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Tuesday, July 29, 2003 |
So let's all get together Thursday night (July 31st) at Hunan on Sansome - 924 Sansome (415-956-7727) in the Barbary Coast area of San Francisco (right near Chinatown and North Beach.) We will post what time by tomorrow. This is one of the original cavernous, killer Hunan places of San Francisco, which gave birth to Henry's Hunan on Bryant.
Dina Mehta takes us on a tour of the state-of-art-of-over-social-networking..........
Social Networks - more more more more more ...... How many social networks does it take to change a lightbulb?.
Welcome to Tribe.net.
 Very cool new social software app: Tribe.net. If you've been exploring social networking software services like Friendster lately, check out Tribe.net.
I just learned this weekend that an old friend and former colleague, Brian Lawler, is part of the dev team... very nice UI on this thing, and seems to facilitate certain kinds of interaction (read: non-gonad-driven) more elegantly than some of the other services out there right now. They're still in beta, but they say they hope to move into general release pretty soon. So far, I'm liking it a lot. Not ditching my Friendster account anytime soon, though.
Where else online could I schmooze with Satan, Carbohydrates, Mister Roboto, and vast legions of Goth/Burningman/Straightedge twentysomething hotties, all under one roof? Wait, don't answer that. Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
So Mark Pincus' and Paul Martino's baby finally sees the light of day. I've been helping out, pushing in a few different directions. danah boyd is also involved. Come on over and try it out!
[Marc's Voice]
Ok I have finally reached my limit for joining these things. I had enough trouble trying to persuade friends to join Ryze, let alone Friendster, LinkedIn, EveryonesConnected,...
I got some benefit out of Ryze but not enough to justify paying for it. It's hard to see what being yet another member of Tribe.net would yield. Maybe if these networks worked out how to federate membership (and still make money) but I don't see tangible benefits in being a member.
I'd be interested in hearing stories from people who do.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]
I agree with Matt - I can only sustain a few relationships. The ones I have I want to pay attention to. Once I start to breach the laws of Magic Numbers, it all falls apart.
[Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
I'm fairly active on Ryze and Ecademy - in fits and starts. Joined Linkedin but did not get much out of it. Marc then pointed out Sona to me, and invited me to join Ringo and now Tribe.net. I signed up at Ringo but have been there only once since. Tried Sona too - but didnot bother to even put up a profile there. Tribe - hmmm - do i really want to - am not sure yet. Blogging, keeping up with the tremendous stuff pouring into my newsreaders hourly, and being active at Ryze and Ecademy, leave me with no time for more online networking. There's the physical world too :) - family, friends, work, hanging out ......... movies, music, partying .....
Yet as consciousness, awareness and evangelism about the power of networking grows, there are only likely to be new networks coming up almost daily. I guess only a few will be able to sustain themselves - and perhaps carve a niche for themselves. Tremendous learning opportunity here, on what makes some successful and others fall by the way. I sure learnt a lot from being really active on just Ryze, at one point!
[Conversations with Dina]
Now Marc's conclusion......
Lessons to learn:
- the basic act of social networking via automatic 'friend making' will continue to grow and increasingly become a commodity. Friendster seems to be getting all the credit, but some of us know that it was Adrian Scott's Ryze that actually started all this.
- it's not clear - as of yet - what the business model is for these sorts of services. Treating it like mating with Match.com envy may work, but......
- so far, all of these systems are closed, but an optimistic man (like myself) KNOWS that technically we can interconnect these social networking systems together. The type of 'metadata standards' that Adam Greenfield is calling for - could happen!
- new kinds of revenue streams will be possible by cross-pollinating membership databases with new kinds of web services and tools. Tribe.net's Listings service, Typepad blogs, MeetUp events, Technorati Cosmos feeds, digital download services, photo printing, multi-player on-line gaming systems - all could generate revenues for systems that 'flow' traffic to these services.
Blogging Ecosystem one year old!. Hey - check this out. The blogging ecosystem is one year old!
Here's my announcement. [Second p0st]
Phil Pearson's blogging ecosystem pre-dated Technorati - and didn't go as far as Technorati, but it's totally coolio anyway. Phil also has a Radio Comment monitor, a Python Community Server, an implementation of a php version of the xmlStorageSystem, a blogging tool and the TopicExchange (which now has a predecessor to our FOAFster/PeopleAggreator.)
Phil's a key guy in all this.
Pie, Echo, Atom, and SIX?.
Looks like the Atom project's name problem is not over yet. Atom is now out due to potential trademark problems. There is a final naming vote planned to start on August 1st, but I don't see anything that jumps out. My own name proposal is SIX (Syndicated Information eXchange) as in Six Degree. I don't know if the name will make Six Apart ecstatic or upset, but I think SIX is a good simple name.
 [Don Park's Daily Habit]
The issue of naming
The project that was known as Atom that was known as Echo that was known as Pie is now without a name. On this Wiki page, some proposals have been put forth. I don't really see any interesting names and the final candidate names all are pretty bland. It's hard to find a name that summarizes the project very well, is catchy and which has not been registered already. It seems like almost every noun has been snatched away and locked up in some registry so that some obscure company can abuse it at will. By lack of better alternatives, I think I'll go for Dada. Dada was the innovative art form. This project will provide something innovative as well, but in the field of weblogging. [chaotic intransient prose bursts]
I vote for Dada. I 'was' a Dadaist during my years in school, until one day - I came back to earth. Just so you guys and gals know what you're getting yourself into, here's a random sampling of random things about dada, which considers randomness to be art. At least the RDF folks will like the meta meta of Dada.
