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Thoughts on the Social Graph
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Aug 20, 2007 08:13 AM
from the something-to-think-about dept.
from the something-to-think-about dept.
Jamie found an excellent story about the trouble with social graphs. The author discusses the proliferation of social networking websites, the annoying problems this creates, and proposes an open solution to much of the problem. Essentially he is talking about an API for all those relationship systems not under the control of any single commercial entity, coupled with a shared login system. Had things like this been popularized a half a decade ago, we'd be looking at a different internet.
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Yawn. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://stylus-toolbox.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 15, @11:50AM)
Re:Yawn. (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to be talking about a system where anyone can run their own server according to the open standard APIs, and hence will not be centralised.
Although he's right that people are tired of readding friends on each network, one flaw is that "friend" has different meanings. On some, it's simply "This person is my friend". On some like Facebook, it also means they can see information about you that others might not. On LiveJournal however (which was created by the author of this article), it goes far beyond simply "friend"; it indicates which journals you want to read, and who can see your "friends only" entries. So conceivably, who I want as a friend on Facebook isn't necessarily the same as who I want as a "friend" on LJ.
Now theoretically this can be handled in that "people whose journals I want to read" could be a subset of anyone I list as my friend (i.e., you have an option for each friend whether you read their entries, whether they can read yours, or whatever is specific for that site). But that's more hassle for individual users.
Re:Yawn. (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @08:29AM)
He identifies the solution is out there... (Score:5, Interesting)
I subscribe to Netflix. I added a Netflix app to Facebook, it let's my friend's see my queue... yawn... It also let's my Facebook friends, if they get Netflix, quickly add me as a Netflix friend (subject to my approval). The Netflix app mirrors some of Netflix's UI, but not everything. I still go to Netflix to manage Queue's and add movies, but I can see what's going on quickly on Facebook.
The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end. If your front-end has all your database calls (no stored procedures in the database, not even a DB functions file in Perl/PHP/whatever you coded in), then you see it as "be a Facebook App OR a website."
The promise of HAVi in the AV world was that we would connect our equipment via Firewire, and they would export a front-end in Java that our TV or Receiver would render for us. The data in MPEG-2 with fixed compression caused content producers to go ape-shit, but the idea is valid on the web.
If you want to process information, you need to collect it and do something with it. The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.
I collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.
I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook. Sure, if they have pictures that they want the Facebook features (tag a friend), they need to upload to Facebook, but if they want Flickr sharing (tags, etc.), they upload to Flickr and put it on the Flickr App on Facebook.
Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.
IP (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday July 31, @12:06PM)
So you want to change the Internet... (Score:5, Insightful)
communism (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose if identity cards advocates jumped on the "open" bandwagon, then their brand of Marxist/Stalinist state-control fascism would be "progressive" too.
Security Issues (Score:2)
Re:Security Issues (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday January 08 2007, @02:45PM)
The people I communicate with on Facebook are not the people I interact with on Linux forums or on Slashdot. The meaning of a "friend" (or whatever) on each site is totally different. Not only do I not want these connections treated identically... I don't want those separate accounts to be related to one another!
Frankly the downsides to having my online social activity interconnected are numerous: spamming, ease of monitoring me, etc. The end result is that I will either reveal personal information I didn't intend to, or conversely I will use the sites less freely because I'll be worried about revealing information (e.g. if I know potential employers will easily find the information).
Considering the numerous downsides, I have trouble seeing the benefit, to the end-user, of having a comprehensive, widely-accessible 'social graph.'
To which I respond... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @10:09AM)
...who cares?
Use a social netowrking site, don't use one. Use MySpace, Facebook, or don't. Is this really a problem? No. Is it bothering anyone else? No. Is this news? No. Nothing to see here -- move along.
anti-human (Score:2, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 19, @12:26PM)
To really try to solve this problem the representation of relationships would have to be automatically generated, and that gets creepy really fast since it would mean having computer applications track all significant interactions with others.
