Alex Barnett blog : socialnetworking

Chris Anderson: Charlie Rose interview discussing FREE

alexbarnett — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:51:00 GMT

I spent some time this morning watching the Charlie Rose interview with Wired's editor, Chris Anderson, discussing FREE.

The interview covers the economics and ideas driving the Internet's current (and future) state: the Gift Economy; the Attention Economy; and the Reputation Economy. Rose leads the conversation into topics such as covering the Freemium business model and consumer perceptions about the value of privacy (or lack of thereof).

The interview also moves to the topic of the Yahoo! and Microsoft merger. Rose asks: "Why is it that Yahoo! can't recruit the people at Google - through some extraordinary salary offers - that would let Yahoo! replicate what Google has?"

Anderson's answer (paraphrased): "There is a basic philosophical difference between Google and Yahoo! Google is a Machine company. Google believes that data, machines and the Algorithms will drive the company's growth. Yahoo! is a people company - it believes content created by people and the conections made between them with its drive growth."

"And what about Microsoft?", Rose asks. Anderson responds (again, paraphrasing) - "Microsoft is a pre-web software company that philosophically wants to be somewhere in between Google and Yahoo!" An oversimplified analysis, surely (hey, it's a TV interview answer), but I think the Anderson's conclusion is pretty accurate at its heart.

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

Thank you Facebook

alexbarnett — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:10:00 GMT

To everyone at Facebook - thank you. Thank you for creating a space where I've been able to re-connect with friends I've lost touch with. That's a big deal for me.

Since moving from the UK to the States a few years ago, I have found email, my blog and occasional IM a useful way of keeping connected to a small subset of friends I've made over the years. However, these technologies and services haven't compared to the amazing power Facebook has to leverage network effects. I love how naturally one long-lost friend has connected me to another, and find it fascinating to observe how certain clusters of friends who have seemed invisible in the Facebook service become suddenly discoverable via a single connection, cascading one after another in a domino effect.

Thinking about it, I've rarely used a service that has brought me so much emotional satisfaction...connecting with good friends is a feel-good thing and it is this emotional value that makes Facebook hard to beat in terms of the gratification other services can provide. So much so, here I am even writing a thank you note to the service (I can't remember doing that for any service...I've written about how "cool" stuff is, or how useful some service might be...but "thank you"? Never).

I created my Facebook account something like 2 years ago (at least it feels like that...) - more out of curiosity than anything else, yet the value I'm getting out of Facebook today seems to be on the up on a daily basis. I was a rare user for most my early Facebook membership and then my sister encouraged me to log back in this summer...so thanks to her too :-)

So...I just wanted to say it again - thank you Facebook.

Facebook export - WTF????

alexbarnett — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:55:00 GMT

On hearing the news over at TechCrunch that I'm able to export my social network data out of Facebook as a .CSV file using the FriendCSV app, I did exactly that.

I have 74 contacts on Facebook but I managed to export 144 records. That's 70-odd people's "social data" including education, work experience, current location, hometown, affiliations, date of birth of people I don't know. Like Justin over here, I seem to have more "friends" than I bargained for. And I've now got their data.

This is not good. Facebook - wtf is going on????

Update: Dan Birdwhistell, developer of the FriendsCSV app, commented below soon after I posted to explain the issue I described above was NOT the fault of Facebook but an issue with the FriendsCSV data processing side of things:

"Hey Alex. I just posted this on Techcrunch as well. WTF is right, but this very unfortunate glitch has been fixed. Here's what happened: After valleywag, techmeme, digg, etc. all picked it up, the server got overwhelmed and we had around 25 dumps that were in queue. FB times out after a few minutes, so to speed up with the dump, we added some threading to the libraries, which pushed the exports through in an instant, but also misplaced some of the data in what we now know to be at least four separate csv dumps. When we were alerted to this, we removed the threading and all was right again; however, the error did occur and it was our fault. We'll continue to test the app during the night just to make sure this doesn't happen again. "

Deepest apologies that this happened."

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly Dan. Here's the thing though - you have shown how easily all this data can be extracted - that's a good thing, and well done for bringing our attention to that, but you have also shown how wrong it can go - that's the bad thing. It's small scale in this case but you've highlighted how this can go bad in a more general sense.

I've been very supportive of the "my data" efforts, however my support has been based on the presumption that I'm actually talking about "my data", not somebody elses. This real-world example has opened my eyes to the fact that opening up social networks / social graph will be a complex business and fraught with possible downsides.

At large scale, the ability to extract all my social graph data - as opposed to "my data" which I provide permission to an application - begs the following question: who's data is my social graph data? It is each individual's, or is it mine once Jo Smith has allowed me access to it?

The Banality of Social Networking

alexbarnett — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:17:00 GMT

There is a fine line between extracting the potential goodness of social networking and drowning in its banality. This video by J.W Sass portrays the misery of the latter.

via Brian Johnson.