I
awoke this morning to an explosion of invitatons to a new social
network called Orkut.
Lots of things to say about it - first and foremost that it's a
really clean, functional and exciting site!
Second - when I tried to join Orkut - I clicked on the 'Join Orkut'
button and it told me - "Sorry you have to be invited into Orkut."
"Oh" I said. "Then why is there a button saying "Join
Orkut?"
That's pretty strange.
Now - the next thing is that Orkut is (apparently) created by Orkut Buyukkokten,
who works at Google and just happens to be the guy who created the
oriignal social network for Stanford - which is now part of Affinity Engines (who have a
new CEO - BTW.)
Orkut has a pretty conspicuos message at the bottom saying
"In affiliation with Google" - so if I was a betting
man, I'd say Google decided NOT to buy Friendster - 'cause they got
their employee Orkut - to roll their own internal system - which (just
happens) to be called Orkut.
That said - let's just hope that Orkut will support FOAF - so we
all can live happily together.
Orkut has Communities in it - so I created a few myself.
Orkut members launch Orkut Paranoia community about Orkut TOS on Orkut
Orkut members launch Orkut Paranoia community about Orkut TOS on Orkut02/10/2004 10:42 PM Geez. My head is spinning. Anyway, BoingBoing reader Adam fields
points us to a new "Orkut community" (one of many online affinity
groups within the social networking service), called "Orkut
Paranoia" (link requires free membership). Adam says, "This
formed out of some interesting discussion we've had about what's going
on... summarized in this blog post:"
1) Orkut claims irrevocable unlimited license rights to everything you
post. Most people don't understand what that means. One example of
this is that many of my friends have posted pictures that I've taken.
This is probably not a problem, generally, but they've granted Orkut a
license to use them without consulting me, and created a legal tangle
should I have a problem with that, forcing me to have to perform a
legal struggle with Orkut, because of their unwitting actions. I think
this is rude behavior on the part of Orkut, but their prerogative to
demand.
2) Orkut may share personal information with Google in an unrestricted
way. Google is unwilling (so far) to discuss what use they may make of
that information.
3) Google's privacy policy possibly has some holes in it with regards
to data collected by way of means other than use of the google.com
website.
I suspect that Orkut is a way for Google to gather personal
information about their clientele for marketing purposes, and to try
to form a more solid relationship beyond "I just use Google for search
because it's convenient". This is not terribly nefarious, but the kind
of data that could be collected to do so has wide potential for abuse,
and people should be aware that that's what's going on. Some may not
care, but many people I know are signing up without reading or
understanding the implications of the above three points.
Company Claims Orkut Stole Orkut Code06/30/2004 07:19 PM It's not like it's particularly difficult to write a social networking
systems. These days, at the rate new ones are coming out, it
practically seems like a typical first year CS student's project.
Still, a company named Affinity Engines that builds social networking
products for universities (that just so happens to have been founded
by Orkut Buyukkokten - the creator of orkut.com) is now suing
Google for stealing their code. From the article, it sounds like
they have a pretty solid claim. First, it's obvious that Orkut had
access to the code. He even continued to work on it while he was at
Google. According to the lawsuit he promised repeatedly that he
wasn't going to work on a similar app for Google, but then did so
anyway. The real damaging point, however, is that Affinity Engines
claims they've found nine identical bugs in Orkut that are also in
their own system -- which certainly makes it quite likely the basic
code is the same.
Orkut02/10/2004 02:53 AM Well, this thing seems to be taking off. Nat threw in the first
invite, so I signed up, and another half-dozen or so folks have fired
off invites. This is another one of those networking site things, and
I've decided that while I'll go accept invites from anyone I know (I
really need to get a picture up--I'd throw the rainbow parrot pic I
use for iChat, but the TOS seem to indicate that'd be ill-advised) I
don't think I'm going to go to much trouble to actively go search
people out. These things are always interesting to look at,...
orkut - help
orkut - help02/10/2004 02:54 AM http://www.orkut.com/join.html
Any orkut members out there? Me need Invite.... ;)
UPDATE: Got a ton of invites. Thanks :)
Orkut is now a spam-filled waste and inappropriate for professional
use. What
a waste of a good opportunity. I am now starting to
appreciate LinkedIn's more
conservative approach.
orkut
orkut01/23/2004 02:22 PM social-networking site .. Orkut
Why Orkut Doesn't Work - Posted by Ross
Mayfield at 11:25 PM
Before we could learn to pronounce it, it was shut down.
