Patreon - Dev Notes, the First

So, for the past few weeks I've been working towards an inaugural game for the Patreon page I'm aiming to set up; it's one part demoing to patrons how much I can deliver in the 4-6 weeks I expect each game to take, and two parts showing myself how much I can get through in 4-6 weeks. The longest (unpaid) projects I've actually run to completion are 48hr game jams, and as those usually involve less than an hour's sleep a day, they're probably not the best yardstick...

The current project is nicknamed "Lander", having started as a remake of the classic Atari arcade game Lunar Lander and spiralled into the illegitimate lovechild of Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program.
Long story short, it's a sandbox game in which you build rockets, fly into space and explore some PCG planets; but unlike (for example) KSP, you do everything from a first-person perspective - the terrain is a big, voxelly map that you can rebuild into scaffolds and launch pads, and (if I hit enough milestones) convert into resources for building your rockets. I think the lack of central build & launch location (unless you make one), with the ability to build & rebuild vehicle wherever you are, should give this a very different atmosphere to some of the existing space flight simulators.

The plan is to get a workable feature finished every Monday, Wednesday & Friday (with corresponding blog update) to stop me getting lost down a rabbit-hole of quaternions like I have with Lander - anyhow, that's the quick intro, next up is the current progress report.

Ludum Dare 26

It was Ludum Dare 26 last week - wasn't terribly keen on the theme of "Minimalism", which seemed to push people in three directions - a literal interpretation, with minimalist art & music; token gestures, where they did whatever the hell they felt like and put "minimal" in the title; and abstract, where minimalism was a feature of the game setting - e.g. the villain you're fighting is a minimalist. Didn't see many where the theme inspired a novel game design; especially annoying is that they've already had this theme for a previous LD.

Anyhow, my offering can be found at http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=8404

I also wrote a quick post-mortem here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/29/ludum-dare-26-post-mortem/

Algorithm for Dividing a 2D Space into Convex Polygons

I'm writing this down mainly as an aide-mémoire, and because I can't find the solution online anywhere - I can't imagine it isn't out there, because I'm trying to solve a fairly basic problem, so I'm possibly using the wrong terminology in my search.

In any case, I have a simple engine for moving a player character round a 2D game map which is split into convex polygons/cells linked by portals/doors; I'm also working on a game that, in essence, allows a player to build and walk round their own spaceship. To fit these two together, I need an algorithm that will take the outline of an area of the ship (itself a convex polygon), a set of walls that the player has added (straight edges within that area) and divide the outline into a set of convex cells such that none overlap a wall, and that any edges between cells that are not walls are marked as portals between them.

My five-minute, scribbled on a PostIt note algorithm is:

• Every wall lies along a line that bisects the outline area into two parts. Filter out all walls that bisect the area such that any other wall overlaps both parts.
• For each remaining wall, select the set of walls that most evenly divide the other walls (from the full set) between the two parts.
• Pick a wall at random from that set and split the outline area into two new areas, adding portals along the dividing line where appropriate, and group the remaining walls from the full set into each area.
• Repeat this algorithm for both new areas with their reduced wall set.

Notes:

There are two special cases - where two walls are in line with each other, and two walls directly intersect. The latter case is probably easiest to prohibit, and the former case is handled by only including one of the two walls in the selection process, but remembering to include the second wall as a non-portal edge when splitting the area.

The Social Graph Pt3: Inversion of Control

(This post is part three of a series: here's part one & part two)

Okay, I've had my rant and ramble about the current situation with Web 2.0 social networks, what I think the Social Graph is and why I think the existing implementations don't match up to the reality; so now I'm going to propose my idea for where we should go next.

The core of this idea is that a social network is comprised of many different services, each of which is atomic¹ (though potentially inter-dependent). The central, quintessential service is the identity provider - a service that can vouch for you, presenting an online identity. When you use Sign In with Twitter or Facebook Connect, that's an identity provider in action.

