Both here and, err, down the boozer, Andy and I have been critical of Facebook’s failure to provide feeds out from Facebook, so that content created within Facebook can be piped in to other applications. Paul Walk, tipped off by…

I think you may be right about the privacy problem though. Do a search at Bloglines for “Facebook” in feed titles. Gulp. From a very quick skim of some of them, I suspect many of those people don’t realise they’ve made their content public.

The Fb feeds should really be protected by HTTP authentication, I think, rather than by embedding the “key” in the URI.

One interpretation of this situation is that if the idea of openness isn’t ‘baked in’ to the system from the get-go, it might be quite difficult to add it at a later date….

Yes, you’ll now be shunned by your former friends in your online social networks. And don’t you dare turn up to the pub on the 28 August
Seriously though, as we discussed the aspect of openness is very complex mashup of technical issues and social and culturally specific expectations.

Perhaps Facebook is so successful because of its closed nature, and not despite of it?

And maybe our IT development community won’t be capable of developing an alternative to Facebook because are beliefs and development approaches won’t deliver services which will have the viral appeal to our users?

But maybe not. My view is that we need to be open in our questioning and avoid sticking to established positions - as I think we (UKOLN, OSS Watch and Eduserv folk) in general are.