I’ve come to believe that making it easier to share “friend” information across sites really provides more benefits to marketers and advertisers than to individual professionals such as myself. Here’s why.
All in Social Network Portability
Facebook Connect Raises Complex Data Portability and Data Sharing Issues
Successful system operation frequently depends on the quality of the data it contains. Social networking systems rely on the ability their members have to manage and keep up to date information about their identities. They also rely on the ability to describe and act upon data about relationships with other network members. If identity or relationship data are faulty, unstable, or inconsistent, the operation of the social network, and the performance of network based transactions related to it, will suffer.
Stage 1 - The Joining
A meatspace friend tells you about a new service that all the cool kids are using. You join.
Listen to Radiolab’s City X. It’s a history of shopping malls told through slickly edited sound bites and Muzak.
Jeremiah Owyang’s LiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry?, especially if you read the comments, delivers a good snapshot of the gaps that still exist between product evangelism and the realities of implementing specialized online social networks.
What Comes After Web Sites and Online Social Networks?
Today we use the web in many ways. Traditional web sites — “places we go” on the web to do things — still exist. But increasingly, web based transactions also depend on the nature of our online relationships with other people.
Are you interested in Linkedin and Facebook but don’t understand the similarities and differences? Maybe this will help.
One year ago I published Balkanization of the Web - or Just Better Focus? There I expressed concern that the proliferation of specialized search engines — and the indexing to support them — would lead to a more fragmented web. I thought that gaining the benefits of specialization could ultimately reduce the benefits we experience from the nearly universal access to web based contents that we’ve been taking for granted.
Lee White and I recently initiated an experiment, described here, that consists of our writing about a specific topic (project management and social media) on our respective blogs. Lee writes a post on his blog, I respond on my blog, then we combine and display the posts and the comments we receive in a single RSS feed.
I’ve made some attempt to keep up with public discussions of DataPortability.org. I’ve had a suspicion that the project is experiencing the growing pains that technology industry standards groups sometimes experience when there is no single strong and deep-pocketed voice willing to weigh in, knock heads, and force progress along a single path.
Social Data Portability, Privacy, and DRM
When Bob Weber published his post-CES DRM 3.0 Has Arrived he made the point that, while DRM for music may be dying, the entertainment industry’s interest in Digital Rights Management is still quite strong. This got me to wondering whether this “next generation DRM” might have some relevance to current interest in social network portability.
Even if it’s true that most people don’t really care about online privacy, things will change when the mainstream media start publicizing cases of pain and loss where credible or sympathetic individuals (e.g., young, attractive, or sympathetic families) get “bitten” by misuse of personal data sourced online.
What Are You Going To Do About Your Own Web Data?
One of the benefits of the Facebook Beacon affair is that it has made many more people aware of the open nature with which so much data is exchanged on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Dennis McDonald's "Personal Data Ownership" Posts
One of the longest running blogging interests I’ve had is “personal data ownership” — the idea that people who communicate online should be able to own and manage information about themselves.
The Growth of Online Social Networks in the Real World
In Tim Berners-Lee on Social Graph: Ok, I Give Stowe Boyd takes Berners-Lee to task for confusing concepts and terminology related to “semantic web,” “social network,” and “social graph.”
In Should You Make or Buy Your Social Network? I wrote about some of the technology-related decisions that are needed when an organization adopts online social networking.
What I'm Learning About Applying Social Media to Disaster Response
I’ve been researching applications of social media and social networking in local disaster response. Here are some of the things I’ve found.
The most interesting statement Forrester’s Charlene Li makes in Google OpenSocial will (hopefully) make social apps more relevant is this: