Slashdot Mirror
Social Network Fatigue Coming?
mrspin offers the opinion of ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear that users may soon tire of social networks — if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks. O'Hear writes: "Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long." In an earlier post he went into more detail on the same subject, with extensive opinions from four creators of social networks. A contrary data point comes from the Apophenia blog, in a post noting the tendency among young users to create ephemeral profiles, and not to mind at all if they have to re-enter data. "Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm." What does Slashdot think — is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?
There are efforts being made to consolidate all these social network sites into one, common portal like Optrata (one page to rule them all).
That may be the key for now, because I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites. (I sure can't imagine how myspace, youtube, facebook, livejournal, orkut, etc. would agree on a standard: they all have their own approaches and problems. Myspace would demand every 1/3 request goes to a "under maintenance" page, still filled with a hundred ads and flash videos and other flash apps to crash your browser... and Orkut would demand every 2/3 requests is a server hiccup.)
too bad it was microsoft that released passport.
I use social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and more, to promote my artwork/design services and music. Most of my fans all have profiles on the same sites, and don't seem to have any problems managing their glitter-animated-gif-laiden profiles. Most of those people are also technologically incompetent. I've never heard any complaints (other than the "Why won't my profile load as fast as yours" crap)
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Facebook and other sites already support importing, exporting, and synching data through RSS feeds and SOAP/XML APIs. They also support importing contacts from other accounts.
Other than the 20 crowd on MySpace, what's the relevancy of these sites? Classmates.com, where you can find the email address of the douche who sat behind you in History class? Yahoo groups, where you can look at a lot of bad, amateur porn?
Is there fatigue over these sites, or just ennui, due to their fundamental lack of any content, other than being circle-jerks?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Social network fatigue is not coming.
Why, you ask? The reason is that as the number of things that people do increases, so does the number of things that social networking sites offer. A great example is Yahoo! which I would argue is a social networking site. It offers email, games, news, music, you name it. I am convinced beyond a doubt that they will start offering blogging in the near future, particularly, as competition to Google's Blogger.
Yahoo! is a great example of an all-in-one philosophy. Google is doing similar things. Pretty soon, however, people are just going to have one account on one giant social networking site. There will be competition, of course, and some will have accounts on one but not the other, but pretty soon, very few people are going to actually have many different accounts.
"What does Slashdot think -- is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?"
Why? Are you moving around that much were it would be an issue? How about slashdot? Are we upset that we can't move from one "social geek site" to another?
Coincidentally I deleted my myspace account today. I found myself spending too much time stalking people. Kinda creepy really.
data portability among social networking sites... ARE YOU INSANE? please file this under the 'google should make my pagerank whatever i'd like' category.
plasticity of identity, the throw away indentity. it makes sense for teenagers and their psychological development as they grapple with exactly who they are: try on one identity, throw it away, start over. it also means that the generation that grows up with the web from birth will be very used to the idea of identities being disposable, for themselves, and in how others act towards them as well
this opens up new weaknesses in social interaction, and new strengths. in a world where identity theft is a growing menace, why would that matter when your identity is made of mercury anyways? at the same time, how can anyone be trusted in a world where the idea of a solid identity is built on a foundation of sand?
i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won't even understand
"bah, kids these days"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For all of the popularity these social networking sites have right now, are they all that profitable yet, or are they still largely dependent on venture capital? I've yet to figure out how these sites can demand any meaningful amount of money from advertisers. The subject matter is extremely broad, is often times used as a promotional tool for other sites or businesses, and it seems that the demographic who most enjoys these sites is in an age group that doesn't / can't buy things online. If someone can explain how and if these sites are running under their own steam (and doing well), as opposed to being propped up by investors, that would be fabulous.
Social networks should soon start seeing interoperability like email. Because like TFA says people are not interested to go join every new site that pops up but would love to be in touch with the people who are on that site and not the one they am on. Just like we are begining to see the consolidation of IM networks (Yahoo talking to MSN, Jabber servers talkin to each other etc) there'd better start a move to interconnect the social networks soon. They dont all have to have the exact same features but agree to interoperate on a minimum set of them should not be a big problem.
To quite the contrary, in an era of online big-brother government snooping, I'd actually prefer that my social networking data be as un-portable as possible, thankyouverymuch. *breaks out roll of tinfoil, begins folding*
The bigger problem with most "social networks" is mental instability!