An extension of the identity provider is the claims provider; this service handles the permissions that you give to the services you use. For example, a service may wish to send you notifications (via a notification service), but to do so it requires permission from you. So that it doesn't have to contact you every time to ask permission (which would just be ironic, given that it's asking permission to contact you in the first place) that service can contact the claims service and be issued a claim token (a digitally signed piece of data essentially saying "Service X may perform action Y") that it keeps hold of and presents to other services (like the notification service) to prove that you gave permission back when you registered. This is the same as the permission options that you get for Facebook apps, allowing an app to post on your timeline, send you emails, read your profile data, et cetera. In essence, the claims service controls which other services can perform tasks on your behalf or access your data.

This leads on to some of the other requisite services for a functional social network; you'll need a profile service that shares your personal information (given appropriate permissions, of course); a notification service that feeds information back to you via SMS, email or in-app notifications; a contacts services, which stores your list of friends, follows, "circles" and so on, acting as a claims service but for other identities, and as a routing map, saying who can see what parts of your profile, follow your feed or receive updates from you (storing the structures of the Social Graph); a feed/publishing service, that lets you share those statuses and updates; a photo-sharing/file-sharing service; a tagging service; and so on.

Of course, none of this is especially revolutionary, and already exists explicitly (as in Facebook) or implicitly (as in the ecosystem around Twitter). Where it gets interesting is when we consider the case of services interacting with each other in the abstract terms above.

Let's say I sign up to one of the newspaper apps that seem to have sprung up on Facebook recently. The app wants to know who I am, presumably to track my usage and which articles I read, so I type in my identity name (an example might be my email address, or my blog URL) then click the big sign-in button; it goes off to the identity server and verifies my identity (using an established process like OpenAuth or OpenID), then lets me in and I can go read articles. However, the newspaper app also wants to contact me; perhaps to let me know when new articles are published, or that someone has replied to a comment I posted. To do this, it needs to know how I want to be contacted; in this example, we're using the notification service which holds information about my contact details and preferences - the notification service I'm using (in this example) batches up my notifications and sends them in an hourly email. Someone else, using a different notification service, signs up to the newspaper app; they receive their notifications as SMSs. Both notification services implement a standard NotificationAPI v1.0, so all the newspaper app requires from me and the guy who prefers SMSs is the URL of our distinct notification services, and we then each get our customised notification behaviours. This is not unlike the drop-down in TweetDeck that allows me to pick which photo-sharing service I want to use (as mentioned back in part 2).

The downside to this approach is that every time I sign up to a new service or application, I have to configure it with all the different services in my customised social network that it happens to need; if it depends on a lot of services, this would be a nightmare. Equally, if I decide that actually, my notification service provider sucks and want to switch, I'd have to go round all my other services & reconfigure them. This leads, logically, to the need for a service provider service (mmm, metaservices) which keeps track of the different services that I use for different purposes. My identity service will likely know which service provider service (and claims provider service) I use, and all the other services I sign up to can then find out, via the identity service, which other service to use for each different purpose. In our newspaper app example, the app would contact my identity service to verify who I am & find out where my claims service & service provider service are; contact the claims provider to get permission to contact me; then contact the service provider service to find out which service to use for notifications. All of this happens entirely out of sight of the user, excepting the specific moments when user input is required - when the identity service needs the user to input their password, and the claims service checks with the user that the newspaper app is legit.

In a general sense, again, none of this is revolutionary. This pattern is already commonly used in software development - see dependency injection and inversion of control; and it's that latter concept that I think is so important. By controlling the injection of dependencies (e.g. providing your own choice of notification service) into the applications & services you're using, control of your social network switches from the service providers (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.) back to you. With interoperability via an open, published set of API standards, by returning control of each user's social networking platform to the user, it is possible to produce a free (or, at least, freer) market of services that users can combine to suit their needs and preferences; and diminish the barriers to data flow through the Social Graph.

There's plenty more detail to the design than that, of course; how different types of service can be described and denoted, how evolving standards (does your notification service support NotificationAPI v2.0?) are handled, how we bootstrap new users without presenting them with a hundred drop-downs (which notification service do you want? And your file-sharing service? And your URL shortener? Which flavour of sommelflange takes your fancy?), but I've covered the core of the concept. The next stage is to build a proof of concept, a small ecosystem of services from which you can devise your own social networking platform - another item for my long list of projects - so I'll update as that matures and hopefully have something to demonstrate as summer progresses. Feel free to get in touch if this sounds like something you'd like to help with, as there's plenty of work to do... ;-)

[1] Atomic in this sense meaning that a service is not coupled to or bundled with another service; and that it provides one (type of) service only. A service host might provide multiple services, but there's no requirement to use them all if you only need one. e.g. a photo-hosting service just hosts photos - it doesn't provide tagging, and a separate photo-tagging service is required for that.

