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 DataPortability
I admit it — I use Twitter. If I’m at my desk I check in throughout the day (I don’t access it by phone but by browser). Right now I follow 690 and 1,432 follow me, so I’m no “A-lister.”
Command Line continues a tradition of intelligent, literate, and thoughtful interviews with his October 1, 2008 interview with Evan Prodromou of Control Yourself. The interview provides insight into the related topics of open source software commercialization, and the possible “federated” nature of post-Twitter micro-blogging.
A couple of months ago my main laptop experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure. While I had most of my files backed up, key files and applications got scrambled. One area that suffered was iTunes and my podcast subscription. As a result, I’ve rebuilt my podcast subscriptions, and these are now my “top 5” in no particular order:
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.
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.
Social Networking and Elsevier's "Grand Challenge" for Knowledge Enhancement in the Life Sciences
Netherlands-based mega-publisher (and former employer) Elsevier BV has issued a grand challenge:
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.