It’s not that the servers are melting with the rapid rise to
~3
million page views or 500th most popular site in a couple of days. It’s
not a conspiracy of data collection or a learning curve.
orkut, which should really be named Oogle,
demonstrated that a high performance explicit social networking site,
well designed for digital immeadiate gratification (one local
engineer personally even complained they had to click from map to
profile to add a friend), supported by brand and with the right root
can unleash latent demand. I would say this is reflective of the
dearth of social capital in our society, but aside from such heady
stuff, frictionless whuffie fun, huh? Latent demand for what is the
question.
Internet researchers would die excruciating deaths in search of the
last days of data. I would venture a guess that most of the digerati
that was already pre-conditions by existing services, an
incomprehensible demographic that grants hypergrowth to the best,
grants the best feedback, but easily taketh away.
okurt doesn’t work because it lacks constraints. Nothing holds
people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on
the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are
irrational.
Normally this would raise questions. Some constraints make good
social compact. Some constraints on openness curb pollution (spam,
security). One of the better constraints is price because it lead to
profit.
However, AdSense is relatively frictionless. It adds new
constraints while adding value. Same could be said for other well
targeted forms of content, like blog posts…[Many-to-Many]
Here's what I just posted as a comment on Many-to-Many...
Trying to lock everything into a black or white -
"friend" or not - is the root of the problem (IMHO.)
That's why our PeopleAggregator FOAF based
social network - has varying levels of degrees of explicit
'relationships'.
Starting from 'Close Friend' and then
'Friend' (both of which need email verification) we relax our
defintion of the relationships by calling the next relationship you
can have with someone - an 'Acquaintance', then a "Know by
Reputation" and then "Know in Passing". which (to me are
nice ways of lessening the quality and depth of the relationship,
while still acknowledging it's existence.
We then have a relationship type - called 'Related
to' (for family relationships) and finally - we end with a blank
"I don't know you, but I want to know you' kind of
acknowledgement of a desire to start a relationship. These 7 levels of
relationship certainly aren't perfect, the best or even a full range
of emotions (notice we stayed away from any sort fo negative
relationships.) But we DID create a scale of sorts - from very close
to not at all - that represents the REAL nature of relationships -
which answers the premise of Ross' complaint.
I agree that social networks need to go beyond just
offering someone to be "your friend" or not. Granualarities of
relationships are the way to go. It's the only way explicit digital
social networks will ever be successful.
Orkut Follies
Orkut Follies02/10/2004 02:51 AM Michael O'Connor Clarke is writing funnily (here and here) about the
foibles of Orkut. His Monopoly card reminds me of a fake screen
capture I used when talking about Artificial Social Networks (ASN)
such as Orkut. Click for larger view Just in case it's not obvious,
the point is that you can't get over ASNs' inherent binary nature by
adding more binary choices. That is, the problem isn't just that the
choices are too precise; the problem is also that the choices are
necessarily explicit. Social relationships depend on being implicit,
hidden, dark and unspoken....
Alternative to Orkut
Alternative to Orkut02/10/2004 02:51 AM OnePotMeal announces a new Artificial Social Network for those of us
griping about Orkut: Urkel....
Why Google needs Orkut
Why Google needs Orkut02/10/2004 02:49 AM In all the discussion of Orkut I've seen so far, most folks are busy
comparing Orkut to every other social networking web site around,
typically they mention Friendster ("it's so much faster!"), but as we
all know these sites are a dime a dozen these days. At least it seems
that way. What surprises me is that nobody has looked at it the other
way around: What problems might Orkut solve that Google would
otherwise find significantly more challenging? Those...
A community without communication is a dead community and
friendship is more than
just a wall of faces. Connections between people are born out
of interactions
between them and strength of connections are primarily based on the
amount and frequency
of interactions.
