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The Internet

It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up 231

Posted by CmdrTaco from the heard-that-before dept.
edmicman notes that "Wired has an article, "Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up", that calls for the greater programming community to create a truly "open" social network. Specifically, the problems with today's networks, says the author, is that their content is not available to everyone."
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It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up More

It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up

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  • As you can see (Score:5, Funny)

    by UncleWilly ( 1128141 ) * <UncleWilly07NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:06AM (#20130195)
    I will be out to dinner tonight at 8pm, so that will be a good time to rob my house.
    • ...as in non-proprietary, does not mean that there are no access controls whatsoever.

      Of course any reasonable open implementation would allow you to make certain things visible only to certain people.
    • On it! Thanks!

  • 6 Billion users.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pthor1231 ( 885423 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:07AM (#20130213)
    I wasn't aware almost everyone in the world had internet access....
  • Ok FOAF isn't really up to par with facebook, but I think it gives the right direction. RDF would allow people to create networking sites that'd be open to everyone, encryption might enable information to be available only to member of special groups etc. The key idea is to decentralize information.

  • knock yourself out (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu.gmail@com> on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:09AM (#20130247) Journal

    I'm not sure what the complaint really is here. Market forces and web site design combined to create places like Facebook, people signed up, and it was successful? Alternative ideas are better, but haven't worked?

    The article raises interesting points but I'm not sure there's any "there" there. If you build it, they will come. If they like it.

    Don't discount some of the suggestions in the article will emerge, but market and social forces prevail. As long as these social networking metaphors are popular and users come and go of their own free will, life is good.

    I'm not sure the sublime or transcendental solution Wired seeks exists, or should. The internet is a network, electronic. It's a powerful tool. (..., the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes.(!)) I'm not sure life was meant to be played out on the internet, anyway.

    (For the record, I'm no big fan of these web sites... I think they're more fad than substance, but I embrace others' freedom to participate.)

    • Re:knock yourself out (Score:5, Informative)

      by pthor1231 ( 885423 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:15AM (#20130333)
      After reading the article, it really looks like it's just this guy whining about being really lazy.

      Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

      Honestly, how hard is it to sign up for a facebook account now. You don't even need a school email, just an email. Everyone could have access if they wanted to, in about 5 minutes.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by corbettw ( 214229 )
        On top of which, you can create a MySpace account and leave it open to the world. Or, gee, maybe create your own web site and/or blog yourself or one of a billion services. I don't get what problem this guy thinks exists.
      • Frankly, I think closed is a desirable feature in this case. Aren't people already complaining about a loss of privacy from use of social networking sites? Opening up that data could automate that whole process, allowing for automated spidering of user pages and wholesale data aggregation.

        Data monkey that I am, I'd be interested in playing around with that stuff, (e.g. "The phrase "Hooked Up" is 32% more common on the pages of male users than female users") but I don't for a second think that anyone who use

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Iron Condor ( 964856 )

          I think closed communities are inevitable,

          I would go one further ans say that it is the boundaries that define a community. Something that is totally open isn't a "community" at all. What would it mean for some group to be a community if there is nothing and nobody that is not a member of that community?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by suggsjc ( 726146 )

            What would it mean for some group to be a community if there is nothing and nobody that is not a member of that community?

            A human?

            Without getting too deep here, while all people are created with the same rights, all people are *not* created equal. We all have unique characteristics that define who we are as humans, as individuals. If you can show me someone who says they have no prejudices, then I'll show you a liar. That may sound harsh, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MSG ( 12810 )
        how hard is it to sign up for a facebook account now.

        Why should you have to? There's no good reason to require that I have an account on every damned social web site, for the privilege of seeing what my own friends want to share with me.

        I'll say that again: the customers of the web site want to share things with their friends, and the current structure makes that hard. Social networks aren't providing their users with what they want.

        I'm all in favor of using a distributed identity system like OpenID [openid.net] so th
        • But the fact of it is, facebook has been pretty successful so far without having a more open scheme. If your friends really want to share stuff with you online with the convience of you not having to sign up for anything, they can grab a MySpace (or any other social networking service that allows anon access) and share there. Just saying Facebook needs to open up because doesn't really make for a great argument. I would agree with you, if there weren't currently other sites that allow this, but there are
          • But there you have no access controls. He wants something that supports access control but lets the user log in with OpenID or otherwise authenticate without a separate account.

        • Re:knock yourself out (Score:4, Informative)

          by PFI_Optix ( 936301 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:50AM (#20130811) Journal
          Facebook and Myspace allow you to share content with unregistered users. They also allow you to restrict it so that only your friends can see it. This is a good thing.

          I think the only thing networking sites could do to be more "open" is to become interoperable: Allow Facebook users to add MySpace users as friends. Of course, that sounds like it would be a royal PITA and would require a whole new standard be developed, but hey...open is good, right?

          There's nothing wrong with things as they are today. If you want to make your information public, get a blog. If you want to share something with just a few friends, use whatever networking site they use.

        • Why should you have to? There's no good reason to require that I have an account on every damned social web site, for the privilege of seeing what my own friends want to share with me.
          You actually don't have to. I post all of my photos I want to share on facebook. My parents don't have a facebook account. Nevertheless, they are able to view the album if I give them the URL to the album.

      • Honestly, how hard is it to sign up for a facebook account now.

        It's not hard like Fermat's last theorem hard, but there is some psychological resistance to overcome in signing up for the hundredth throw away account. Also, there is a certain amount of rudeness in putting up content in a walled garden that you then expect others to look at and comment on, even if they are not in the network themselves.

        -Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

      • Shoot, that's the whole reason I got on Myspace in the first place. Set the profile to where only your friends can view it, the monitor who your friends are. If I wanted the whole world to be able to see what I posted, I could just goto Geocities or something. Yeah, I have my own .com, and have a few things set up in areas where it requires a username and password to access it, but why bother anymore? Everyone I know has myspace, just approve them as friends, and they can see the stuff that I don't want th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by makomk ( 752139 )
        It's not a question of how hard it is to sign up for a Facebook account. It's "how hard is it to sign up for a Facebook account, a Myspace account, a Livejournal account (plus accounts on the various Livejournal clone sites), a Xanga account, an Orkut account, a Friendster account, ... and remember the usernames and passwords for them all".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by masdog ( 794316 )
        Last time I checked, there was a way to share photos and videos posted to Facebook with people who didn't have accounts or didn't want to sign up.

  • Well... real-life social networks aren't open (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Yold ( 473518 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:11AM (#20130289)
    Something that I was actually thinking about this morning is why are people friends with some, and not with others. Its because most people use their friends to feel better about themselves. I'm not saying they abuse their friends, I had a shitty weekend and sitting around laughing with my buddies on Sunday night at the bar made me feel amazingly better.
      My point is, I had this feeling of "this is us, these are my friends and this is where I belong". It took me about a year and a half to become a fully-accepted member of this social group.
      It wouldn't suprise me if the future trend of social networks is to become more and more closed off and exclusive. Like having to do interviews and personality tests to see if you are accepted into the group.
     
    • Concur. To drop an example, I like the fact that LiveJournal has a slightly exclusive feel. Quite a bit of actual dialogue going on.
      /. occasionally lets in a bit of information, but is more often a source of belly laughs.
    • I don't think the suggestion is that these sites be "open" in the sense that anyone can view and participate in your "social group". Rather, the suggestion I think is that these things should be able to interoperate, so that your profile didn't "belong to" Facebook or Myspace. As in, you could have your one profile that could be used in any social network you want. At least, something more like that than what we have now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by makomk ( 752139 )
      Just because the social networks formed on the sites are closed doesn't mean the sites themselves have to be. Unfortunately, the article misses that distinction. Remember, your real-life social networks aren't dependant on the goodwill of a large corporation whose interests don't quite align with your own and which doesn't care any more about you than it does about any of the several other million users.
    • I think he's arguing for open-standards, interoperable social networking. The "open" that he's talking about is very much the way that real social networks work. In the real world, you can call and speak and make friends with anyone in the world. The major limitation is pretty much language, which is something that would be very hard to change. From there, you can choose who you want to be in your social networks.

