paul walk’s weblog

I’ve just been invited in FaceBook to join something called a ‘blog network’. The invitation purported to come from a well-known blogger - someone I’m happy to be associated with. I accepted the invitation, which caused the FaceBook to announce to anyone who cared to notice that I am now a fan of that particular blog.

Err - ’scuse me? I just joined a ‘network’ - I didn’t make any value judgement other than that which can be implied by my joining this network - and I don’t think I implied I was a fan. In this case I’m not too worried by this association as I generally appreciate the blog, but it could be otherwise.

Which brings me to the point (yet another thing I don’t like about FaceBook): It seems to work against any possibility of nuance or sophistication in inter-personal relationships. I can’t have a contact, or a business associate - it’s friendship or nothing.

Tags: blog-network, Facebook

Via my colleague Brian Kelly’s post, I read Catherine O’Brien’s How the Google generation thinks differently on the Times Online site (Brian gets cited offering advice on parenting in a digital age!).

I enjoyed the article, but one sentence in the middle caused me to reminisce about my own childhood, and my approach to ‘doing’ homework:

The experience with which my generation grew up, of absorbing oneself in a single book and allowing its themes to meander into the mind before forming considered judgments, is in danger of being eclipsed by the new, digital world order.

Now I judge myself to be more or less of the same generation as Catherine, but I have a quite different memory of doing homework. As I recall, I spent hours in my bedroom, with a text book or two for sure, but also with Radio Victory playing fairly continuously on my clock-radio. At pre-arranged times I would use my pocket torch to send messages in Morse code to the kid across the other side of the alley-way which ran behind my house. Here’s a sample:

- …. .. … / .– — ..- .-.. -.. / -… . / … — / — ..- -.-. …. / . .- … .. . .-. / .. ..-. / .– . / …. .- -.. / … — — . / -.- .. -. -.. / — ..-. / .–. — -.-. -.- . - / -.. . …- .. -.-. . / ..-. — .-. / … . -. -.. .. -. –. / … …. — .-. - / - . -..- - / — . … … .- –. . … / - — / . .- -.-. …. / — - …. . .-. / .. -. / .–. .-.. .- .. -. / . -. –. .-.. .. … ….

If you feel so inclined, you can translate this using this nifty Morse code translator.

My point is, of course, that continuous partial attention is not a generational phenomenon so much as it is related to age.

And furthermore, while the technology may be different, but thirty years ago I had a remote social network (with two nodes - I didn’t have many friends then, for some reason) which was maintained with a recognised, international standard deployed over a binary protocol using readily-available, commodity hardware.

Tags: morse-code

I haven’t minted a TLA for ages - I think I might be the the first to come up with PPP for Personal Profile Portability as a convenient handle to wrap around the current flavour of ‘data portability’ being touted by the major ‘walled-garden’ social network sites.

Both MySpace and Facebook have recently launched initiatives to open up a little….but not too much.

MySpace has announced its Data Availability project with some major partner applications. Essentially, this will encourage the user to manage ‘profile’ information on MySpace, with a view to surfacing this information in other, partner applications (initially Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter. It will also allow users to share some data such as photos which they have added to the MySpace site. Facebook has a similar initiative called Facebook Connect, initially in partnership with Digg. In both cases, a set of usage policies will be imposed such that the user retains control over what is shared, with the power to revoke the sharing agreement. I’m really encouraged to note that in the case of MySpace’s Data Availability, the mechanism adopted to solve the inter-authentication/authorisation issues between these systems is an implementation of OAuth.

Amit Kapur (MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer) says that Data Availability is:

“…founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data.”

Dave Morin of Facebook believes that:

“…the next evolution of data portability is [...] about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

The extent to which users ‘have control’ over their content and data even while it has been completely locked up within the MySpace and Facebook applications has been argued about extensively. The relationships between these sites, their users, and their users’ data have evolved over the last year or two, as users have become a little more savvy. Pressure from groups such as DataPortability appears to have had an effect, with MySpace also signing up to this recently.

So, it seems as though the walled gardens are opening up, getting ready to participate in the wider web. Or are they?

