Comments on: Better Social Networking

By: etbe

etbe — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:40:27 +0000

Social networking doesn’t require giving all data out to everyone. Giving it to trusted people and then allowing them to export a sub-set is adequate.

Note that Orkut tries to do similar things (EG allowing certain fields to be only visible to friends). So it’s not as if restricting access to some data is an entirely new idea of mine.

By: mind

mind — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:44:18 +0000

“password protected”. fully trusted servers. heh. heh. plus, you’re completely missing the “networking” part.

By: Adrian Thurston

Adrian Thurston — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:31:17 +0000

I really like the idea of exploiting GPG as much as possible for the purpose of social networking. I’m glad to see others think the same way, after all this is about getting everyone to use the same open protocol.

By: Serendipitous altruism

Serendipitous altruism — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:30:12 +0000

Components for open distributed social networking are already available…

Open is everything – the rest is details. That is why we must take the best use cases of the closed social networking world and port them in the open. This is a lofty goal in all meaning of the adjective, but a surprisingly large number of potenti…

By: etbe

etbe — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:15:41 +0000

stratus: No matter how many privacy features they add, it will still be under their control. Also the idea of having different profiles for different readers (including different “friends” lists) is AFAIK not something that has been implemented by anyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID
Ben: I’ve considered OpenID but the issues mentioned in the Criticism section of the Wikipedia page are a concern. If I was to implement this I would want to allow other users of my site to use it as well and until I get crypto-tokens or something going I’m not confident that it would be secure enough for them.

It’s interesting to hear that Facebook was selling it’s data, I assumed that someone was doing it (or someone would if they hadn’t already) but hadn’t heard of any examples. With my idea everyone has their own data, data on their friends, and some data on friends of friends. There’s no central repository that can be sold. The worst that could happen is that someone could crack the PC used by someone who has lots of FOAF’s – but that attack can also be used against all other social networks.

Steve: Printouts are one case where it’s needed, the other is reading blogs by email.

Daniel: Interesting idea about GPG. How hard would it be to change/manage such data though?

By: Everyone Should Blog | etbe

Everyone Should Blog | etbe — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:01:09 +0000

[...] Better Social Networking has the potential to expand the scope of the blog space. [...]