It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up

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."

Comments

Re:I don't want EVERYONE to see my data!!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

'Open social networks' is greed-speak for 'easier SPAM access' AFAIAC.

Or worse. I'm far more concerned with things like identity theft or profiling of child targets for other crimes than I am with spam.

Opening up the social networks might be an ideal for a completely open society, but our society isn't grown up enough to be that open yet. Doing it now will just mean that anyone can abuse the system by data mining for their own ends, instead of just the hosting services and their current and (unknown) future owners and business partners.

Of course, some of us removed our personally identifiable data from all social networks pretty early on, precisely because you have no idea who really has access to all that juicy insider gossip about your life and what they're going to use it for, even on the "closed" networks today. Facebook's entire MO is basically to get friends to spy on each other, thus resolving the one remaining block in intelligent data mining of the entire population.