Non-Euclidean Software

I've finally moved into this contracting gig and formed my own company: Non-Euclidean Software. Yes, the name is Lovecraft in-joke. No, it's not a very funny joke. Yes, the website is just a placeholder. I'll get round to adding some relevant bits like access to my open-source projects and the like when I have a free evening.

The Social Graph Pt2: Facebook is a Big Truck (in a Walled Garden)

And we're just dumping all our data on it.

(This post is my (somewhat belated) follow-up to an earlier ramble about viewing the Social Graph as an active medium and not just dataset.)

Imagine you wanted to send an email to someone; you have a GMail account and they have a Hotmail account. Sadly, you can't; you have to sign up with Hotmail (or, perhaps, convince your friend to switch to GMail) because in this world, email providers don't talk to each other. To be able to talk with everyone, you'd have to have multiple accounts - then again, you may already, because each email provider bundles additional value-add services along with email. Of course it's not actually integrated with the email service, so much as it is bound to the identity that your email address represents, but it's still an integral part of one service competing with another.

You will likely have realised I'm drawing an analogy of the current ecosystem of monolithic social networks - you cannot send a Direct Message from Twitter to a friend on Facebook¹; the more astute (and elderly, and probably also American) among you, however, will realise that I'm describing something that actually happened, back in the early days of the public Internet (80s to early 90s). The early ISP-equivalents peddled proprietary email, forums and file transfer services that only functioned within their networks; my experience of this was with CompuServe in '94, though by this point the ISPs were integrating more and it was only a couple of years before Internet access was opened up fully - I think I got my first Hotmail address in '96/97.

There are various flaws to this approach, some more obvious than others. An immediate issue is the network effect - if all my friends are on service A, I'm likely to join that service; but if a new service starts up with an amazing new feature, I need to drag all my friends across to make it worthwhile. And, as Google+ is discovering, the nature of the Social Graph as a dataflow network means that having friends on a network isn't enough - there has to be content being generated and flowing through the graph to make it worthwhile.
I've always been a believer² in the free market and would argue that customer lock-in stifles innovation & choice, while choice empowers users and enables them to fight back against abuses of power; and when we're talking about services that facilitate the flow of information, I would argue that partitioning dataflow networks can have as great an impact on the development of society as putting up physical barriers³.

But there are other, more integral factors. The issue of security is well-explained in this XKCD comic; essentially, the more services I sign up to the more risk there is of my identity being compromised. The solution to this is already in place - Facebook, Twitter and other services are allowing integration through Facebook Connect, OpenAuth & OpenID that opens their identity service to other service providers, resulting in an improved user experience (one-click "sign-ups"), improved security (as your username & password is only held by one service) & reduced fragmentation (as your identity on different services remains constant across all). This openness empowers and enables users to switch freely between identity providers without impacting their experience of a given service; just as I was able to switch between BT & VirginMedia as my internet providers without my access to the Internet changing (beyond, of course, an increase in speed on a cable connection - the distinction here being between quality of service & nature of service), I was able to switch from an LJ login to a GMail login when using StackOverflow, and my experience of the service remained the same (note that here we must distinguish between my identity as an individual (which is what StackOverflow cares about) and the identities presented by LJ & GMail distinctly, which function more as aspects or façades).

Indeed, the question of choice is central to the problem with modern social networks. If you don't like Facebook's handling of private data or their use of advertising to monetise their service, your choice is to stay or to leave; to have or have not. If you have concerns about Twitter's censorship policies or Google's data gathering, your choice is to have or have not. There are numerous issues, from constantly changing UIs to the ever-waiting Fail Whale to freedom of speech, that can only be tackled when users have the choice to have this or have that.