And we want this *why*? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial. And hey, as a perk, if I ever find myself on the run from the police (for example, after someone steals my identity and gets me flagged as a major contributor to Al Qaida), they'll have a convenient list of everyone I might contact. Golly, what not to love about that?
People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site
Why, exactly, does "every site" need to know my friends? For that matter, why should any sites know my friends? And I don't mean in the Slashdot Friends/Foe sense - I have plenty of both, solely for the purpose of moderation. Of over 100 people on my lists here, I only actually know three of them, and one of those I've never even met.
If a site actually needs to know my friends/family/coworkers, you can safely bet on my not wanting to use that site.
For the record, I get sick of registering at websites not because it takes too long to come up with fake info, but because for the majority of them, I shouldn't need to create a personalized account in the first place! If I find something through Google, I don't want a lasting relationship with a site, I just want my damned content. If I buy something as a one-off purchase, I don't want an account, I just want the transaction completed and all my info expunged from the site. Unless I specifically ask a website to give me a persistant profile, don't force one on me - it only wastes time, and I won't rememeber what fake info I put in next time anyway (hell, I must have over fifty logins at the NYT).
This sounds like yet another one of those non-issues that give marketing gurus wet dreams and serve no purpose beyond stripping us of any semblance of privacy and anonymity. Brad can keep his thoughts, I want no part of it.
Re:And we want this *why*? (Score:5, Funny)
You truly are Slashdot material. Welcome my brother.
Re:And we want this *why*? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday April 03 2006, @07:23PM)
If you mean that I can't call myself one of the 1.4 million "friends" of the latest boy band - Yes, it has. I simply do not see the point of Myspace or Facebook other than as a free-as-in-beer webhost (with the hidden expense of having all your "friends" receive slightly better-targetted advertising).
If, however, you mean a real social network - I limit mine to people I actually know, people that (with very few exceptions) I have physically met. Friends and acquantances whose real names and at least partial contact info I know, whose birthday I might celebrate with them, whose voice I would recognize on the phone or whose face I would recognize in a crowd.
Call me a Luddite, but it disturbs me greatly to think that we have diluted the term "friend" to nothing more than a form of moderation roughly translating as something between fandom and "I like something about your web page".
Re:And we want this *why*? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday January 08 2007, @02:45PM)
I know how to use the web in such a web that I'm "sufficiently anonymous." I know true anonymity is impossible (e.g. with an IP address and a subpoena), but I know how to restrict the information I give out to a level I am comfortable with, and totally out of my control.
One problem with ubiquitously-connected social networking is that I not only have to be careful what I reveal, but I am now very much dependent on what my "friends" decide to reveal about me. If they go mentioning personal information about me, and it's cross-connected through every social networking site I visit, then this represents a release of information beyond what I'm comfortable with.
Obviously this problem already exists (and currently results in, e.g., people wasting time un-tagging themselves from Facebook photos)... but a widely connected and widely available social graph exacerbates the problem. Suddenly I'm dependent upon the net savvy of every single person who is connected to me? (And, given the whole "six degrees" issue, that's a lot of not-so-savvy people.) No thanks.
The end result of more detailed, more available, social information is merely that those of us aware of the privacy implications will stop using social networking sites. Is that really the intent here?
All you need to know on the subject is: (Score:2)
(http://pcbookreview.com/)
MySpace - Kids/teens
Anything else - non starter.
NSFW! (Score:1, Funny)
Security/MS Passport (Score:2)
Saying that it does seem better if the entity you entrust this information to (not just password but friend relationships, behavior, preferences, who knows what else) is a non-profit, maybe non-evil, maybe open source, etc... Still what if they aren't as innocuous as they seem, what if they suffer a security breach? Even with a centralized login system as an aside, think about the possibilities for identity theft and social engineering. If someone can reconstruct your behavior, friends, family, location... how hard is it really to become you?