So it is communication that binds people and communities together
yet there is little
of that going on in Orkut. Yes, there is the message feature
but it's works
more like radio and discourages interaction. Communities have
topics, but topics
are little rooms one must make effort to enter and
compartmentalized conversations within
a group setting do not encourage others to join in uninvited.
To get around these problems. I think permachats should
be created
centered around individuals and communities. A permachat is
like IRC except
conversations takes place over much longer period, days even.
Visibility of
permachat should be limited to friends or friends of friends
only. Amount is
determined by rate of actvity.To promote interaction and to
encourage
the sense of conversation, sense of time is removed, leaving only
faces and names
next to each entry. Amount of activity within past 24 hours
should be displayed
in the 'view network' and 'my communities' pages using color hints
(i.e. red for hot).
Permachat allows people who know me to communicate with me as well
as others who know
me. This in turns allows them to become friends over time
instead of using more
explicit introduction based social networking. It also allows
interaction without
spammy messages invading private spaces and deteriorating sense of
friendship.
For communities, permachat serves as the single thread that binds
the community.
Topics is too focus-oriented to serve this function.
Permachat allows casual
conversations, encourages interaction, and informs every member
with minimal effort.
And, most importantly, permachat allows new friendship to be born
out these intereactions
among community members just as conversations among friends of an
individual helps
them form new friendships.
A working example of permachat is #joiito.
#joiito IRC channel not only binds the friendship network centered
around Joi,
but also builds a community in itself as people get to know each
other. Topics
come and go just as Joi comes and goes, but the conversation rolls
on and weaves its
social magic around everyone. I think Orkut use a bit of that
magic.
Orkut for bitches02/11/2004 04:27 PM Many people email me inquiring after the hounds. How are they? What
are they up to? Do they rule? The answer, quite obviously, is that
they're busy doing Social Software. Networking, as it were, via the
might that is Dogster....
I did finally meet someone who went on dates with three people she
met on Orkut. So far so
good she reports.
Orkut is supplying me with a life so, via
orkut, I got comped into Etech, I got a meeting with VCs, 3 dates had,
three arranged, and lots of people have walked up to me and said, "oh!
hi!"
I know that Orkut is a tired topic already, but here is a map from
DataWhoreHouse showing
distribution of Orkut members who exposed their general location on
Orkut (via Scoble and Liz at Many2Many).
Hmm, no, I didn't have to pay to get layed.
Mostly what I expected except Silicon Valley looks like Death
Valley for some reason.
A bug?
Orkut Death
Orkut Death03/06/2004 02:09 AM Huy
Zing: My Orkut.com death was a slow painful one that lasted
1.5 hours starting at 20:44 on Monday, February 23, 2004. [via
Danah Boyd]
Orkut
is too busy to play.... It seems the Orkut servers are overloaded
at the moment. I've not been able to login for the past hour.
Hopefully the Orkut team will invest in whatever is needed to help
scale their websites.... [The Jeff Pulver
Blog]
Um - somebody tell Jeff that Google/Orkut doesn't care about you or
the performance of the site. Orkut is a research project meant
to suck end-user behavior patterns and profiles. They don't care
about you.
We've just launched a new feature that allows you to specify the
primary language of your community.
Why would you want to do this?
1. So that everyone posts in one language! As orkut.com gains more
members from around the world, it makes it easier for you and everyone
in your community if people can read each other's posts. This is hard
to do if everyone's speaking different languages. 2. So that you can
search communities by language. This way, when you're looking for new
communities, you'll always find ones that you can read and participate
in.
I say - "right on!"
We all need to start thinking more international! I bet this is
really gonna make Orkut take off even more. Now if they only had
something to do in there.
HHHmmmm - maybe like Gmail, Blogger and Google News.....in the
valley of the search.
People are asking me to be their contact on Multiply. There was an error
processing your request. Please try again. it tells me, with
advice to "contact customer service." I'm not a customer. I don't have
the time. But I do wonder why we need yet another one of these
things.
Ah, one friend just told me Multiply promised to import
Orkut contacts, somehow. That's a good sell, if it can be
done, I guess. If it has other advantages over Orkut, which has become
too slow for me. In fact, it's busy not coming up right now.
[Doc Searls]
Me too! I wanna export from orkut - too!