DADA: [the Motion Picture]
Wikipedia: Dada
Tristan Tzara (my hero BTW)
The DADA Engine
Dada in Zurich
 Dada Painters and Poets - by Robert Motherwell
Unity of Multi
DADA & Encryption
And I conclude with a quote from my hero, Tristan Tzara:
![[Tristan Tzara]](http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/Photos/tzara.jpg) *There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement.
I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.
I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.
Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it. If I cry out:
Ideal, ideal, ideal,
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,
Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,
I saw a demo of this at Planetwork and I've been waiting for their launch and someone else to blog it before I commented on it. So Jason Lefkowitz does it for me......
Is This For Real?.
News.com is running an interesting interview with Joe Firmage, the former CEO of USWeb, about the impending launch of his new venture, ManyOne. ManyOne is... well, he can probably explain it better than I can:
"In 2000, a year and a half after I left USWeb, I kicked off the predecessor to this project, called One Cosmos. I was inspired by a show I saw when I was 12 years old, 'Carl Sagan's Cosmos,' a 13-hour series. One of the episodes was called the 'Encyclopedia Galactica,' in which Sagan said that someday we would have access to all of recorded human knowledge right there on our screens. And I said, 'You know what? We could actually do that.'"
Apparently ManyOne aims to do this by providing a combination of a collaboratively edited directory, an ISP service, and a tightly-integrated browser that allows browsing in 3D via VRML. Wait, browsing in 3D? VRML? Yes, you read that right. In fact, the interviewer, Paul Festa, calls ManyOne "a virtual museum of tried and abandoned Web media concepts" (always good to get a little editorializing in your news). Firmage has been associated with some... um... unconventional ideas before, so this announcement seems to be being received less as a new business venture and more as a test of Firmage's sanity. Still, it's clear that he's passionate about it and has put a lot of work (and money -- $11 million so far) into it, so it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. They're offering a beta version of the "ManyOne Universal Browser" for free download; I'm going to try to have some first impressions of it for you soon.
[Ant's Eye View]
What can I say... while the world burns, over $10M is being spent on..... well god bless um. I wish them luck.
consorting with the enemy. creative commons board member joi ito and MPAA head jack valenti mug it up [anil dash's daily links]
Joi is so cool. He can hang with slimeballs like this, call himself a VC and still be well liked. How cool is that? Me - I'm like a bull in a china shop, adept at stepping on people's toes and convincing investors that I can't be trusted. But one things for sure, no one ever lost any money investing in me.
Clay Shirky and Adam Greenfield are putting two and two together........
V-2 Calls for Social Networking Metadata. Adam Greenfield over at v-2 has some interesting observations about participation in social networking services, spurred by the appearance of Tribe.net:
I've spent, maybe, six hours of my life building up a beachhead at Friendster: fleshing out a profile, writing testimonials, uploading pictures. By the time LinkedIn came along, I could hardly be bothered to do the minimum necessary to look credible. Now, with Tribe, unless it shows real signs of critical mass and robust utility, I'll doubt I'll be motivated to do much more than a pro-forma signup. And the next one won't even get that.
There needs to be an open metadata standard in this area, or none of these services is going to survive for long enough to gain momentum and reach beyond the initial membership cliques. These services need to be interoperable. Though I sympathize with the sentiment, I doubt the conclusion. The *only* thing these services have to base a business on is lack of interoperability -- as noted here earlier, LinkedIn specifically forbids users from including contact details in requests, to prevent users from contacting one another out of band. Were LinkedIn to open up, they would lose all the leverage they have in charging for the service, since users, not LinkedIn, would control their data.
Much liklier is that this is a game of over-building and collapse. Most of the YASNS sites doomed, because network effects favor the larger over the small. Like IM, the standards are likely to be set by the commercial victors, because while everyone might benefit from an open metadata standard, the benefits would be spread so evenly as to deflect commercial investment. [Corante: Social Software]
Here's the comment I just left for Clay and Bill Seitz:
| Marc Canter |
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Gosh darn it if you two haven't stumbled right into our strategy. FOAF is the vehicle for open standards and systems like LinkedIn - when they choose to be, can stay closed and still do their thing.
But it's up to US to create enough critical mass around OPEN social networking, so that folks like Adam can keep their profile data in one place and control who gets to see what.
From that basis we can not only share ID info and friends, but also inter-connect various new kinds of web services, like Tribe's Listings service or MeetUp's events. I'm also looking forward to passing photos, music and videos back and forth between say Fotolog.net and other 'digital lifestyle aggregators'.
I've never said this before - but the future is so hot, I gotta get some shades. |
The timing of this post is amazing. I've been on the phone almost constantly - trying to pull together a loosely coupled federation of players - to build an inter-op demo to do EXACTLY what Adam is implying. Meme plant (think of it as a birthday present to Doc: FSN (Federated Social Networks) - dedicated to Doc.
DeWayne gets REAL FOAFy.....
Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow
Friend of a Friend Info
Source: Feet up!
FoaF quickies. A handful of interesting FoaF related links: Via Phil and Danny - Edd Dumbill's useful tips for FoaF, including Adding people into the FOAF web Digitally signing FOAF files Limiting who can read a FOAF file Via Danny - Foaf project a weblog about FoaF Via Dave Beckett - the friend of a friend (foaf) project has a new user friendly home page Via Dave Beckett - FoaF autocreation tool by Marcus Campbell to take FoaF and your blogroll (in OPML) and make more FoaF by using autodiscovery. Cool idea, autodiscovery is very a great way of collating meta information. Technorati profiles which use FoaF and are interesting, but for some (odd to me) reason don't expand into showing who you know Marc Canter has a real FoaF field day! Eric Vitiello's trust module for FoaF. [Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow]
Never met DeWayne before but he certainly a FOAF nerd. Howdy DeWayne!
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