Joho the Blog
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« Deconstructing hyperlinks || Back to Blog | Microsoft lobbies to keep voting privatized and unverifiable » June 17, 2007
Dave has a rich piece on the problem with closed social networks. He concludes:
In my terms, he's talking about social information going miscellaneous: Lots of it, detached from any particular app, a seedbed of emergence. There have been attempts to make this happen before — FOAF springs to mind — but they attempted to get us to write things down about ourselves independent of any application. FaceBook et al. make writing things down worth our while. So, the data is there. We just have to (a) get it everywhere, (b) provide strong user control over it. (A is likely to happen before B does. But you never know. At least I never know.) Dave also wants more-better metadata, especially with regards to the types of relationships these sites capture. Jeez, do I agree. For most of my friends at Facebook, the available categories are inadequate. A folksonomic approach would turn up far more interesting relationships. As it stands, FaceBook requires us to reduce this richest of social information. [Tags: social_networks dave_winer facebook identity everything_is_miscellaneous] Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 17, 2007 04:17 PM
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Comments
You mean "everyone is miscellaneous", don't you?
Posted by: Hanan Cohen | June 17, 2007 05:29 PM
I'm a huge fan of tagging, labeling, keywording, etc. However, I like that Facebook can tell me everyone I worked with in 2005. I don't see how relying on tagging to qualify relationships is going to allow me to express the richness of my relationships. Obviously the relationships that Facebook supports aren't going to fit every situation, but I'm not convinced that tags are the solution.
Posted by: Jackson Fox | June 18, 2007 10:18 PM
I would love to see as much "blowing up and reconstituting" as possible in all sorts of social networks. Why can't my starred items in Google Reader show up in del.icio.us? For that matter, why do I have to choose between del.icio.us and ma.gnolia or connotea? I have very good reasons to use all of them, and would do so if the boundaries were removed.
In a similar vein, I look forward to a unified tag cloud: del.icio.us, Gmail labels, Google Reader, MailTags, file keywords, LibraryThing tags - I use all of them and want one tag cloud to rule them all.
Posted by: Sara | June 19, 2007 01:29 PM