I think a better system may be for a user to establish those per-site IDs then use a common API to link them to each other. The user specifies I'm John-Crazy-Guy on Facebook and my MySpace ID is John123-Crazy-Guy please sync with each other. Of course I'm not sure how MySpace/Facebook would correlate the relationship of your friends to their other social networking IDs. That would probably have to be dependent on if they have established that relationship as well. It still leaves something open to security breaches, but at least it is;
a. Distributed so each breach wouldn't be as large of a compromise.
b. Does not include credentials.
c. Is dependent on who in your contacts has also done their part of the sync.
d. Could be a common RFC for data sharing between sites.
e. Probably scales better without dependency on a central authority.
What about XFN (XHTML Friends Network)? (Score:2)
(http://russnelson.com/)
It already exists - FOAF (Score:3, Informative)
Vendor lockin is the reason it isn't simple to migrate across all the sites.
Non-geek usage (Score:2)
Non-geeks are not going to be developing new applications and mashups, they'll be using it. Moveable Type pioneered a blogging API, that turned out to be a nice defacto standard, that most other blogging engines support. Result is that thousands of non-geeks can now blog from outside their blogging-silo.
I imagine a simple REST/XML webservice protocol, so a service can query my Facebook and my LinkedIn in the same way, and then work with that. Both sites (Facebook and LinkedIn) allow you to enter your ID in other contexts (IMs, email, websites) and that should be returned for you and your friends. If would even make sense for social sites to allow you to enter your ID on other social sites (my Myspace and LinkedIn on my Facebook, and vice verse) in order to better correlate the data.
He claims that Facebook is positive to the idea - having them onboard would be a huge boost to such a protocol.
what i don't understand about slashdot (Score:2, Flamebait)
(http://circletimessquare.com/)
huh?
universal id is universal id folks. it's the same thing
someone might point out that one is open and free, and the other is under the control of a central authority. what are you smoking?
you don't get it: any kind of universal id is open to the same kinds of abuses you could appreciate if it were microsoft or george bush behind the plan. it's the same tension between convenience and privacy/security, regardless of the entity behind the universal id
the slashdot crowd seems to be schizophrenic on the concept of universal id. work it out philosophically, figure it out, and adopt an intellectually consistent point of view
Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
It's my understanding that a crack team of programmers has been assigned to this problem. That team includes Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Great Pumpkin. Good luck and godspeed.
What's the problem again? (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Saturday January 06 2007, @01:13AM)
And why is that such a problem? I'm quite happy with that state of things in the "social graph" arena.
"People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site"
1) Really? Some people (esp teens?) seem very happy to have new opportunities to redeclare their friends. Or erm start a new "friend collection".
2) Do they actually do that? Who's forcing them to anyway?
!fair (Score:2)
So he wants like some sort of library of users that a site can tap into on launch? Why should a popular site hand over its hard won users to the new kid on the block? Doesn't seem all that fair to me. If your social site or application is cool enough the Internet will beat a path to your NIC. If the users don't show then build a better site/app.
Relax, it's just Trillian for Social Networks (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 09 2004, @10:35PM)
Mugshut (Score:4, Interesting)
Conclusion? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://tribbin.nl/)
quote:
How 's that for a conclusion?
wow (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday September 17 2004, @04:10PM)
didn't microsoft try single login (Score:1)
(http://www.homerecordingconnection.com/)
Ownership is how you make money (Score:1)
If you "give away" the exclusivity of "owning" that user's data, and controlling access to the data, you will have to think of a different way to make money because there is no leverage to keep a user at that site, when they can just go to another.
I don't use social networking sites (unless you count slashdot) for that very reason, I don't want someone changing the rules some time down the road and suddenly I find that I am having to wade through popups and interstitial ads to get to my friends messages.
Just kidding, I don't have any friends.
I don't see Facebook playing along (Score:1)
trust networks? (Score:2)
(http://obsidianrook.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:48AM)
The question in my mind would be: can you start with this "friend" framework and build a "trust network" out of it...
If you take the idea seriously that the internet is going to become the new journalism, the backbone of democracy and so on, then eventually we're going to need ways to screen out the hired sock-puppets.
Re:A decade ago? (Score:1)