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No biggy eh?
Spidering Facebook can be a real pain.
As for adding people without their approval, it would destroy the hierarchy of the FOAF concept as described in the friendster patent.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1...
If that were allowed it would be a public contact manager and not a social network.
Most social networking sites will allow you to add people who did not approve you in favorites list.
Glad I'm not you.
I have enough to do.
If you could see my Outlook contacts you'd understand that THOSE are far tighter ties than any online social network.
The fact that you see them as different somehow explains just how bad these networks are. Now we're justifying THEIR bad designs to ourselves as "FEATURES." And we don't even realize it!
Human beings are funny animals, that's for sure!
With myspace the only distinction is whether someone is your friend or not (though everyone is a part of your "extended network"...still haven't figured out what that's all about), and you can't even say how you know a particular person.
Facebook was originally only for students. And to separate themselves from MySpace, they created super tight security in regards to keeping profiles private. To keep the .edu's not from community college feel like they were joining a respectful webstablishment.
When they went public, they simply kept the same format regardless of their new audience. It's not like they're going to code a whole new framework just for the new people.
The whole outlook integration you're looking for wreaks of Microsoft. You should check out spaces.msn.com if you want something that integrates into your MS products suite instead of Facebook, "a 3rd party Windows app". Kidding, but I'm sure Gates would describe it exactly that way.
If you read Digg recently you would have seen an article on the front page about Micheal Moore supporting the piracy of his own movie(which is already on newsgroups). Why would he do that? He's already rich and doesn't worry about it. Facebook could make a windows tray monitor/importer/thingy to work with the Outlook API, but there is no reason for them to do so.
Its topical that just last week I had a friend request from person on Facebook whom I had never met, talked to or even shared a dialog of any sort with. They just were a friend of a friend. When I explained my choice for turning him down he was very very cool about it.
It did lead me to wonder though If I could not somehow segregate those networks into close, distant , work and internet contacts.
The net is making celebrities without the usual grooming and profiling of the traditional media. Social networks are going to go a long way to help those advertisers find new models on which to define who best represents them.
The first online social network to integrate friend connections with credibility and value will have the next adwords like product and revenue generator on their hands for sure.
But... you don't have to fill that info out at all. I rarely do. Look at the buttons at the bottom - I think one is called "Skip this step". I could be wrong about the text on the button, but there's definitely an easy way of not filling out that information.
But doing so adds another level of intricacy to your network. Click on Friends > Social Timeline to see an example of this.
I think it's clearly a feature, not a bug, that Facebook makes it very difficult - compared to Orkut and some of the older ones as well as LinkedIn - to "find" new friends. I like that. I quit using those other systems because people's Friends' lists were worthless - I had NO confidence that person X actually has (or had) a relationship with person Y. They were more like contests to collect people than true reflections of people's social networks.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, would be worthless if you couldn't easily make new connections - but that only works if each person's contact list is free of chaff. Consequently, they have built a whole system around introductions and finding distant contacts while maintaining the integrity of the network and investing every user in that as well.
Robert Scoble You crack me up. I love how you openly confess feelings for your wife, rock on. I'm going to start a social network for couples just so I can send sweet nothings to my wife. Nah that's too much work, I'll just use email.
I agree - which is one reason why with my social app, NELA (Never Eat Lunch Alone) we are deliberately not focusing on building yet-another-social-network. Instead we are focusing on tools to help you manage and use your contacts in a richer manner (and not just for individuals - for companies as well).
Oh and we are working on putting together a solution for that pile of 6000 business cards as well (a for fee service to scan, enter, and even research those contacts resulting in a portable contact list importable into tools such as NELA, but also Outlook or gmail).
I think it is also really important for social network designers to think about context - and making it visible (and also not making it either/or) - i.e. I have one set of friends to whom I turn to for restaurant recommendations - with some exceptions they are not who I ask for an introduction to a VC or potential client. I know 1000's of people, the set of people who I would invite to my home for brunch while large, is not at all everyone I know.
And the set, as Nick Douglas amusing twittered from brunch at my place yesterday, with whom I might be interested romantically is smaller still.
From an application designer perspective, however, there are some serious complications in tying behaviors to arbitrary tags. I suspect the best case is some checklist of possible actions/access levels - and a mapping of them to your tags. But with some reasonably smart defaults which the majority of people would use (i.e. something like "intimate friends", "family", "social friends", "business contacts", "public" might be sufficient, perhaps even too many).
Shannon
I agree with your comments on Facebook, having gone through this frustrating problem a number of times now when trying to add contacts. It seems that it would not be too difficult for them to tweak it just a little and add one or two questions:
- Is this person a business contact? (And then just let you add instead of asking where you met them)
- Did you "meet" this person online? (For Facebook's marketing info, they might ask where, but I would rather not have to answer that question.)