There is (and has been, slowly developing, over the past year or two) a movement to decentralise & distribute the functionality provided by the monolithic service providers. Consider this blog post on the move to federated social networks, the Diaspora* project (and on Wikipedia), a distributed, user-hosted social network, or YaCy, a decentralised search engine. It an important step, and with enough time (and a good UX) these projects should help us to dislodge the grip of monolithic Web 2.0 services; there is, however, a further step required in this process, and you can see it developing in the ecosystem of services around Twitter.

In addition to the core micro-blogging functionality of Twitter, references to other media are now possible through the emergence of dedicated value-add services (e.g. TwitPic, TwitVid, Deck.ly) or the filtering of existing media hosting (YouTube, web-comics, blogs, online news, etc.) through URL-shorteners⁴. Twitter clients are now integrating with a range of these to provide wider (and yet seamless) functionality to users, but without necessarily constraining users to a specific service. This quick snapshot of the TweetDeck options page shows this choice in action; there's two types of service that TweetDeck can consume, but the choice of which specific service provider is up to me. We're seeing two parallel developments in progress here:

• The ability for software (in this case a client, but potentially services) to consume other services⁵ on behalf of a user (and their associated identity)
• The ability for users to build & customise a conglomerate social networking service that provides the specific functionality that they need, whilst remaining completely compatible with everyone else's custom social network

The move to integrate services in this way is amply demonstrated by If This Then That, a Yahoo-Pipes-Lite that allows users to build active links between their services. IFFT uses a set of purpose-built adaptors for each type of interaction, but by using the standardised interfaces & APIs for content sharing & notifications that are in development by the federated social network projects, this can all be generalised and made freely interoperable.

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Right, it's taken nearly two months of talking to people and rewriting to get this post this far, so I'll pause here and promise a third & final part with my thoughts on the ideal solution...well, it'll take less than two months, anyway.

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[1] Indeed, a "friend" or a "subscribe" on Facebook is an entirely different and incompatible concept to a "follow" on Twitter.

[2] In the same sense that I believe free speech is generally beneficial if you're not a dick about it, as opposed to the way I believe in dinosaurs (they existed, but I doubt they'd be beneficial to the economy).

[3] Hmmm, that's probably worth a rant of its own. Adam Smith's Division of Digital Labour?

[4]The passing of data references (Pass/Call by Sharing) is a familiar concept to programmers, enabling developers to manipulate and exchange heavyweight objects (large data files like images & videos) using only lightweight references (URLs in this context).

[5]Oh, my goodness! Shut me down! Machines making machines. How perverse.

The Social Graph is a Series of Tubes

Okay, this one is a bit of a stream of consciousness, so bear with me.

So I was reading this, a rant on why the Social Graph is something of a misnomer, and it stirred up some thoughts that I've been mulling for the past year or so. Note that I don't actually agree with several things the article had to say, but that's a post for another time; instead I'll respond to some specific points that were made and the train of thought those kicked off.

"In order to model something as a graph, you have to have a clear definition of what its nodes and edges represent. In most social sites, this does not pose a problem. The nodes are users, while edges means something like 'accepted a connection request from', or 'followed', or 'exchanged email with', depending on where you are.

The way you interpret this is another matter - does clicking 'follow' imply you're friends with someone in real life?"

There's a few points in the article where the author questions the nature of the arcs or links in the social graph, and what those represent - sadly missing the equally complex discussion of what a node represents, and how this relates to issues of personal identity online and the many façades we use - and while the discussion oversimplifies somewhat, the point is generally sound: the links between people cannot be simplified to or interpreted as Is Friend/Is Not Friend (or some variant thereon) and they are intrinsically dynamic (indeed, it is a lack of activity that can cause the greatest change in interpersonal relationships). A point that the author skirts but fails to deliver specifically is that the Social Graph as espoused by, for example, Facebook, deliberately (and vocally) misinterprets the links that its users create and destroy. When I "friend" someone, it's because I want to see the information they're sharing; I want to follow them. When I "unfriend" someone, it's not usually because I'm no longer friends with them - there's plenty of people linked to my Facebook account with whom I have no interaction at all - it's because I'm tired of listening to their shit. The status updates you've been posting for the past few weeks are actually really offensive, and I don't want to hear them any more; it's just a difference of opinion, and I'm not going to stop being your "real life" friend because we disagree on something, but I don't want to subscribe to your thoughts on the matter. You only use Twitter to play Echo Bazaar; there's nothing wrong with that and we're still friends, but there's no signal and all noise in your feed. We've broken up, and whilst we've resolved to stay friends, I don't especially want to see the pictures of your annoyingly handsome new boyfriend.