      I just don't think he explained himself very well, or made a very strong argument for his case.

  • Its the "club" syndrome. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BiggestPOS ( 139071 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:12AM (#20130303) Homepage
    I think part of the reason these sites are so popular is because they are *not* open. People like feeling as if they art part of a group, no matter how open that group may be in reality, if there is even a hint of the "velvet rope" effect its generally enough to make people feel special.
    And the general public likes to feel special.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by owlnation ( 858981 )
      Yes, I think you are right.

      Now, I know myspace has been criticized for..., well many things really..., but mainly for having a population base that's considered lower IQ and social status. Where Facebook has been considered to be mainly a graduate type of network.

      However...

      I'm a filmmaker. I am a graduate, and have a pretty good social status. Much as I do agree Myspace is the place where web designers and anything considered good taste goes to die, as a filmmaker it is a very very good tool for ne

  • umm.... yeah..... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:13AM (#20130323) Journal
    I like the comment that Wired "tried to build an open social network, and failed". Makes me think that Wired doesn't have a clue about Social networking in the first place (and why would they?)

    The crux of the complaint here is that in order to view someone's profile on Myspace/Facebook, you need to create an account. I guess I fail to see what's difficult about creating an account on a free service. Concerned about privacy? It's easy enough to set up bogus info. I guess I don't see the argument here.

    Is this just an advertisement for a new social network? Trying to create buzz around something that may fail for the sole reason that we we have is good enough?

    • I guess I fail to see what's difficult about creating an account on a free service. Concerned about privacy? It's easy enough to set up bogus info. I guess I don't see the argument here.
      It's a pain in the ass, and it's unnecesary.
      • If you want to trawl though someones personal social pages then the LEAST you can do is sign up for the service. :(

        Otherwise you'll have millions of trollers, bots, data harvisters and everything else nasty on the insternet glomming onto it instantly.

        But go ahead and build your open social network and see what happens...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by egburr ( 141740 )
      The crux of the complaint here is that in order to view someone's profile on Myspace/Facebook, you need to create an account.

      Correction:
      The crux of the complaint here is that in order to get someone to view your profile on Myspce/Facebook, you need to get them to create an account.

      If they don't already have an account, what incentive does your profile give them to make the effort to create one?


      • Your sparkling personality? I mean really, social networking sites aren't being used by people to find new friends and create new networks. Most of the folks I know on MS/FB have their list of friends filled with people they know and have met, at parties, at school, at work, etc. There are a couple who accept every single random friend request they get, but they are really pretty rare, at least in my group.

        And to all the folks that whine about the information having to be updated in each and every dif

  • BUT WAIT (Score:5, Funny)

    by thedrunkensailor ( 992824 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:15AM (#20130335) Homepage
    If we open up social networking and make it a community effort, who gets to sell it for millions?!?!?!
  • Hardware cost, bandwith etc. are the things that need to be 'available' to get things like this running. And that problem can be fixed in two ways, with advertising, which created the need to restrict access to the data to 'things which can show ads', or through a subscription fee which usually puts of the users en thus kills the data.

    Maybe some P2P system could fix this, but that whould require users to install certain software which generally slows adoption quit a bit.