I think it's likely they'll make these changes eventually, hopefully sooner. BTW, I hope you'll add me as a "friend" on Facebook, since we have actually met in person now. :-)
On Ning, you have the option of creating a private group and having the separate option of adding friends who are not in that specific group (or not). You can create private groups on Facebook, but the whole contact thing needs to be easier, like Ning's is now.
Thanks for bringing this to Facebook's attention.
Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer
Creative Sage
You "have to"?
How is that? Aren't you allowed to skip the step where that is asked? I've never been forced to define a relationship on Facebook. Is that a difference between the "college" accounts and the other "networks"?
Funny that on the mobile app it doesn't even have this choice. It just asks you to "confirm" when people ask you to add them to your Facebook.
If the feature isn't there to help you communicate with and build your networks, then what is it really there for?
I'd rather just "confirm" or "deny" and then later add tags about each person that I make up. You have no idea what I want to put into my social network about you. For you, for instance, I'd want to use these tags:
NICE
PROGRAMMER
SMART
RELIABLE
CONNECTOR
ENTREPRENEUR
PHOTOWALKER
SAN FRANCISCO
NELA.COM
THAI
COMPUTER HISTORY
Now, how many of those tags mean what you think they mean?
btw, in facebook you can skip the "how do i know this person" form
What's important is that the tags mean what you thing they should mean....
Presumably, anyone networking through you should either understand enough about you to appreciate the context for your tags, or they should be willing to spend the time to investigate the connection.
Duncan
Managing social networks (i partecipate to Linkedin, Facebook, Ning, Flickr, Neurona, Twitter and others I do not even remember) means two thing: managing your identity and managing your contacts... These are very interesting topics :-)
Ciao... Nicola
http://www.tagworld.com/
I had written back & forth to the owner Evan. He's actually pretty cool BUT
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detai...
Your idea didn't make it in the real world.
Sorry Scoble.
TagWorld is just like every other social network... I think Robert is referring to something more along the lines of "add-and-run", where people can be within the network without even visiting it.
In other words, Geni, but for everyone you know.
I wanna input my friends e-mail address (or some point of contact) and tag him as "lawyer". If he doesn't visit the "service", no harm done - he's still "in the grid" :)
Anyway, I just wanted to give you an overall thumbs up on your observations regarding friends (vs. connections, etc.) and also respectfully note that I wrote a similar rant a few weeks back:
"All “friends” aren’t created equal! (why we need better relationship marking in social networks)."
It should only take a day or so to modify the media wiki code and wire it into a fresh sitespaces install.
I think it's a dumb idea, but I'm always willing to make money off of anything.
What you're talking about is essentially a personal wiki.
I know lots of people do this, and yes, I counter as many as I can. The softer the term gets, the easier it gets to forget the atrocities.
It certainly hasn't been designed with college students in mind either. I totally dislike it when that annoying window opens where I need to not only enter how I know that person, but also from where, when etc etc etc...hmmppff! Yes, there is a button that says "Skip This Step", but I don't want to click on it either. I am a lazy internet surfer! Zuckerburg, are you reading this?
There is this new "application" called "Top Friends" or "star friends"..something like that. I got a request today to add that application which enables me to quantify my friendship with someone. 4 stars, 3 stars etc. What if I don't know what star it is?! Why not be a little innovative and choose planets?
Another one- Fortune Cookie, Horoscope sharing etc. I think this application sharing madness will drive me insane. In fact, I log in much lesser now because I know that every time I log in, I'll have to deal with those "add this application" screens.
"well, i'd go to a friend's page i knew we had in common and see if you commented on their page, then message you that way."
how ass backwards IS that? Stop trying to cram Fox TV shows down my throat and focus on the basics of what social networking actually is. LET ME NETWORK, SOCIALLY, and chill a bit on trying to be a "media" company
back to you Scoble, i LOVE your idea of tagging contacts within a social network, not just because it's distinct from the "how do you know this person" question but because those tags can change and grow over time as your life changes and grows.
I would tag some people SXSW for the past two years, but this year need to add a Gnomedex tag.
You should send your complaints to the facebook folken. they've listened in the past.
Facebook acquires LinkedIn and Geni. You now can set whether someone is your family (Geni), a friend (Facebook), or a business associate (LinkedIn). Just now all the options would be via one platform (Facebook, which would integrate the other networking sites). You still have one contact list, but with different contact types. Plus, you get the best features of the other networks (the Flash chart showing your family tree at Geni and the business savvy/networking of LinkedIn) and the social networking superiority of Facebook.
When you meet Mark, Robert, can you ask him if it's a possibility?
> lets me add contacts. Lets me add them for any reason.
