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Wednesday, July 09, 2003 |
YASNS: Ringo.com. Yet another social networking service, Ringo, yet another bizarre misreading of social networks:
Asking your friends to join is as simple as sending an email. As your circle of friends grows to include your friend's friends, and their friends too, you will quickly find that your new, expanded circle of friends includes hundreds of people. Many circles never stop growing.
Now you are ready to find a match within your list. Are you looking for an activity partner? Somebody to go to the movies with? A friend, a lover, a soul-mate? Or perhaps simply a mechanic or a lawyer?
With Ringo you can instantly find that someone, always safe in the knowledge that they were referred to you by a friend! In biological systems, things that don't stop growing are called tumors.
The persistent mistake in the design of these systems is to assume that human relationships have frictionless transitivity -- A trusts B, who trusts C, who trusts D, so introducing A and D is a sure bet!
A is my sister. B is me. C is my meth dealer. D is his "debt collector." My relationship wiht my sister includes her trusting me not to introduce her to known criminals. Any service that proposes to remove me from deciding which introductions to broker doesn't get my business.
The general rule in systems like this seems to be "We're going to assume that human behavior is simple and can be easily represented as transitive operations, because thats what we know how to make computers do."
This is not to say Ringo (or any of thes social network services) will fail -- it just means that success is going to have to come from some force other than illusory transitivity. Ringo seems to have taken a page from Friendster's book in subtly but pervasively emphasizing romantic possibility as the core feature, while claiming to be a general social networking service, in the same way a "theme" bar can pretend not to be a singles bar. [Corante: Social Software]
It's great that Clay stays on top of all these social networks. I wonder if he's tried SONA, Everyones Connected or Its not what you know. I always thought he was too tired leading his social software inner cabal - attending private meetings around the world. One day maybe I'll be invited.......
Needless to say - since they started the Corante blog - Clay's been getting out more often....blogging.
Metacheese. Had a great conversation with Bill Kearney from Syndic8 last night about Echo, RSS, OPML, RDF and all things metadata. I know Adam Curry has a vested interest in his investment but bribing the tool builders to stifle innovation isn't the right route to take. As a tool builder myself I will always support the formats that cultivate growth and interoperability between tools, systems and most of all people. All this fancy shit we do day in day out is all about the people and the conversations. It's our job as the tool creators to facilitate the conversations. [Jason DeFillippo's Journal]
I wonder if Adam really knows how he's coming off?
It seems amazing that he'd trade short term supposed stability for long term innovative constipation. And why does he think that RSS 2.0 support is going away? How completely warped! Now I wonder who's telling him all this FUD? Could it be.....????
EE Kim speaks!.
Eugene Kim has started blogging: EEK Speaks.
Eugene and his partner, Chris Dent (who blogs at Glacial Erratics), of Blue Oxen Associates, both have PurpleNumbers on their blogs, where each paragraph has its own fragment permalink.
Eugene wrote a plugin for his bloxsom blog, and Chris is generating his in Moveable Type. Chis also sends these paragraph level links out in one of his RSS 2.0 feeds.
PurpleNumbers are something totally good for the iCite net, which likes links to content at as fine a granularity as interesting, like a paragraph.
[the iCite net development blog]
I had the pleasure to meet Gene during Planetwork conference. Somehow they convinced Pierre Omidyar to fund them!
When Reality and Virtuality meet and clash. During my brief contract earlier this summer, a jarring moment occurred when I walked up to one of the people I worked with and saw that he was reading my weblog. I've never had such an obvious mix of the 'real' world and this virtual world before, and I found it uncomfortable. He's a very likable person, friendly and personable and now a budding weblogger -- but it was still a moment that stopped me dead in my tracks. I don't encourage my friends to read my weblog, though they are welcome especially if it helps me maintain contact with them. However, I don't talk about it with my family, and hope that they're too busy to check up on what I'm writing. When I went back to San Francisco this last trip I had kind invitations for lunch and fireworks, from a fellow Wayward Weblogger as well as Marc Canter, but the trip was a difficult one for me, and I wasn't ready at that point to again bring about this meeting of real and virtual. I will be, soon, and am planning on taking a few road trips later this summer to meet close by webloggers, as well... [Burningbird]
It's all about where Cyberspace meets Meatspace.
Imagine me reading all these blog posts about Shelly walking my nieghborhood (within a few blocks from where I live.) I HAD to say hi and invite her over. It was only polite!
Hopefully by the time she's back - we'll have some 'semantic' stuff to play with.
Perhaps we should rephrase that. Would you like to be told the fascinating tale of Oddpost's deceptively simple interface design? Who wouldn't!? Read it! Read it now! [Oddblog]
I had dinner with Ethan and Iain of ODDpost last night. It was great talking to other 'new school' tool vendors. Their product kicks ass - is entirely made in D HTML and..... has an RSS aggregator built in.
Behold Echo. I'm not really interested in the politics of Echo, however, no matter what happens, a year or two from now... [David Galbraith]
David raps it out. I especially like the statement:
......not enough focus has been made on tools to create modules and allow extensibility. Forms need to be built into applications such as Userland's, Blogger and Moveable Type's to allow end user creation of RSS modules within a users namespace and without having to have users have any need to know about the underlying XML. Rapid adoption of modules will take syndicated content beyond the headline/link pair that is the only metadata currently being syndicated in any volume.