    Or someone should donate a proper
    • I think that's an interesting angle. A shared hosting sort of thing. Sort of a cross between bit torrent and serving websites. There would be no central website to keep running, (or shut down, for that matter), if everyone is sharing the load of hosting it. I know there are a ton of puzzles to solve to make something like that happen, and it's above and beyond my abilities, but I think if it was going to be a truly "open" network, wouldn't the shared hosting of it make it even more so than having it all on

  • I've been thinking about this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:16AM (#20130349) Homepage

    Part of the reason I've always thought social networking sites were stupid is because it was a weird boundary to keep-- everything has to be on their site. Sure, that makes sense from the point of view of the business running the site, but I don't think it makes sense from a business standpoint.

    It would make more sense to me if people were able to create a set of standards for online profiles, access-controlled by something like OpenID, that could be linked from various sites. That way, I could design my own site, my own profile, my own weblog, keep all my data in one place and under my control, and have the linking between these sites be the "social network".

    I just think it's stupid that, if you want to participate in these communities, you have to go duplicating your data all over the place. I know people who had a profile on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and their own site, and spent a bunch of time trying to keep the profiles in sync. i never joined any because I refuse to take these things seriously until it's an actual open and dynamic way to establish a real social network, rather than a means to generate ad revenue for some creepy company that caters to teeny-boppers and child-molesters.

    • You echo my sentiments exactly: this social networking stuff only makes sense if it saves you time over other forms of networking. Signing up for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Classmates, etc and filling out the same information again and again is what has kept me from adopting any of them.

      It's like instant messaging - unless you are savvy enough to have a product like Trillian, you have to install AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and now things like Skype to keep up with all your friends on the various service

    • Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and their own site, and spent a bunch of time trying to keep the profiles in sync. i never joined any because I refuse to take these things seriously until it's an actual open and dynamic way to establish a real social network, rather than a means to generate ad revenue for some creepy company that caters to teeny-boppers and child-molesters.

      No offense, but for whatever reason, you seem to think that anyone is going to do this for your benefit.
      They aren't.
      They do it for the ad revenue.

      You seem to think that making an appeal to emotion (child molesters, really?) will somehow whitewash the fact that you want what the companies have, for free. Who is going to pay for your "own site, my own profile, my own weblog"? If the answer isn't "ads on the internet" then I guess it'll have to come out of your own pocket.

      P.S. The internet is just a reflectio

      • But nothing in his comment precludes anyone from making money from ads. If MySpace, et al. allowed an import - or better, a sync - from a common content format, then you could use all of these sites without retyping every damn thing into each one. They could still all compete with one another for popularity through trying to be the better tool for creating and sharing the data. You could type a blog entry on your Blogger page and it would automatically update to MySpace and Facebook if the tags match "perso

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dominion ( 3153 )

      Appleseed [sourceforge.net] is a distributed, open source social networking software I've been working on.

  • hmm (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thatskinnyguy ( 1129515 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:19AM (#20130385)
    I think sites like MySpace and some of the others need to focus more on user security before they go all "Facebook". I can't tell you how many people who have come to me with complaints that their accounts got haxor'd because they didn't take precautions and got phished. A good social networking website will be genuinely foolproof before moving on to third party apps.

    • I think sites like MySpace and some of the others need to focus more on user security before they go all "Facebook". I can't tell you how many people who have come to me with complaints that their accounts got haxor'd because they didn't take precautions and got phished. A good social networking website will be genuinely foolproof before moving on to third party apps.

      Perhaps once this is done, they can share the technology with banks [banksafeonline.org.uk], the IRS [cbsnews.com], Blizzard [ezinearticles.com], and everyone else using online authentication.

  • "Open" social networks fail at its users (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:21AM (#20130419)
    While I'm all for the ancient hacker creed of data wanting to be free, it does not work. It simply does not.

    This would first of all require people to actually accept freedom of speech as the freedom of someone whose opinion or attitude they do not agree with. Try to start an open, unmoderated discussion group on a controversal topic (needn't even be abortion or capital punishment, emacs or vi already does the job) and within minutes you'll drown in opinionated, information-twisting and "FACT: I AM RIGHT!" messages.

    Do you want that in your discussion group?