But to export - we need to get explicit permission from each and
every person - with them 'opting into' the export process. That will
appear as a simple checkbox in folks' settings.
THEN Doc can use FOAFnet to import his social network into Multiply
- theoretically. All Multipl has to do is support the FOAFnet.org spec!
You have 1024 friends. You can only have up to 1000 friends. Before
you can add more friends, you need to remove
friends.
Partially because I was getting sick of social
networks systems, partially because they were trying to be "exclusive"
with invite only and partially because it was easy, I took the policy
of saying yes to every friend request that didn't look like a
fakester. Now I've found the edge of Orkut. According to Orkut, you
can only have 1000 friends. I guess that's OK compared to the 150 or
so for AIM. This error message reminds me a bit of real life. I know
need to forget someone every time I meet someone I want to remember
because I'm having a buffer overflow on my people recognition
memory.
Now the question is... What do I do with my Orkut network now that
I'm "done"?
I just registered into Orkut,
thanks to an invitation
from Chris Pirillo --
thanks Chris!;-).
While the registration process was a bit tiring, Orkut UI and user
experience were
more pleasant than Friendster or LinkedIn.
It could use some improvements here and there, but at least it was
pleasant enough
for me to invited a bunch of friends and collegues, something I
haven't done with
other similiar services.
Hmm. It might be interesting to mix PKI with social
networking. For example,
I could issue Friend of Don certificates to my friends
that basically say
“I know this person to be trustworthy, smart, and nice enough
to be my friend.“
What uses would such certificate have? Nothing in the horizon
but I am wondering
what might lie beyond that...
If you are my friend and haven't received an invite from me,
just send me an e-mail.
I just grabbed the names that were handy and definitely missed many
of you whom I
would be proud to call a friend.
It has many security and privacy issues just as other social
networking services
have. For example, one can send a message to thousands of
members with only
a few clicks. There could be some XSS (cross-site scripting)
problems as well.
But, overall, I have yet to see anything that can be resolved over
time given sufficient
technical and financial interests.
Invitation-only aspect of Orkut blew me away in terms of its effect
and its meaning.
Since you can't just register without an invitation from someone
within, it creates
a sense of value that drives people to signup.
As to the meaning, what invitation-only means is that everyone
who is a member
of Orkut knows Orkut himself through a string of friends.
It means you have
joined a six-degree of separation experiment where the starting end
is Orkut Buyukkokten.
I'll bet that was why it was named Orkut.
I am not yet convinced that there exists a workable revenue model
behind Orkut but
then I have similar opinions about Rovers in Mars.
Entertaining thoughts about
what might lie beyond the horizon with a bunch of geeky friends is
a reward enough
for now. To this end, I created an Orkut Community titled
“Orkut Design”
to examine Orkut in detail.
Orkut, Google and Privacy
Orkut, Google and Privacy02/14/2004 05:25 PM If I understand this correctly, Google can now link my name and
personal information to all of the Google Web searches I do (or may
have done, as long as the cookie on my computer has been there, prior
to signing up). This is totally outrageous. A company PR person said
she'd look into it. I'll let you know what she says.
Orkut Newsletter Spam?05/25/2004 02:21 AM Well, it seems that Orkut is now sending out a newsletter to members.
Mine looks something like this: Hey Jeremy, You have 162 friends: -
145 friends - 5 acquaintances - 12 haven't met New members in your
network since May 16th: - 2 new friends - 33 new friends of friends -
2490 new friends of friends of friends Friends of friends you might be
interested in meeting: - Joi Ito
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=1405190888294923508 - Ask
Bjørn Hansen
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=5207100656550035736 -
Mitchell...
salon.com/tech/feature/2004/06/15/social_software_one/index.htm
l track this
site | 4 links
Should sites like Orkut own your profile
Should sites like Orkut own your profile01/25/2004 12:45 AM orkut - terms of service: "By submitting, posting or displaying any
Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically...
Warren Ellis on Orkut
Warren Ellis on Orkut01/26/2004 02:57 PM Orkut, the recently-launched,
Google-affiliated FOAF (Cory critiques them -- and the bigger FOAF
picture -- here), is offline for a while. Before the temporary beta
outage, Warren Ellis logged on, sniffed around, then said:
Right now, it looks pretty much like an iteration of the Tribe.net
system, with an eye on Friendster's apparent main function as a dating
system. (Which means, oddly, it requests your business profile at the
same time as it's asking you where you like to be fingered.) (...)
