the internet. Sitting in Barcelona, I can now connect to a machine on the other side of the world in milliseconds. We all can.

Put billions of intensely social humans in front of computers connected to a global network that ties them all together, and what do you get? Humans trying to be social using computers.

The mismatch—and the missing piece—is social data.

I don’t think we can get to truly social data while applications maintain tight control over their data. Even calling it their data is likely wrong, as much of the data ingested and stored by applications comes from users and might be in a sense owned by the user. But even that is wrong: how can you own information? You can only think you own it.

These days applications are increasingly open. But things are still far too locked down. The standard way to open one’s data today is to provide an API to let others get at it. But custom APIs are not the answer to truly social data. An API, like a user interface, only lets you do to information what the people controlling access have decided to allow you to do. You can only do what’s been anticipated. You often have to ask permission. You can’t add things to the data as you please.

Data will only be truly social when you can work with it in the kinds of ways we work with information in the real, non-computational, world. In the real world we don’t ask for permission to have an opinion on something, to add to the ball of information surrounding a concept. Our needs don’t have to be anticipated by programmers. We can share information as we please. For example, nobody owns the concept of Barcelona. If I want to essentially “tag” Barcelona as being hot, or noisy, or beautiful, I just do it. I can keep my opinion private, I can share it with certain others, I can hold conflicting opinions, I can organize things in multiple ways at the same time and give things many names.

Fluidinfo lets you do all of the above, and then some.

The main way in which it does this is by changing the control over information. In Fluidinfo, objects (which can correspond to anything – web pages, files, people, movies, ideas, etc) do not have an owner. Any application or user is free to add information to any object. There’s a strong and flexible permissions system—but permissions are applied at the level of the tags (with values) on objects, not at the level of the object itself.

The reason this is so different and much more social is that Fluidinfo gives applications and their users a world in which they can always contribute information. It can take us from a default read-only world to one in which we can all write. Without stopping to ask if it’s ok, and without anyone having to anticipate what we might one day want to do.

In a world of truly social data, any user will be able to customize or personalize anything. You’ll be able to say “I ate there” or “that’s cool” or “that sucks!” or “I know that person” or “I want one of them” or “I’ve read that” or “Hey mum, look at this” or …. or do pretty much whatever you want. I can think of hundreds of examples, making them up at will—you only have to think of the kinds of things you’re used to doing in the real world. Your contributions will be just as important as any other. You’ll be able to search based on your data, or any selection of your friends’ data. You’ll be able to combine your information with heterogeneous information created by others. You’ll be able to augment, organize, and selectively share information as you please.

The nonexistence of truly social data is the huge missing piece in the puzzle of today’s computer applications. It’s the pain we’re all feeling, but which we’re so used to that we don’t realize it. The problem won’t be solved at the level of the application. Truly social data will be the foundation of a new class of applications that all benefit by storing at least some of their information into a common social data architecture. The ones that don’t will be left behind. Because when you think about it, all data is social.

And you can guess the rest: That’s what Fluidinfo is all about. Stay tuned.