Changing the links between myself and the people I "follow", "friend" or otherwise is, to me, not a matter of keeping my data up-to-date in the same way as changing my relationship status, my address or my profile picture, it's about changing my experience of the service. I'm not expressing the status quo, I'm not describing the actual Social Graph (which is definitely an actual thing, even if we've not found it yet) I'm building a dataflow network. Google+ has started to grasp this with the Circles mechanism, allowing me to distinguish between the people I trust to see my information (friends), the people with something interesting to say (followees), and the overlaps between them. But I contest the article's implicit assertion that the links in the Social Graph (as present in social networks) are nouns, "friend of", "lover of", "enemy of", "employer of"; instead, I say they are actions, verbs. My links say things like "trust", "follow", "ignore", "inform". I'm telling the social network to do something, I'm building a set of pipes through which I can broadcast, send, receive & transform data.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that the Social Graph is not the data, it's the medium. A friendship, a relationship, an emnity, these are not tags or metadata, they're processes, they're impellers, they're agents of change and movement.
Is that the difference between Amazon Recommendations/Google Ad-Targeting and viral marketing? Because the former uses the Social Graph as data, churns it through an engine and tries to drive itself along those lines, while the latter lets the natural forces of human society carry the message?

"One big sticking point is privacy. Do I really want to find out that my pastor and I share the same dominatrix? If not, then who is going to be in charge of maintaining all the access control lists for every node and edge so that some information is not shared? You can either have a decentralized, communally owned social graph (like Fitzpatrick envisioned) or good privacy controls, but not the two together."

Yes. And also, no. But mainly, sort of.

The present system of social networks lumps all the data in one, big central pile; there's a service out there, somewhere, on the net to which you send all your private details. This service is also the identity authority; you get a username and password to identify yourself, but it's up to Facebook, Twitter or whoever to decide if you are who you say you are. As an identity, you then ask the central service to allow or deny other identities access to your data. It's an entire world in a box, massively centralised and under the absolute authoritarian control of the service. This means the privacy policy of that particular service can be absolutely enforced, but it does mean sending all your private data to Mark Zuckerberg.

I'm loathe to comment overmuch about the author's apparent assumptions around privacy and control in the Semantic Web alternative; I need to read the essay by Fitzpatrick in more detail (though at first glance it seems to explicitly leave the topic of private data as an known requirement to be resolved in future) and the article provides no justification for the statements quoted above. But I do believe that a better standard of privacy and control can be achieved if the responsibility for managing data and identities is transferred to (and made practical for) users. I still believe that as Web2.0 features user-generated content, Web3.0 will feature user-published content; just as content generation has decentralised, so will content publishing; that we will all be our own YouTubes, Facebooks et cetera.

Okay, I've got to go do something social, so I'll be back in a bit to finish of this post with the actual endpoint of my train of thought; but in the meantime, here's a list of the all functionality I could think of that a social network would need to provide:

• A Feed: I want to share a stream of short statuses/tweets, links to articles, videos, et cetera. I also want to reshare things that have been shared with me.
• Content hosting: I've generated some of the content that I'm sharing, and I need to host it. Further, the act of sharing content is content in and of itself.
• Data sharing: I want to share information about myself. That may be my age, address, relationship status, or my dating proclivities, or where I am in the world, or my CV, or whatever. In a sense, this is just another form of content, but it's a specific format of content to which social networks cater.
• Identity: I need my content to be identifiable and attributable as mine. If someone re-shares my content, I want my identity to stay attached to it. Note that identity does not implicitly equate to me as a person; I may have several online identities, or an identity may belong to several people (like a company or brand).
• Privacy: I need to control who gets to see what content, and - so far as possible - the period of time for which they have that access. My friends get to see all my personal data, but a potential employer can see my contact details and CV for a few weeks after I submit a job application. That control should not be affected by the channels on which I share content; especially, it should not be affected by who chooses to reshare it.

Anything I've missed?