1. Maybe you don't *want* data to be portable. It'd make it that much easier for spammers, hiring managers, etc. to scrape the web for your info. 2. I imagine MySpace et al will end up like the instant messengers, either with networks merging/interoperating or a universal client that will be able to interface with all the networks.
Data portability will make it harder for me to maintain my multiple personality disorder.
It's not a disorder, it's good for us to have all of these different perspectives.
You're such a freak.
Will you guys stop yelling?! I'm trying to catch a rerun of the Fiesta Bowl.
I was under the impression that most people stuck to a single service anyway. Maybe they have multiple accounts across the board, but they probably devote most of their time to just one.
Which one they choose depends on their "network." Just like instant messaging, some people will use aim, some will use yahoo, some will use msn. Some will try to keep up with all of them, and some will occasionally convert for someone special. The headline makes it sound like people will tire of social networking in general, but typically people will always be social, so that won't hurt the business.
I joined LibraryThing recently, and it was interesting to see that they've included the option to link to your profile on many other social network sites - Myspace, LJ, Blogger ... and Slashdot. I set up a squidoo as well, and they pull out the RSS for my blog and display summaries.
...
I guess all this has a logical conclusion, where someone sets up a meta-site that pulls together all your online profiles into one 'ME' page. When they do that, it'll be quite something. Imagine all your Myspace friends without the Myspace baggage
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
If you dont have enough TIME to log in and check all your social networking sites, it may be time for you to take the TIME to log off your computer and have a good look at your life, its probably quite sad.
The problem I see with social network sites, is that retards flock there.
So much dyslectic morons "i c u lol how r u ? zomg!! dats so kool, o rly??", etc. I cant stand it.
Much of those sites are cluttered with ads, flash content, etc.
I like sites that have XHTML+CSS and use XML. Have stuff like RSS feeds.
Maybe they can make a SOAP-backend.
What does Slashdot think is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?
not it's not a big deal.
social networking sites? Who cares? Go to your community centre, bar/pub, start or join a club that interests you, participate in life. Get off your couch, reach out and touch real people in real ways. Get a real life.
I have my own site, I wrote my own blogging engine and I have total control over it. I am sure most slashdotters can program and code their own site like me, even though we might be the only user on our sites, it wouldn't matter because it's not like we have a life outside of our mother's basement.
Please direct all bug reports to
Reading profiles and looking at friend lists will get old eventually. If Napster were still around, I doubt kids would even waste their time.
I don't really see the fatigue thing happening. I know a couple of people who have myspace accounts, and the amount of time they devote to their pages is insane. Well, hey, the amount of time I spend on Slashdot is insane, too :-) Coincidentally, I just set up a myspace account, thinking it would be a nice way to keep in touch with these two people. I was amazed by how user-hostile it was. By the time I was done messing around for an hour, I had a page that was 75% ads, plus some content about myself that I couldn't figure out how to customize or get rid of (e.g., myspace wants the world to know I'm a Capricorn -- never mind that I think astrology is idiotic). Apparently teenagers spend a lot of time swapping snippets of CSS to cover up the ads, and do all kinds of other cutesy stuff. It just seems like too much work to me, but obviously they're intensely interested in it, because it taps into the teenage psyche.
Find free books.
Re-keying profile data is nothing -- how often do you change your birthplace or last name?
:-) :-o
The guts of every social networking website is the friends systems, messaging/IM, photos, blogging (of one form or another), commenting, etc. Why would SocialNetworkA want to share that with SocialNetworkB? That assumes they are alike, and for social networking websites to all survive, they will need to differentiate and stay that way. In face, they already have -- Facebook, for instance, is geared more toward the college student/post-college professional. MySpace was started for bands/music. Etc.
When you're posting about your class schedule, do you really care if your friends back home on MySpace see it? Doubtful.
Besides, if all the social networking websites were the same, how could teens carry on their multiple mood swings throughout a day?
Mood: happy
Mood: angry >:\
Mood: horny
Mood: suicidal X-|
The title should have been. Check out my profile, just search for anonymous coward.
We'll see a decline in social networking sites, but not due to lack of standards. It will be due to lack of use. Growth will slow to zero, since anyone who wants to do that shit already does. In the meantime, they'lllose users like mad as people realize that
1)There's no damn difference between a myspace account and a personal webpage people have had since the 90s
2)Nobody really reads the damn things anyway- people love writing due to the sheer egotism of it, but nobody really reads the damn things except the small circle of friends they'd talk to anyway.
They don't care about signing in (come on, 90% of people just use the remember me or browser password storage anyway). They don't need a standard way to enter text, its a giant textbox everywhere. They don't care about profile sharing, chances are far and away they use a single main site and only update that one anyway. There's no real benefit to a standard for any of these things.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Any real attempt to consolidate these sites will see about as much luck as the DOJ saw getting AIM fully interoperable with AOL provided code. Just like AOL these sites are all ads. If they consolidate to one page or site- bang! There goes their revenue.
There are a bunch of efforts at linking sites and identities together using either HTML or RDF, including XFN and FOAF.
if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks.
It makes perfect sense for people outside of these corporations to see that... But from within, how do you balance interoperability with the business necessity of maintaining your users? For-profit sites aren't interested in that balancing act. They'll keep their walled garden as isolated as they can.
I've been developing an open source, distributed social networking software called Appleseed, and honestly, I think the solution is going to have to come from an open source solution. As long as profit and market share are the main motivating factors of companies like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc., there is absolutely no incentive to design things properly.
Appleseed, and open source in general, has the freedom to be able to do things right. Create an interoperable network of social networking "nodes" which use a standard protocol to connect and interact. It's very simple, and the rules of business that these companies have to follow is the only thing keeping that from happening from within the proprietary world.
I see it as analagous to the old days of email. Back in the day, you had Compuserve, you had AOL, and Prodigy, and other competing services that attempted to monopolize their user base by refusing interoperability. But eventually, they had no choice but to adopt standard E-Mail for their users.
Let's face it, in this day and age, there is no single, good technological answer for why a user on MySpace can't send a message or a friend request to a user on Friendster, other than "We [myspace] doesn't want them to." Which is not an answer that people will tolerate for long.
This is an itch, and open source (namely, Appleseed, since it seems like the solution which is the farthest along) is the only way to scratch it.
I'm even sick of posting journal entries!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
When I started getting more active in online communities, I recall getting involved with a site named WBS. This system was massive, featuring hundreds of rooms and thousands of players at any given time. Of course, like most things during that day if it showed an inkling of success it was purchased by a large corporations and subsequently change in a way to sour the proverbial milk.
Eventually, WBS was shut down as a web-based chat system and people were scattered to the wind. Some smaller sites opened up, some of which are still active today, but none of them ever captured the greatness that was prior to their inception and none worked well with one another. It was during I decided to kill a bit of time and code my own site, being throughoughly disgruntled by the administration of certain of those sites.
The code I built grew in scope, adding features that had been lost when WBS fell, adding my own, expanding into galleries, forums and adding new features including a social network/dating profile addition. Naturally people started to notice and flocked to my site which generated a modest amount of traffic day in and day out.
There was one difference however from my site and others who offered similiar services and that was code released under the GPL and made freely available. While the code to this day is still a bit difficult to install (tons of modules it depends on) other sites managed to get it going and it caused an unexpected side effect. Essentially it allowed other people to create a multitude of splinter sites, without having to know programming, database administration or even administration of a Unix based server.
As a result of the GPL, these sites featured the same options, functionality, features as the main site with a possible lag in development/release time. However even when I closed my site and people moved on, I noticed that the splinter sites kept popping up with (specific niche needs) here and there using the code and the features that had been put into the code for years.
Perhaps social networking is in for such a step. Essentially, a commodity-based approach to the product and through standards/common code allow people to find communities that match their needs. Sure it may not be a Lavalife, Facebook, MySpace in which everyone and their dog is there, but people do seem to find comfort in a little corner to the world being their own, a community of like-minded people a net centered neighbourhood.
On a side note, I also found that once the code allowed for things such as import/export of handles and such, people tended to flow freely from one site to another. I wonder if implementing OpenID on the system would increase that movement?
I just started checking out Ziki, which let's you integrated all your RSS feeds into your profile (blog, flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and shares them back out as one feed.
- social-thunderdome.aspx
I wrote up a short review on my first impressions: http://www.vinull.com/Post/2007/01/03/ziki-enters
here is that there's too much overlap in social networking sites, everyone is trying to do the same thing the other guys is doing, only better. At that point, there's no reason to offer interoperability because it offers nothing to pare down the sameness of each site. I think what social networking sites need to do first is offer some type of differntiation amongst themselves, more than a simple "myspace on cingular" or "friendster mobile email". Only when each site is unique will there be reason for interoperability.
Yep. Usenet.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Does that count?
Myspace is painful to look at, and really, no one I know is so interesting that I need to go read their blogs. The entire idea of a whole page dedicated to me is egotistical in the extreme; I realize I am not that important.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Duh. The point is the sites are in competition with one another. You're not supposed to use all of them, you're supposed to sign your allegiance to one and ignore people who use the others, kinda like high school cliques in real life.
Hey, just like the IM networks. Oh, wait...
Only for people who use multiple sites and are heavy users. There are ways to consolidate things to a point. For example, one could maintain a single blog on one site and on the blogs of the other sites post a single entry linking to the true blog. I would personally not post my photographs to my MySpace page because of that stupid user agreement clause saying that News Corp owns all content you post to it. I'll post snapshots maybe but most of the stuff I would open a Flickr account to keep stuff on.
My friends have occasionally directed me to their blogs and myspace/facebook pages over the years, and it's honestly been more of a hassle than I cared to deal with to sign up for each and every one just to see their crappy cell phone pics or whatever. The few I care enough to read regularly (like the blog of my friend in Japan) I just comment "anonymously" with my name in the comment. When MySpace wants me to login, I use BugMeNot to get a random login. Same for YouTube's oh-so-scandalous "mature"-tagged videos and the rest of that crap.
The point? These sites aren't just "fatiguing" current users; they're scaring away potential users like me who aren't willing to sit through 5-10 minutes of entering (fake) personal information just to occasionally watch a 3-minute video clip or read a meandering myspace post written by a friend who's too lazy to just goddamn email me.
What does Slashdot think -- is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?
Social networking aside, data portability isn't a big deal for 99.9% of computer users.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Old news, I've been tired of this for well over a year.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Social Networking is all about sex and status. As long as it can achieve more of those for the user or at least the user can be persuaded of that then the burden is not too much until an easier route appears. If the chicks leave the guys will leave too. If they stay, then the guys will stay too. It's that simple.
The burnout is just another way of saying it's not worth the effort for the return on the sex.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I typically avoid social networks at all costs. Due to my friends and family neglecting all other forms of communication, aside from Facebook and MySpace, I've found myself adding these sites to my bookmarks and visiting multiple times a day.
I just fixed the RSS feed for my blog, so that Facebook could resume importing from it. MySpace, on the other hand, isn't going to be so easy. I ended up posting a bulliten on MySpace, informing my friends that they could visit my blog for updates since MySpace doesn't support such a system as RSS.
I think some sort of uniform standard, such as RSS, would be of great benefit for us "more technical" users. Once the youngsters see it in action and see how easy it is to use, I imagine it'll catch on in popularity.
This will not happen because these for profit sites do not want you to use other networks, certainly not with theirs.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Does Facebook have contact-list export capabilities back yet?
Back a few years ago, there was a brief time when Facebook let you export your friends contact information as a VCard file. It was awesome -- you could download all of your friends' info to one file, and from there import it into Address Book, or the PIM of your choice. From there, if you had an intelligent enough system, you could have all their birthdays added to your calendar, phone numbers downloaded to your mobile, etc.
They eliminated the feature pretty quickly after they implemented it -- I only got one data download out of it -- due to spam concerns, but I always thought that there had to be a way to balance spam resistance against the obvious benefits of such a system. (Of course, the obvious solution is to only 'friend' people you actually know and trust, and not just anybody who sends you a request...but any security method based on user intelligence is probably doomed to failure.)
If they've re-enabled anything like that, I'd be very impressed. Facebook is by far my favorite 'social networking' site (which isn't saying much, really it's akin to saying 'Facebook doesn't make me want to gouge out my own eyes'), but it could certainly be more useful if the data, both simple contact information and more complex relationship-derived metadata, was exportable for external use and analysis.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Where is the tin foil helmet FUD crowd on this one?