It's faster than Fuckster and Tribe, but it shows that all these
friend-of-a-friend things have really hit a wall. I mean, what can you
actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a
couple of small message boards? Message boards that, unlike Tribe,
allow anonymous postings and therefore devalue the message board
experience? What happens after that? After you've gotten all your
friends in -- whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case,
presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social
network system opens and you start all over again.
These things want to be a hub for your Internet community experience,
but they're just not necessary enough. Tribe gets closest, but it's
nothing you're going to leave as an open window on your desktop all
day. The first new social network system that builds an IM program
into its structure may have a shot. The Delphiforums message boards
have Jabber tacked on to them, which would have been brilliant when
Delphi was at its height, but has gone pretty much unnoticed in the
wake of their self-mutilating half-smart attempts to monetise. The
idea was and is sound. The minute you make these things the easiest
and most direct way to communicate with the personal network the
system's let you build or collate, there's going to be a reason to
keep the site on your desktop. And that has to be their goal. I mean,
who builds a social network system that doesn't want people to use it
all the time?
Google's Orkut cuts out01/27/2004 09:51 PM The social network site, an experimental project of search giant
Google, goes offline just days after thousands of Silicon Valley execs
and techies are invited to join.
Cool potential for Orkut or Friendster
Cool potential for Orkut or Friendster07/16/2004 01:28 AM Whole Lotta Nothing has sent out a lazyweb request for a blogging
plug-in that would allow a blogger's close friends to correct typos in
his or her posts. I sure could use something like this.
I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my
closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my
blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. If I'm
gone for a couple days and improperly used your when I meant you're,
I'd love it if a friend fixed that while I was away. I first got the
idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster
useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if
someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could
be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could
let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member,
which seems to be the closest form of relationship
there).
Orkut Toolbar 0.1 (Default branch)02/07/2005 01:17 AM
Orkut Toolbar is a Firefox extension that helps
you to format the text of your posts in the Orkut
forums. With Orkut Toolbar, all you need is to
type your entire text without any formatting code
and then select the desired parts of the text and
apply the format using the toolbar buttons, much
like you do in many other text editors.
Changes:
Quick links can be made to the main Orkut
sections. Bold, italic, and underline styles can
be easily applied to text in a post. The color of
the text can be easily changed. A hyperlink can be
easily inserted into a post. Easy access is
available for all emoticons. Both en-US and pt-BR
locales are available.
Grok Description matches for Orkut GrokA matches for Orkut
In answer to Tom's question "what won't we do with FOAF" I can say
that FOAF does not include authentication, security or privacy
controls. It is up to each vendor, developer and system to
provide those features.
FOAF is simply an object wrapper around whatever profile data you
wish to store. Any kind of unique identifier can be inside a
FOAF file. FOAF is just a stnadard way of FINDING profile data,
which is then addressed and pointed to - in a standard way.
That's it.
A Little Bit of FOAF
A Little Bit of FOAF12/29/2003 11:43 PM Peter Rukavina of Reinvented.net recently pointed me to a Quicktime
video of Ben Hammersley's RDF presentation at the Danish "reboot"
Conference. I'd like to recommend the presentation, too. Even if
you've got a decent understanding of XML namespaces and triplets and
the mythic potential of (don't throw anything) the semantic Web, the
Hammersley talk offers digestible ways of describing the damned thing
to others.
’Course, I couldn't just watch the video....
Does social software matter? - Posted by David
Weinberger at 10:05 AM
There’s some back-and-forth at StartUpSkills.com on whether social software will amount to
much. Jeremy Zawodny says: “Start thinking
about how adding a social networking component to existing systems
could improve them.” StartUpSkills replies that people
don’t have enough incentive to give away the social network that
is their competitive advantage.
Personally, I agree with Jeremy that networks such as LinkedIn will
only survive if an external application figures out a use for them.
Without that, we’re left with people you don’t know asking
you to hook them up with other people you don’t know.