What I would like is a way of defining contacts in my addressbook and then sharing that with the various sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) rather than importing / export N times and trying to keep it all in sync.
But it seems like Identity is like the Higgs boson of the internet - something we keep searching for but never quite finding.
The problem with 'fixing' this issue is that it will 'fix' it for a handful, but break it for others.
I agree that Facebook has no options that ever work for me, so I generally choose the random option and type in a story. I find that useful to a degree (I am now at the point that I forget who is who...beyond about 150, I can't possibly keep track), but, you are right, it doesn't encompass adult relationships.
Have you ever seen the Microformat XFN? http://gmpg.org/xfn/
Wordpress uses this for links - and you can use combinations of types of relationships. For instance, Chris (factoryjoe) is:
friend, met, coworker, co-resident, sweetheart
It doesn't say how I met Chris, but it defines my current relationship with him.
How I met someone is very anecdotal and personal and has endless possibilities...and, you are right, this is where tagging can be very helpful.
So, if I link to Chris, I can say:
"a href="http://www.factoryjoe.com/blog" rel="friend, met, coworker, co-resident, sweetheart" tag="designer, citizenagency, factoryjoe, sanfrancisco, talented, barcamp, coworking, microformats, openid, opensource""
But our actual story is much more complex than that and can never be boiled down to a tag or a drop down. However, for someone I met at a conference, I can tag that person with that conference. If the relationship gets more complex, I may have to remove the conference reference as it becomes meaningless.
Personally, I agree with Jeremy Toeman regarding the misuse of the Nazi term (remember Godwin's Law: http://tinyurl.com/6h49c). Perhaps social networks haven't solved the issue very well. I agree. Personally, I like some of the boundaries these SNs set. I use them for what I use them. LinkedIn does my professional network stuff. Facebook helps me keep in contact with old friends. Twitter is my microblogging tool. I have slightly different networks for all of them and my relationships aren't all transferable.
Okay...so what I've said in a very long-winded comment is that the solution isn't simple. There are both positive and negative results from closed social networks. And there are ways in which people have already been discussing these issues for many years that are out there.
BTW, LinkedIN just got made because I tried to blanket invite all the folks from all the other various social networks. They're the only ones who 'penalize' me for trying to load up a bunch of friends.
Ah, social networks.
I don't know why twitter hasn't done this, and in fact this is the limiting factor that prevents me from using twitter as it is intended. Instead I've created a private twitter account for my Planypus coworkers so we can twitter in the office, and then I have another public twitter account. If twitter supported tags it would give me a quick and dirty way to twitter to a particular group of people (it could still default to public giving me the same functionality)
I took out a domain, malliki.com. As soon as the rest of our server gets here and I put it in the datacenter I'll make it live. But even with a cross between wikipedia and friendster, something that's new and pointless. I don't see people going to it.
If Scoble gave me either the best social networking software on earth or 5 real well known celebrity profiles including Paris Hilton. As somebody who wants to make money off of it, I would take the celebrities in a second. Ordinary people do not give a crap about the software.
Because social network messaging is a multi-degreed form of communication and it's easy to access contacts (most of the time). The problem is that social network messaging can't scale because it's a closed network. How useful would Gmail be if you could only communicate with people on the Gmail domain?
Chris is right - people don't visit for features, they visit for communication. Why not take the Google approach of less is more? Stick to communication. Kill the profiles, use open protocols, make it easy to find needed contacts, and make the system opt-out versus opt-in.
I would say Plaxo is pretty successful with over 18 million users. Who would have thought that keeping your contact information up-to-date was so "sexy". As far as I'm concerned, Plaxo is "address book 1.0". We need "address book 2.0" that takes e-mail past the first-degree medium that it is.
Is that what it's all about?
lets go out for a beer and fix this problem. then we'll be real friends!
fred
I'm reposting this link so you can read it well.
http://freemyspace.com/history.htm
I've met some of the people behind these sites. They are not interested in rfc standards ect... They are not interested in the same goals as google.
http://collect.myspace.com/misc/news.html
MySpace built up their membership not only by getting celebs, copying friendster ect.. But they had parties, physical parties in LA, and other places. Then they went and advertised on comcast channels.
Most of the people involved in Social networking are not interested in the technical details. Their programmers are not the best programmers because it's not something that you can say is an accomplishment really. No offense to Duc, he did a great job with the ugly mess that is cold fusion.
To understand why the sites are the way they are, you kind of have to have met some of the people or at least talked to them. They're not the Kevin Rose type for the most part. They're the Kevin Pereira type.
Of course, there's the problem that my high school friends keep hopping networks, and I keep having to add them again and again. That's a real problem, and while I appreciate the ability to import my Gmail contacts into Facebook it isn't quite the same thing as importing my MySpace contacts.
