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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."
I will be out to dinner tonight at 8pm, so that will be a good time to rob my house.
I wasn't aware almost everyone in the world had internet access....
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.)
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.
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.
What, me worry?
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?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
If we open up social networking and make it a community effort, who gets to sell it for millions?!?!?!
i support the right to offend.
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.
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.
The game.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
Since they cut my comments off of the article summary :-)
'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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
No jack-ass, I like the segmentation offered by islands like Facebook.
Blar.
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.
No. Even in the most ideal of open societies, I would still want to be allowed to form circles around certain topics. When I log into my arts community, I want to know that I'm surrounded by fellow artists who understand what I'm getting at when I speak of a particular effect that some software was never intended to do. I do emphatically NOT want a bunch of retarded computer geeks tell me that I merely have to reformat my hard drive, install a completely different OS and use this particular specialized software in order to generate that effect.
Likewise, when I log into my fellow-nerd community, then I want to know that my subtle pun on the fine structure constant is actually understood. It would be completely wasted on a horde of uneducated Joes.
Even my network of drinking buddies, which is about as "open" as a social network can be (show up, get plastered, be a member) should retain sufficient limits for us to decide that we just don't want to hang out with some given person. That dude that showed up to that party and started shouting racist crap when he was drunk - I'd rather not have him show up at the next party. I think we all made that known to him, but he didn't quite give me the impression of getting it.
There are social networks that are filtered by virtue of their nature - my circle of co-workers is necessarily composed of certain hardware wonks simply because of the nature of my employment. For all the other ones, I'd prefer to maintain a certain amount of control over who I associate with.
(Incidentily, I consider Facebook "wide open". It's not exactly hard to get an account; it's not exactly hard to join some network. And what is Myspace if not the widest open social networking side possible?).
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
AFAIAC
... Anchor ... Chilis?
As Far As I
Comment of the year
Sir, get thee a Clue.
Either you didn't read the article, or your reading comprehension needs serious work. The author was NOT calling for a network where all information is freely available to everyone, simply an open framework within which people can network as they please. It's kind of like IRC versus a web-based chatroom on a website - IRC is an open framework, anyone can make an IRC client that will work with any IRC server, but that doesn't mean users can't form private channels or choose who they communicate with. Similarly, there is no reason an open framework for a social network would require you to give up the ability to have distinct, closed cliques within the open system. You could, however, reuse any profile data you put in for as many different groups in as many different configurations as you like, without having to sign up for and maintain your presence on a multitude of different, specialized social networking services. You'd just need one login for one service, or maybe one login for a master network which you could allow any independent service to access to retrieve your data as you see fit.
The problem of your friends adding information to your profile is a problem of Facebook, not of social networking sites in general. You should have control over your own profile. Of course, you can't prevent someone from posting a picture and saying, "This is me with my good friend Anonymous Brave Guy! (He's on the left)." That happens all the time regardless of whether it occurs on a social networking site or not. Arguably it's easier to trace down connections among people because the links are explicit and contained in a relatively easy to use interface, but really, the photo scenario could have just as easily happened with any site.
You knew when you joined Facebook, that friends were going to show up in your social network, either through explcity invites or by posting things to your wall. That's the whole point of joining any social net. To say that you were shocked to find that your connections to your friends would be accessible is the strain credulity to the breaking point.