    Not to mention that not much later (or maybe even sooner) you'll drown in important information where you get your penis enhancing products and that Lilly really wants you to see how naked she is on her webpage.

    If people did "behave" in social networks and be civil and rational, it could work. People aren't, though. And for this reason, I reserve the right to choose who may read my messages, who may discuss with me and who I do not want near any place I frequent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Enoxice ( 993945 )
      Congratulations, you just invented Usenet!

    • Statistically, something like 1 in 30 people is a sociopath.

      There you go, I just killed the idea of successfully running a fully open social networking site any time in the near future, right there. Sorry about that.

  • Its the SOCIAL network ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tjp($)pjT ( 266360 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:22AM (#20130433)

    "Specifically, the problems with today's networks, says the author, is that their content is not available to everyone."

    It is a social network not the augmented expose of my life to everyone including the people that may wish me harm network. Dang social engineers think they know better but this is market and society driven. WE CHOOSE as a Social Network the places we want to expose ourselves and how much and most importantly to whom we will expose our information, and in some sites liked Linked-In some people see more than others. I LIKE IT THAT WAY. (sorry shouting at an ignorant pseudo-pundit, he may be smart but he is still clueless)

  • The article doesn't address privacy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rascher ( 1069376 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:22AM (#20130437)
    The article does not address the issue of privacy. Facebook and myspace, and xanga, allow users some amount of granularity to control who can view their personal data, which is one of the draws of these websites. Let me start a blog, post my home address and phone number and who I'm dating on it, and let google index it for spam-harvesters and identity thieves to come get? I don't think so.

  • This is a feature, not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ThousandStars ( 556222 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:22AM (#20130451) Homepage
    Facebook, at least in my experience, is free of spam -- unlike, say, e-mail. Opening up the network would allow all the problems that currently plague e-mail (and, in my much briefer experience prior to deleting my profile, MySpace), thus reducing the value of Facebook to its users. I also trust, within reason, Facebook to not display my personal data to anyone except those on my friend lists. I don't want the "content" available to everyone, which is the whole reason Facebook took off in the first place -- people I want to see my profile can (friends, classmates), and everyone else can't. This article is a call to fight a problem that doesn't exist and that the author will create.
    • Exactly--anyone who wants an open social network can set up a webpage, with profile and all the rest, on his ISP's webserver. Typically they have tools for this, so it's easy. For others to contact him, he can post his email address. That's the ultimate open social network. There is also an even easier way to do this. They are called "blogs" with "comments" and "profile pages." Any moron can get one on Blogger.

      The whole point of social networking sites is that they are closed off from the rest of the Web. I
  • The WWW is already full of standards, right there for anybody to use: FOAF (mentioned before), microformats, and, yes, hyperlinks!

  • My original comments (Score:4, Interesting)

    by edmicman ( 830206 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:32AM (#20130567) Homepage Journal

    Since they cut my comments off of the article summary :-)

    Personally, I don't use either Facebook or MySpace, though I have friends that do. I host my own blog, and communicate with friends via email, IM, and forums. I run my own blog and pic hosting. I've just never really jumped on the social networking bandwagon. Yeah, I'm old school.

    As for this article, I can see both sides. Part of the point of the Facebooks and MySpaces is so that *not just anyone* can view what you put online. Nevermind that I don't really get why you'd post something *private* online in the first place if you didn't expect the world to see it. But the private social networks foster and clique or group mentality where if you're not in the know, you don't know.

    What the point of the article is, though, and which I tend to agree with, is there needs to be a better way to round up your online "identity". Why should I have to sign up for Facebook to keep in touch with some friends, and MySpace for others? Why should I have to be a member of multiple IM services to keep in touch with different people? I have multiple email addresses for different purposes. I have signed up for probably dozens of mailing lists and discussion forums, and have been an active member in more than a handful. Heck, I even signed registered on Slashdot so I can make posts and comments non-anonymously. Why should my online "identity" be fragmented so?