In a web of distributed social networks, the most likely way in which users might manage their participation would seem (right now) to be through a single entry point. Essentially, if the web of social networks is going to allow ’single-sign-on for the user, and allow a re-use of profile information, and even content across multiple applications, then one model is to give the user a ‘gateway’ service, where they sign-on and manage their ‘account’. Both Facebook and MySpace are going to battle hard to be that gateway service for the masses. Both have accepted that they can no longer remain as a completely walled garden - they must open up, just a little, to avoid being eventually marginalised. But now that they are not totally closed, they may find it difficult to retain control. They may find others are waiting to seize the initiative. Enter Google, and its Friend Connect service.

Friend Connect is different to the previous initiatives from Facebook and MySpace. Google’s new offering is designed to provide a ‘middleware’ services, sitting between the big social networks, and sundry web applications which might want to exploit the new openings in these services. It also utilises components which have been developed with the OpenSocial API. Friend Connect is, I think, a very significant development, because it shows how more distributed social networks might work. It is significant also in a particular detail - notice how Friend Connect can become a social network of sorts simply by integrating existing social networks. Suddenly, the huge headstart enjoyed by Facebook and MySpace doesn’t look so unassailable. This is, presumably, the real reason why Facebook have taken steps to block Friend Connect.

I suggest that because they have been walled gardens for so long, neither Facebook nor MySpace really know how to succeed as middleware. They have always been the destination - never really a component in someone’s workflow. By contrast, Google has always offered services which the user employs en route to a different destination. Google understands this kind of arrangement fundamentally. Expect to see increasingly desperate measures from MySpace and Facebook to retain control while Google quietly grows its Friend Connect service.

Tags: data-availability, Facebook, friend-connect, Google, myspace, oauth, personal-profile-portability, ppp

In a recent post, Facebook Or Twitter - Or Facebook And Twitter , Brian Kelly says:

…in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.“.

Brian tackles the “popularity on the wane” comment with some web statistics, but leaves the “closed garden” and “better development environment” arguments. I’m not at all sure what the argument is about development environments, but I am very interested in the walled garden aspect - I wrote about this in July last year, and I have seen nothing since to change my mind. I’m not sure I’m deriding Facebook, but I do maintain that it is a walled garden. I still keep an account in Facebook out of interest but I rarely access it.

I attended a session on digital libraries earlier this week at the JISC conference, at which Lorcan Dempsey spoke about how where once the user built their workflow around the library, now the library must build services which fit into the user’s workflow. Facebook, it seems to me, is a destination. I go there sometimes, almost always because someone has uploaded some photos of an event I have attended. I go there for occasional amusement. According to the figures, Facebook is very successful at being a destination. But is it embedded in anyone’s workflow I wonder? Twitter is very much part of my workflow - it is the single most used application on my iPhone.

Twitter is an eminently ‘composable‘ service by design, while Facebook is an attractive (for many) destination. Twitter participates in any number of mashups, and has, given rise to an extraordinary range of user-interfaces. It fits into people’s workflows because they can choose how to access it. I use a combination of the mobile web interface and SMS: others use these and a variety of rich desktop interfaces.

So I think my response is still: use Twitter and Facebook, or both, or neither. But I believe that Twitter is more interesting, really because it’s composable nature will allow it to fit all kinds of workflows.

Your mileage may vary

Tags: composable, Facebook, Twitter

The headline to Guy Dixon’s post on vnunet.com is “Facebook user numbers fall in the UK”. The sub-title is: “Social networking fatigue sets in at last”.

I don’t think the one follows the other. I think that what we are really seeing is simply Facebook Fatigue.

I felt the first effects of Facebook Fatigue months ago and stopped actively using it although I still respond to the alerts that it sends me about people communicating with me in some way. I wouldn’t want to be rude!

When Facebook announced their platform which would allow third parties to deploy applications within the Facebook environment, I was momentarily interested, until I had a closer look, and concluded:

I just can’t get all that excited about facebook as a platform. From my point of view, in an exciting era of mashups, facebook is only seriously mashable in one direction, and it’s the wrong direction. If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable - now that would be exciting.

I have yet to see a compelling use of Facebook’s platform. Very quickly, during the period I actually used Facebook, I decided that the only value it offered me was the status and news updates provided by my ‘Facebook friends’. The RSS output facility for these allowed me follow them without having to log in to the application proper. Of course, this relegated me to the status of ‘lurker‘ but I was already getting bored with the thing anyway.