The commons hasn't embraced standards in IM, why should social networking be any different? You build a successful on-line community by appealing directly to your target audience:
Countries and Cultures, Age and Sex, Income and Interests. The commons won't care that you've built a walled garden, if the garden is where they need and want to be.
As I wrote once before, social networking sites, like nightclubs, have a life cycle. They start out, get some users, and if they're well run and lucky, become cool. Then they become too popular, the percentage of losers goes up, the cool people leave, and they go into a slow decline.
This has already happened to AOL (peaked sometime last century), Geocities (peaked before 2002), Nerve (peaked in 2002), and Tribe (peaked in Q1 2006). Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn look flat, but it's too early to tell.
Who's on the way up? YouTube, which is rapidly acquiring social-networking features.
(Slashdot, incidentally, peaked in Q1 2006, when Digg took off.)
I work for a company that does make you sign in for the services, but it saves you a boat-load of time in the long run. You see, we aggregate reviews from a lot of social-network-consumer-review-sites and we let business owners see what's being said about them on these sites under their business listing. They don't have much time on their hands, but I think if the trade-off for signing up once means you can see and maintain your web presence without going to several sites than it's a pretty good situation. But ultimately, yes, there's too many of these social network sites out there to keep track of. The company that I'm talking about that aggregates these reviews is MerchantCircle.
But didn't Microsoft try a login in once login to all type thing called passport or something and everybody cried foul? Memory may be wrong here, but I think I remember correctly... everyone is a pillar unto themselves, and it'll stay that way in an effort for everybody to retian their own client base. Personally, I think social networking is stupid to the level of MySpace, but who am I against a billion people that seem to love it...
dB Masters
"What does Slashdot think -- is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?"
Uh, what's a social network? Is there a RFC?
It enables "Single Sign-Ons" between related Drupal sites on one server with a shared database. I have not integrate http://www.mathpotd.org/ with it -- I think I should.
I have already complained about the lack of standards and social networks in a post. BTW, I am still not subscribed in any social networking site. :)
That's all well and good...however servers aren't free. It's not weither the social software is free, but the hardware (as well as the people who maintain and run it). That's what needs to be paid for (bandwith too).* Software is easy compared to that problem.
*The profit and marketshare you just poo-pooed.
Here's what I did to make my myspace, facebook, and wordpress blogs play nice together.
:)
- I post everything to my myspace blog.
- A service called Make Data Make Sense turns the html into an rss feed.
- Feedburner grabs this rss feed.
- my wordpress blog (on my server) has a plugin called feed wordpress that grabs the feed burner feed and posts everything then
- facebook grabs the wordpress rss feed and posts everything as notes.
Notes about this system:
1) It works. I write a post once and it shows up in all 3 places.
2) It could work better. Myspace is the absolute worst of the 3 and, surprise, the one nobody else wanted to work with. I could not find a way to automatically import posts into myspace. That's why I have the start there.
3) Feedburner regularly tells me that my feed is bad because when myspace times out, so does make data make sense. Feedburner is part of the chain so that wordpress doesn't have to deal with this.
4) You have to be careful about formatting. My myspace blog has a white background while my wordpress has a black background. This makes adding a lot of color a bit tough. Facebook reformats everything, stripping most of the html and moving / resizing all of the images. I generally stick to <b> and <i> tags and not much else.
5) It's a bit slow - if I time it wrong it might take 4-6 hours before the post shows up on all 3 sites. I generaly post around midnight then go to bed, so this isn't a big issue for me.
What I would ultimately like is a system that allows me to post to wordpress and then pushes those posts out immediately to the other sites with proper formating.
Nathan Friedly
Standard Login? Yea, how about rfid brain implant.
What do all these strange words mean that I'm reading in these threads? "friends"? "social life"? "human interaction"? I'm not familiar with such terms. Maybe there's another /. article around here that explains them....
Is it just me or have they been saying this every month since like June of '06?
...I'm certainly sick of MySpace right now. For the past two weeks it has been fucking miserable, slow to the point of unusability. It takes 10 or 15 attempts to get a goddamn page to load-- probably because all the kiddies have been off from school and clogging up the tubes every day.
On the plus side, the slowness has frustrated some of my friends to the point where they have started using real e-mail and IM again, which means I can avoid MySpace for a while and communicate with them through other means.
Maybe if ol' Rupert had let that OJ book go on sale he'd have had enough money to put in some more servers and they could handle all this traffic.