    Of course, the flip side of that is is that due to the fragmentation of my online identity, I still maintain that air of anonymity. I think that actually may be at the root of a lot of the issues going on. By having different email addresses and aliases, I can appear to some audiences as one person, and to others as someone totally different. Even on Facebook and MySpace, would most of those users publish in a real life semi-public place the photos, musings, and thoughts that they write on those sites? Perhaps we would ideally like the convenience of having a central identity, but don't want the accountability of being tied to that central identity? /blockquote

  • Missing the point of Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hansamurai ( 907719 ) <hansamurai@gmail.com> on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:35AM (#20130611) Homepage Journal
    Seriously, the best thing about Facebook is that it's closed to everyone but specific people that I want to allow. Nobody but my friends (or people in my network, Facebook offers a variety of privacy options) know what I'm up to, can see my favorites, or see my wall postings. I don't want random people to know specific things about my life. However, Facebook still allows you to do broad searches on specific fields in specific networks, but you can't access the real information until you become friends.
    • The point is to make APIs so that you can access the data with a defined protocol rather than with a web browser -- one can change the transport, and still keep the same authentication / data limiting~

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RESPAWN ( 153636 )

      Seriously, the best thing about Facebook is that it's closed to everyone but specific people that I want to allow. Nobody but my friends (or people in my network, Facebook offers a variety of privacy options) know what I'm up to, can see my favorites, or see my wall postings. I don't want random people to know specific things about my life. However, Facebook still allows you to do broad searches on specific fields in specific networks, but you can't access the real information until you become friends.

      Exactly! Facebook is nothing more than a convenient way for me to keep in touch with my friends and my extended friends and let them know what's up in my life. I was never big on MySpace. Yeah, I have a profile, but I'm not real keen on the site, partly becuase it seems to be nothing but the digital equivalent of a high school year book. It seems like it's more of a competition to see how many friends you can get than a way to keep in touch with friends. Not to mention, the whole MySpace profile edito

  • > Want to show somebody a video or a picture you
    > posted to your profile? They have to have an account.

    Yup, but that's an enabler, too. For example, you can have an app that allows for conversations to develop around a video [facebook.com]. Rather nice.

    Disclaimer: I helped work on that one, tech details here [blogs.com].
  • Internet detectives are successful and creepy enough as it is even WITH "closed networks."

    Nevermind the fact that he's wrong and you can make your Facebook page (or at the very least your photo albums) open to the whole web. I found this out after mine was accidentally indexed in Google.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by British ( 51765 )
      That's my biggest beef with Facebook: the social norm is to put your REAL FULL NAME there. Oh, and you can put your address, phone number, etc in there too. It's prime identity theft hunting grounds.

  • Closed? A Good Thing! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Monday August 06, 2007 @10:42AM (#20130719) Homepage Journal
    After seeing what most MySpace pages look like, I think it's not such a bad thing that the content on social networking sites is not freely available! And with the API having been opened up to allow the launch of a million and one chintzy and loud page gadgets, I'm not too worried about Facebook being closed either. Besides, wasn't the allure of the social networking sites hanging out and sharing with a few (hundred?) friends, and not the whole friggin internet?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Meostro ( 788797 )
      Facebook being closed is not the reason it looks "good". MySpace being open is not the reason most pages look horrible.

      open != user modifiable
  • The future of social networking isn't about telling everyone what you had for dinner, well, not in the Twitter [twitter.com] way anyway, it's about deriving content from the experience, in other words, writing a review of the restaurant you visited and making it available for syndication, more like Technorati [technorati.com] but with attribution and maybe even reward, or indeed what the original idea of the world wide web was, at a deeper level - where the link was the basic principle of Sir Tim's version of the Web, it becomes the arti