I was actually alerted to the possibility of more widespread Facebook Fatigue by someone ‘tweeting’ about it on Twitter. Twitter is, from my point of view, interesting in all the ways that Facebook just isn’t. From one point of view, Twitter provides the social network and ’status updates’ functionality of Facebook, and nothing else. Importantly, it does so in an open way - it has a very good (and simple) API which has allowed a number of applications which use Twitter to spring up already. Where everything developed for the Facebook platform is only usable within Facebook itself, Twitter-based applications can be deployed anywhere.

I’m a fan of Twitter. It took me a while to ‘get it’, but now it is becoming increasingly useful to me. It’s my virtual ‘water-cooler’, where I catch up on the gossip in my network. It’s my alerting system for breaking news. It’s agile - I can easily start/stop following people. Now I can do the same to ‘tags’ - if I get interested in something, I’ll follow it for a while, then stop. By embracing the constraint of the 140 character limit per post, we get a very different communication channel - one which seems to fit a need for an increasing number of people. Where my network on Facebook peaked to a plateau quite early on, on Twitter I’m gaining new contacts frequently.

Facebook has failed (so far) to get embedded, in systems, workflow or practice on a large scale. Given it’s massive user-base, this is interesting. Facebook seems to want to be the destination, and the only destination. Twitter is already both destination and component - I now habitually turn to Facebook to see what my network thinks about the latest news for example, and have already started roughing up application which could use Twitter to add to my ‘finely-tuned antennae‘.

If you haven’t already, give Twitter a try.

Social networking fatigue? We’re only just warming up!

Tags: Facebook, facebook-fatigue, Guy Dixon, Twitter

Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup. So, parts of the blogosphere are quite excited by the news that Facebook, previously criticised for being a closed system, has agreed to join the DataPortability Workgroup. According to Duncan Riley, the author of this TechCrunch post:

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

Of course we can only speculate on the real significance of this. While Facebook would not be impossible to copy and compete with a technical level, especially for someone with the resources of Google or Yahoo or the like, it is the established user-base, and consequently the brand, which would be very difficult to match.

It seems clear to me that Facebook has been looking for ways to open up access to its data - it has to in order to be able to exploit it beyond the simple ‘page view’ advertising model. But Facebook has already found this difficult - witness the strange mistakes they made with RSS and the Beacon debacle.

What the participation in the DataPortability initiative gains Facebook is three-fold:

1. Facebook becomes immune to the ‘walled-garden’ accusation for the short/medium term
2. Facebook is not alone in navigating the uncharted territory of social network portability
3. If DataPortability actually delivers, it puts competitors on the same playing field as Facebook - rather than Facebook being scrutinised and expected to lead the way

However this pans out, it is certainly a boost for the credibility of the DataPortability initiative - I’ll be keeping an eye on this now.

Tags: DataPortability, Facebook

The strange excitement in some parts of the HE sector around Facebook continues apace. Apparently, it is now possible to create a page for an organisation rather than for an individual. This is of course creating a stir, with a rush to claim pages. Kind of like internet domain registering but without the regulatory framework. There’s a long comment thread over on Brian’s blog with several points of view on this.

I can’t help thinking that the emphasis here will be on defending a brand. Universities will want to claim ‘their’ page mostly in order to prevent other people from doing so. I’d like to suggest a new income stream to Facebook: charge a small fee for organisational pages - you’ll clean up! If I’m right, then many organisations’ first real engagement with Facebook will be quite negative - the motivation will be to see off a perceived threat.

Of course, once the organisational page is established, people will wonder what to do with it. The temptation will be to do something with it, even if it is just for the sake of its existence. Some sort of ‘down with the kids’ marketing drive I guess!

Inevitably there will be incidents of claim-jumping. Imagine the disgruntled, or even just irreverent student who claims their university’s page in Facebook. What fun they could have….!

What about trademarks? Domain name registration is subject to trademark law. Universities are aware of this (here’s an example from Oxford University of a clearly stated policy). Will something similar need to be done for Facebook pages or groups? And then again for the next fad?

So, is the introduction of organisational pages in Facebook an opportunity or a threat to the organisation?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, trademarks, Oxford