1. Keep standards proprietary or non-existant. 2. Start digital personal secretary/assistant shop. Follow DO NO EVIL! creedo... 3. Maintain all profiles for that one person--users ages 12-18 (and doing the parents a deal by acting like the US gov't and flag bad habits). 3. Outsource personal secretaries to India. 4. Profit!
n/t
Not really, cause teens and predators are the only ones that use them. I don't understand how sites like myspace make any money at all. The amount of bandwidth they use vs. how much money teenagers have to spend is retarded.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
In other news Steve O'Hear claims that unless the major webmail accounts consolidate, users will soon tire of webmail. I don't think so.
Sure maintaining profiles on multiple SN sites takes more work than one. The SN whores will go through the process because they don't mind. Those that mind will keep a profile on perhaps one or two sites.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Participants will probably settle into communities where they feel most at home, and most comfortable, where they are surrounded by the most like-minded people. For some this will be Fark, for others it will be Digg, Reddit, or Netscape. This is where the wisdom of the masses and the tyranny of the mob will really conflict, I think, and the sites and communities that thrive the most will be the ones where there is some sort of accountability, and some form of moderation.
Of course, I say this as a 34 year-old who's completely fed up with people being unaccountable shitcocks online. The 24 year-old version of me probably would have had a different opinion (and spent the bulk of his time at a different website.)
Replace "social network" with "instant messaging client" and voila; 1999 is calling, and they want their interoperbility whine back.
Face it: IM is no more interroperable now than it was then; sure, there's a few niche clients like Trillian operating, but what percent of users use them?
People do one of two things: they suck it up and use more than one service at once, or they pick the one they like (or that serves more of their friends) and bail on the others. I have seen my friends (and myself, for that matter) do this with myspace, facebook, and friendster already. You start out with 3, and you end up with 1.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
I see OpenID mentioned twice without any discussion of what it is, who's using it, or how it addresses these problems. You can read the gory details from the Wikipedia article, but OpenID is basically an authentication system that lets you authenticate with an existing identity, by proving you "own" a URL associated with that identity. It solves the "account overload" problem fairly well, you only create an account on a site (or on sites) that you will actually use - everywhere else, you use your identity on a site you actually use as an OpenID. For example, you could use OpenID to comment or get added as a friend to another person's site. This, and the increasing prevalence of RSS and Atom feeds, mean that the technology already exists to have social networks that span multiple sites. Right now, the biggest OpenID-enabled site is probably LiveJournal, but OpenID is an open standard, can be supported in standalone blogs easily, and is supported in some way by many of the commercial and open source blog engines. I guess the question would be what's stopping MySpace, Facebook, and other sites from coming on board? Loss of control? Fear they will lose users?
It may be more a question of anonymous identities than throw-away ones. The difference in behaviour in a forum where people know who you are, and those where your are essentially represented by an "avatar" is remarkable. I grew up in the Norwegian woods, where IRC became a good tool for socialicing with people from nearby, including the non-geeks. Change channel to a bigger one, with people from far away, and the world ended; the "game" begun.
l as/ It's got some thought provoking ideas...
People just don't loose their core personality like that tho'. The reason you get "throw-away personalities" is simply because so much of the online world essentially feels like a game. Thought we bring elements of ourselves into these games, I've yet to see someone bring elements back out. When you go to work, you're still you. When you go on a date, you are still you. When you go back to your parents, you are still you (if somewhat filtered). Any social network that reaches into our world will force you to be more like yourself online.
The problem however is when there is something weird about you in the first place... Networks may enhance sides of your personality that should probably not be strengthened. It's difficult living out your fantasies about eating people online, and not have that strengthen your desire in real life. If you get into a group with canibals talking allot about this, your mind will assume it more normal.
The latter also holds true for fundamentalism, political dogma and all those other nasty tasty spices that keeps CNN broadcasting.
Lastly, let me reccomend the blog Global Guerrillas: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerril
*Click*
Do adults not need to socialise?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Well, for me, anyway. I'd had accounts on just about everything since Friendster, but I really did a lot of consolidating onto just one site (and off Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.) in the last year or so. It was just too much of a pain to log into a half-dozen different sites when I could just go to one that did a fairly good job as far as blogging, reviewing, photo sharing, music sharing, video sharing, link sharing, and a (so far) so-so job of calendaring. (And offered RSS so folks could keep up with me that way if they wanted.)
The link? It's up there.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Too fatigued...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
I agree with the previous posters, social networking is over. I only have a myspace account because my friends refuse to give it up and I have no other means of contacting them. I hold an unparalleled hatred for that site and spite my friends for duping me into participation. Social networking became quite homogonized last year, really. It's the same people talking about the same stuff, the only difference is that every iteration seems to be more fruitless and frivolous. It actually pains me to write this and I would not participate here save for the fact that the speed of news on this site is unparalleled. So, kudos to the group on that one.
If you are not part of the solution then you are part of the precipitate
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2006/12/11/micro formats-part-0-introduction
Then its google searchable, and is universal. Then google could have a search for people.
We've already had information fatique, compassion fatigue, and, ironically, buzzword fatigue. Now we have social network fatigue.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to get fatigue fatigue.
Well, it is an interesting approach, and it is not the only one, perhaps an even more interesting approach is FindMeOn by Jonathan Vanasco, a Perl guy, and Appleseed, whose author is posting here on Slashdot.
But I believe that singe-site reliance is inheritently evil, standardisation is required. I think there is a very interesting approach in SIOC - Semantically Interlinked Online Communities, which seeks to make it possible to share all data across different sites, make it possible to interlink data in the Semantic Web, manage identities, and so on. SIOC has proper funding and is getting momentum too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
How many services support publishing / subscribing to RSS feeds just as easily as to internal accounts? I see depressingly few, even though this would be an easy and effective way of making things more connected...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
The hard work would appear to be done already:
OpenID http://openid.net/
FOAF http://www.foaf-project.org/
"Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long." What about Microsoft Passport ? That was the whole idea of the flippin' thing, sign up once - login to multiple websites. Hey, maybe MS actually had a good idea once.
No, really !
Why would I think making life eaiser for Choicepoint would be a good thing?
Sure, today the software's too difficult to install and lacks some features. But if that ever changes it could mean a big change in how social networking pages interact with each other: No more middle-man.
We had all this back with the E/N pages back in 2000 before Livejournal (and way before Myspace) but the problem is that non-technical people outnumber the technical so E/N pretty much died out.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"it's a fudge that dodges the meat "
There's goodness in that. Really.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Most of the people I know on social networking sites use these sites specifically to kill time. Therefore, the lack of interoperablity is not an issue - the vast majority of the younger users of these sites have the time and desire to waste their time. Making it more efficient would force such people to concentrate on schoolwork, their jobs, or other such non-procrastinating activities.
Seems to me that the more consolidation that occurs, the less points of privacy exist. Like MS's passport fiasco - one crack in the armor and it all collapses.
I would think that even though much of what folks put into their profiles is less than accurate, putting all the eggs into one basket would be like crossing the streams - i.e., 'Bad'.
But then maybe I'm just being paranoid...
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
...not yet, so don't get grumpy if you think it's crap, but later in the year, we'll be trying a few things to give people a more dignified online presence! The backend is based on some nifty RDF and FOAF machinery. (Firefox only for now, else somethings will break.) GONUMBER.COM.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
If one were to consolidate all the social networking sites, they'd lose their appeal. The main thing that draws people to such sites is to network with like-minded people.
I don't think I'd very much care for digg, kuro5hin, and fark to be merged in with slashdot.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
My prediction: Google + some XML-based format = problem solved.
http://outcampaign.org/
The browsers should kept a log of my browsing activities. Remember what I have posted to where (which I expect answer or follow ups) and place them in a priority list. The email system should also pull up the reply mail to place in the top for my reading. The browser kept a cache and history but refuse us to arrange them for effective use.
Just type random gibberish for the secret question and answer, and don't forget your password.
The answer is simple; when Teenagers are using social networking sites; they're playing.
No, I will not work for your startup
I've noticed a lot of problems with sourceforge lately. Do any developers (or others) have alternative plans in the event sourceforce becomes unusable or goes down completely? It would be a shame if a lot of projects were unavaliable or not easy to find for extended periods of time because we lost sourceforge. In fact, isn't freshmeat run by the same company? Even if hosting was found, it may take time for people to find the correct sites...especially if search engines haven't indexed them yet.