Anyways, my point is that every SNS site has to choose: How will they model relationships? Will they try to support small networks or large networks? Will they encourage people to meet strangers or help people track down people they already know? Each of those decisions has implications in how the system can be used. Facebook made their decisions -- of course they might change their mind someday -- and those decisions lead to a system which might not work the way you want.
Honestly, it would suck if every SNS site worked the same way.
On the N95, you can actually save login details. I've found it always works for username - though not always for password. If you've saved the info, the way to call back your entry is by entering the first character and then pressing down, which will show your name. You can select it and then your form info will fill.
then try logging into m.facebook.com."
It did help. Once. It's most frustrating.
The line in the silicon stops a little short of that for me.
never thought a phone call to u will lead to such a post
i really like you a lot
site name -RajaRishi.com where you the user rules us
gender-Anonymous,Man,Woman,gal,boy,couple,friends,group,gay,bi,lesbian,money lender,money seeker,govt official,any of above,dont wish to say
minimum age needed -1
registration starts at -1900
extensions currently allowed as pics -gif,jpg,jpeg,png,flv,fla,mpg,mp3
the only restriction that i have used is that u have to verify your email address at registration login_this is to ensure the safety of the site and to protect users and me>the owner and the website host
--------------
this uses -php izabi - a open source social networking using php mysql script and runs on linux and any Linux apache php mysql(lamp) and any server using php mysql like iis etc -users of my site can contribute code by sending code to me _raja_at_rajarishi.com or by contributing to the code base at www.phpizabi.net
it has been downloaded
---------
90,802 downloads totally that is
133.7 downloads per day
features that this script and which my website currently has
New Features
* Random members gender selection
* Saved searches
Generic Features
* Smileys support
* Multilanguage support
* Registration captcha
* Mass mail support
* Pictures cropping / proportions
* Tell a friend
* Invite a friend
* Search and advanced search
* Search by geographic distance
* Contact us system
* Bookmark link
* Privacy and terms of use
* Match search based on profile
* Online / Offline status
* Activity notification
* Customizable genders
Users and Profiles
* Customizable profile data
* Customizable questionnaires
* Email address confirmation
* Automatic / Manual approval
* Unique address check
* Online status
* Personal Gallery
* Personal Blog
* User settings panel
* Ignore / Block users
* New contacts notification
* New mails notification
* Favorite blogs
* Recent profile views
* Contacts list
* Contacts categorization
* Contacts management
* Newsletter
* Horoscope
* Last login
* Profile / pictures rating
* Profile views
* Private photo gallery
* Nudges (kisses, slaps, ...)
* Users comments
* Events calendar
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* Saved searches
Communication
* Blogs
* Internal messages system
* Pages (notifications)
* Forums (inkspot)
* Chatrooms
* Files sharing
script recommended by jessu@mail2.
so heres to anonymity
3 cheers to the new way to socialize -dont wish to say my name
Join the Social Hermits: http://hermits.ning.com
Exactly. By checklist I meant in terms of defining the actions related to a tag - that's the biggest piece from a programming perspective - but you are right, the specific tags will be unique to each person (but I would still suggest that rather than a blank slate the network suggest a few standard types for people to start with if they don't want to go through the effort of customizing - i.e. you might then "clone" the privacy rules for "family" for the tag "cafesinAmsterdam"
Shannon
Your comment on not being able to see the people who have friended with you is a valid one and the feature is already on our roadmap. If you want to invite your existing contacts, check out http://jaiku.com/contacts/invite. It is still limited in terms of services you can import from, but getting more complete.
Regarding the ability to make a difference between types of friends ("school buddies", "colleagues", ...), we'll soon introduce new channel functionality, which should take away part of the pain here. In addition, I've been selling the idea of people tagging for our team for some time, but let's see what happens there. I'd love to hear about your ideas of how the tags could be leveraged?
See you later today!
Well, in retrospect I guess social networking isn't so bad. :)
You gotta love the internet!
BTW, My PSP also sold for 1/3 more than what the Microplay here wanted to give me for it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&a...
Maybe the Scoble Wiki/Friendster Frankenstein will work after all. The new server should be here in a couple days so I can drive it down to the DC and find the hell out.
I am now forced to abandon Twitter because I tried to reset the password Monday (couldn't remember it, and needed it to try their Facebook widget), tried the reset function several times, and it just plain doesn't work. The form doesn't even align properly on the page when reloaded after a failure.
Emails to Twitter support, both via the form and direct email, have gone unanswered. Pity. I really liked Twitter, and have a lot of friends there. Now I'll have to see whether their competition does any better at handling the basics.
The "Network NAzi" syndrome is alive and well
oh dan I will end up on the twitter blacklist for that one