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by joto ( 134244 )
      Uhm, you are taking away the "social" aspect of social networking, and making it into a blog. I can't predict the future, and I certainly can see this happen. After all, a "blog" is what used to be called a regularly updated personal homepage. But if blogging now suddenly gets named "social networking", well what phrase would you use in the future to describe what we nowadays call "social networking"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by simong ( 32944 )
        What the article talks about is the aggregation of social networks, which certainly won't work because Facebook, MySpace, etc etc need eyeballs to pages to generate revenue. I'm probably in the wrong demographic to appreciate the true value of social networks as I'm old and I hate everyone but the only value that I can see of any of these sites is the interconnectedness of small groups of people - Facebook has reunited me with a couple of old friends, which has been nice, and it is the one site that may ser
  • Without even reading TFA, it's obvious that the author doesn't have clue.

    The point of Facebook and similar networks is that access is controlled. The concept of a Friends list is what makes it work.

    A lot of people want a place that will allow people to find them, to even follow what they're doing in their lives, but where they can also restrict who sees how much data. Facebook provides that.

    Critical to understanding this is to realize that our ideas about privacy [community-media.com] are changing rapidly, and differe
  • Keep MySpace off of it. Not because MySpace is awful, or that the users are idiots. But because they insist that everyone know "Tom." Either there'd have to be a list of accounts various systems use for maintenance, or everyone will just put up with being in everyone else's extended social network thanks to fucking Tom.

  • Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

    This guy doesn't get it. That's the whole freaking point of social networking, and why facebook is so popular while MySpace is now languishing.

    I like the fact that when I enter my cell

  • So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref [census.gov]) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref [internetworldstats.com]) to 6Billion overnight!

    To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system [facebook.com] which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does
  • I use Livejournal, and it is annoying that my best friend uses some other blogging format and so can't read my friendslocked entries. But I'll sacrifice her being 100% up-to-date (I'll tell her anything important on phone or IM anyhow) to keep the general public out of some things.

    Livejournal does [livejournal.com] supports OpenID [openid.net], which is basically what the site in this article is trying to do. Basically, with OpenID, if you're a member of any site that uses OpenID then you can use that login on any other site that uses

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by makomk ( 752139 )
      The thing is, they things users can do on LiveJournal with OpenID is severely limited. OpenID comments are treated almost the same as anonymous ones, and I don't think they can join communities or post entries. It's also much, much harder (in fact, impossible on most RSS readers) to read friends-only posts via RSS on an OpenID, since the usual method of doing so requires a proper local account with a username and password.
  • Either the author never got invited to any of the 'cool' parties in high school. Or he's upset that teenage girls can block access to their pages by anonymous older guys.
  • ..is that one day, the State will create a public profile of me on a networking site for everyone to see, and I won't be able to do anything about it.

    I think Facebook/MySpace/Orkut are ways to acclimatise people to the notion that privacy is an outdated concept and we'd better get used to it.
  • Two things that I'd really like to see...

    I'm on Livejournal, and have a lot of friends who are on LJ as well. I know a lot of them also have myspace sites, but I hate myspace and don't want to use it. It'd be nice, though, if I could put their myspace blogs on the friends list for my LJ account and have everything in an RSS feed-like view so I can aggregate my friends blogs (including their protected friends-only posts) regardless of who they're hosted by, whether it be LJ, some other site that runs LJ's

  • I've been working on a project called Appleseed [sourceforge.net] for a couple years now. It's pretty far along, the distributed aspects are all functioning and only require optimization at this point, but it's still not quite out of beta yet.

    As a proof of concept for distributed social networking, it works. Whether it's appleseed or something else, the idea of walled gardens such as MySpace or Facebook will seem as ridiculous as isolated services like Compuserve or Prodigy were.

  • Users probably don't want all of the content from each of their social networks available on all of them. But it would be useful to have a standard mechanism for aggregating messages, announcements, and changes, so you could keep track of what's happening in your world without having to log into all of the things. A pull-type thing, like RSS, rather than a spammy push-type thing.

    A standard format for events with dates, times, and locations would help, so the receiving end could slot them into a calenda

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