I myself have been trying to deal with FOAF lately and find myself completely dependant upon Morten Fredericksen and Leigh Dodds tools. Hopefully Phil Pearson will come through and we'lll have a FOAFster soon enough :-)
But it's always gonna come back to tools. I love it when some VC guy tells me: "there's no money in tools."
So I have to politely tell him:
- I'm the one who helped create Macromedia - and we BEAT Microsoft and Apple - thank you very much
- They (Macromedia, Adobe, Symantec, Microsoft) currently represent the old school of tools - the Status Quo
- Just as we had to replace assembly language programming and black screens with green text - for productivity software and GUIs so NOW do we have to make a leap forward!
- So don't start telling me about all these dot com failures who didn't grok it - I'm not them!
That's ONE of the reason I took the 90's off.
Hydra and Social Invention. One of the moments I love best is when a group, given a piece of software, uses it in a way that is simultaneously so novel and so good that the pattern becomes worth codifying. This is now happening with Hydra, the "7 brains are smarter than one" text editor that has been likened to an IM Wiki. (Mac only, alas.)
At OSCON in Portland (at which I am not, alas), the soi-disant Semi-Unofficial OSCON Wiki is hosting a Hydra template for group note-taking, using the pattern that grew spontaneously at ETCon and was codified by Tom "The Internet is not Shit" Coates. And though the original Hydra use case was programmers collaborating remotely, the Hydra site itself now points to a similar template for the Apple WWDC, meaning that the software designers have taken note of the user innovation.
Watch for later releases of Hydra to include features designed specifically for real-time note-taking by the Wifi-tribe. I haven't talked to the Hydra designers, but I'm willing to bet that this will become an example of social innovation that gets instantiated in code. [Corante: Social Software]
I really dig Hydra. Needless to say it's about the faces! We gotta get that feature into the WebOutliner.
[SN] Me. I just gave a talk on why digital ID makes me nervous. It wasn't an argument against it, just an attempt to figure out why my stomach gets upset every time someone talks about it.... [Joho the Blog]
David Weinberger on Digital ID. Here is my impressionistic transcript of David Weinberger's Digital ID talk at Supernova.
I am deeply ignorant of Digital Identity and I hate it. It turns my stomach. I'm not atypical.
Why am I so irrationally afraid of DigID? I'm not sure. I have no argument against it, but here are the roots of my insecurity.
For starters, I'm a hippie. I am not a number. But in the main, I don't mind having a passport a credit card, a drivers' license, and I'm emotionally attached to my phone-number (something the cellcos know, which is why they resisted number portability). [Boing Boing]
Now that the Cluetrain is finally leaving the station - let's not get all hung up in our emotions. Sure the fascists are gonna try and control us through some global digital ID effort. But that's happening anyway.
What are we gonna do - sit around and be rubber stamped/branded to death?
NO! We're gonna stand-up and declare our OWN People's DNS - or OWN system for identifying and interacting between ourselves. Microsoft, the Liberty Alliance and the Government can do their own thing. But we gotta do ours!
Don Park asks "will there be men's and women's versions of Longhorn?"
I wonder, what would the differences be?
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
You're kidding right Robert? What's the difference between men and women? I would have thought your many wives would have taught you that already.
How 'bout color, shape, sound, smell, attitude, aesthetics, family approach - just about everything that makes someone a human. In fact the ONLY thing men and women have in common - is that we both eat, shit and breath.
So what does that have to do with user experiences (which include UI, built-in content, web services, community, context, etc.) ? Well that's ONE of the things we've been working on - going on 11 years now.
Soft, pastel, intuitive, friendly = female
Hard, primary, intellectual, comradery = male
The best Microsoft ever got to was long and short menus. What? You're not spending enough on R&D? Where's the innovation? Where's Nathan Myrvold when you need him? Isn't that what .Net is about? Can I hear you say "Hailstorm?"
Well now you have a reason to tell them (that's YOU) to invest in us - and we'll answer all your questions.....
We've been doing the R&D Microsoft, Xerox, MIT, Interval Research - SHOULD have been doing. Now it's time to productize.
Don Park has it right - there WILL be deifferent version of Longhorn for men and women. But also for young and old. Left and Right. Up and down.
FOAF keeps on truckin'.
Adam Gessaman is on a FOAF creation drive, and is also asking for FOAF files along with comments on his blog. His matching of FOAF with comments is interesting.
I noticed Adam had a aimChatID listed in his FOAF file, so I added my aimChatID and my jabberID to my FOAF file (FOAF! doesn't! have! a! property! for! Yahoo! IM! ID! yet!). I also saw that Marc Canter is, even more, getting FOAFy too.
I don't yet have a FOAF autodiscovery link in my blog page templates, but I will soon when I launch my next revision which includes my tricky DHTML-enabled blogroll display. Until then, you'll have to autodiscover my FOAF on this page about me.
[the iCite net development blog]
This guy Adam has some cool FOAF stuff to play with - he uses FOAF for his commenting system. By adding him into my friend's list, my social network grows.
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