diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'old/published/Webmonkey/Monkey_Bites/2007/07.30.07/Fri/facebook.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | old/published/Webmonkey/Monkey_Bites/2007/07.30.07/Fri/facebook.txt | 45 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 45 deletions
diff --git a/old/published/Webmonkey/Monkey_Bites/2007/07.30.07/Fri/facebook.txt b/old/published/Webmonkey/Monkey_Bites/2007/07.30.07/Fri/facebook.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 13f8b54..0000000 --- a/old/published/Webmonkey/Monkey_Bites/2007/07.30.07/Fri/facebook.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,45 +0,0 @@ -Social networks initially took the web by storm because they filled a gap in how people wanted to interact over the internet. - -Facebook, MySpace and Bebo all essentially offer the same service: a way to manage your personal data and keep in touch with the people you know. But in order to get any real value out of a social network, you have to put a bunch of data in -- your photos, your contacts, your social calendar, lists of interests and written thoughts. - -Therein lies the rub. By entering that data into Facebook, you're really just sending it on a one way trip. Need to show somebody a video or a picture you posted in Facebook? Unless they have a Facebook account, they can't see it. Your videos, pictures and all the other tidbits of your life are essentially stranded and cut off from the rest of the web. - -Some social networking companies are challenging the closed Facebook model by offering open platforms where data such as personal contacts, videos and photos can be exported and used elsewhere. - -On Monday, the contact management service Plaxo launched a new social network called Pulse. The service gives Plaxo users a way to manage their interpersonal relationships and show off their interests on a customizable profile page. - -In a sense, Pulse offers the same all-your-data-in-one-place approach of Facebook, but with one crucial difference: It's not walled off. Anything you input directly using Plaxo can be retrieved and used elsewhere as you see fit, and any data you make public is accessible to anyone, regardless of whether or not they have an account. The service is rather limited at the moment, but it's a step in the right direction. - -Also, Pulse is no panacea. What the internet needs is a way to take the features of the social network out of the social network and into the larger world. Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion potential viewers. It's time to take our data out of Mr. McGregor's little garden and put it back where it belongs -- growing free and open on the open web. - -An open platform for social networking is on the horizon. In fact, we're closer than ever before to being able to ditch the locked-in, closed network for good. - -With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that hosts all of the essential stuff one would find on a Facebook profile that can be set up with the same plug-and-play ease. You'll have to store all of your photos, videos, and contacts elsewhere, but at least you'll be able to get to your stuff. - -Start by setting up a blog. Say what's on your mind. Unlike your blog on Facebook or MySpace, everyone will be able to read it. - -From there, you can pull in your photos from Flickr or Zooomr, show off your impeccible musical tastes hosted at iLike or Last.fm, share your favorite web bookmarks from del.icio.us or ma.gnolia and put up a list of your most recent reads using Shelfari or LibraryThing. - -All of these servies have open APIs, making it easy for third-party developers to build widgets for displaying public data stored there. As a result, a dearth of such tools exist. - -Need to keep up to date with your friend's activities? Pull in a feed from their blog or from their Twitter page. The Upcoming event notification service has a dead simple code generator that will create a widget listing all of the events you plan to attend, as well as those your friends are interested in. Like to chat? Meebo offers an embeddable widget for AIM chatting, and Jaxtr does the same for SMS. You can even drop in a Skype button that lets your friends call you with one click. - -One of Facebook's unique features is the "everything in one place" feed, but you can build such a thing yourself. Just create an account at one of the many feed re-mixing sites like Yahoo Pipes, FeedShake or >FeedBlendr. Plug in all the feeds from the various sources you want to track and paste the resulting URL into a widget on your site. Voila. - -The free blogging software from WordPress has all of the functionality to let you embed these widgets and RSS streams. WordPress also has a thriving plug-in ecosystem, so it's likely a developer somewhere has done much of the dirty work for you. - -An even easier option is to use a sharable and customizable start page from Pageflakes or Protopage. Pageflakes in particular allows you to build a customized chunk of cyberspace that aggregates all of your desired content just like Facebook, which you can then publish publicly (Pageflakes calls this a "Pagecast"). And beyond a simple user registration, Pageflakes doesn't lock in any of your personal data. - -It's entirely possible to replicate most of the features of Facebook without getting sucked into its black hole, but there's still something missing. This is where it gets tricky. - -At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms, no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on internet at large. - -We would like to place an open call to the web programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards. Think of it as a structure to link individuals sites along familiar lines of friendship, a way of defining micro networks within the larger network of the the web. - -One possibility is the microformat XHTML Friends Network (XFN) which defines the relationship between the linker and the linkee. - -Some developers are beginning to offer easy-to-use tools which can create XFN code (WordPress and Movable Type both offer templating solutions), but use of XFN isn't yet widespread, and the data format doesn't offer any tools for managing friends. While a code snippet placed in a page can convey who you are and how you know who you know, the format doen't provide any way to utilize the information. - -Such a "mirco-network" standard may sound daunting or even impossible, but nearly all the tools we've mentioned so far started small. Blogging grew from a few people trying to easily publish web content on a daily basis. Del.icio.us started with one person looking for a way to manage his bookmarks from any machine. Even Facebook started with a few college friends trying to better plan their social lives. - -Eventually, an open network will emerge. Let's make it happen sooner rather than later. |