Om Malik doesn’t understand why people
would share their Rolodexes with commercial entities. My problem,
though, isn’t that my Rolodex is too valuable to share (hah!),
but that social software of the Friendster/LinkedIn sort necessarily
get social relationships wrong:
First, social relationships aren’t transitive: If A knows B
who knows C who knows D, there is no sense in
which A knows C much less D. We do, however,
have a social convention for first degree relationships: A is entitled
to ask B for an introduction to C. But not to
D.
Second, social relationships aren’t formal (in the logical
sense). In logic, if A > B and B > C, then A > C. But — and
here’s why people generally don’t name their kids A, B and C — A
doesn’t have to ask B’s permission to be greater than C, and C doesn’t get annoyed at B for pestering
her with requests from strangers to be greater than C. Every time I introduce someone to my pal C, I am altering my relationship with C just a
little bit.
Third, real social networks are always implicit. The ones
constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected
with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the
invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of
friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because
he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then
you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her
daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks
not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they
are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid
ending shaky ones.
There may be uses for the links created within these artificial
social networks, for while the relationships aren’t transitive,
some of their properties — interests, tastes, prejudices —
are: if A and C both know B, they are
statistically more likely to share B’s tastes in music than two
randomly selected people are. That may turn out to be useful to some
other application.
But if you want to get at the real social networks, you’re
going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have
worn into the actual social carpet.
Oh boy, finally an intellectual rap I can sink my teeth into!
And from somebody no less esteemed as the good Doctor
Weinberger.
You see, I tried to invite David into Friendster early on and was
refuted by him, scoffing at the notion of implicit social nets - so
I've had 9 months to ponder this issue.
First off - I totally agree with him that explicit social nets are
infected with bullshit. I myself proved that by quickly gaining
444 so-called friends on Tribe.net. I've drawn the line at 444
(since it's such a nice number) and as I add friends, I take away
accordingly - to keep the number at 444. How's that for
arbitrary? :-)
I know this pisses off danah boyd, but that's life. It all
seems like bullshit to me, so what's wrong with gaming the
system? (This is from a person (ME!) who met his wife on
Match.com BTW :-) Lisa (my wife) and I had totally figured out
Match - as we both spent over three years trolling around, looking for
each other.
Only until we more or less gave up and just saw it for what it was
- did we suceed.
But all these math formulas somehow trying to prove that I don't
care or don't have the right to ask D for a date or sell him/her
something is bullshit too! Sometimes I think that the good
Doctor is just an old crumudgeon and that 'his generation' just don't
get it.
If you wanna have fun on-line and you wanna use technology - then
why not ask out D for a date? Or try to do business with
her? As opposed to what? Sitting at home watching bloggers
blog the Mars landing?
What's more fun - reading RSS feeds or flirting with
strangers? If an explicit social net can give me the excuse of
meeting hotties from Knoxville, TN or Banglore (for that matter) then
what's wrong with that?
I for one - COMPLETEY UTTERLY - believe that by
adding social networking, to say 'a gaming portal' or a content play
(like Tony Perkins 'AlwaysOn
Network') - we're about to push the envelope even further -
developing spontaneously forming groups of like minded people.
And anything that helps people hang out together, in a decentralized
world, is a good thing. How else are we supposed to form the World of Ends?
But another thing I TOTALLY EMPHATICALLY AGREE
with the good doctor (and Om
Malik), is that there's no value - to ME - in giving some system
all my personal poop, friends, info, etc. - unless I can use it
elsewhere. This is what I tried to explain to Reid Hoffman when I
first found out about LinkedIn. This is also why - every
chance I get I ask Reid - in public - if he plans on 'opening up'
LinkedIn - to allow, say a FOAF file to move these social nets -
elsewhere.
It's up to entrprenuers to figure this challenge out.
How can we, on one hand, develop IP, assets and business models
which can make money, while on the other hand - not lock people into
yet another lock-in strategy? That's what Jonathan Abrams, John
Doerr and Friendster is all about. Lock in.
I just hope that Reid Hoffman and Mark
Pincus are smarter than that.
:-)
That's why our PeopleAggregator is being
developed - to provide away for folks to move their social
networks around. And that's why FOAF is right on! It's the perfect
format for that reason - it's not controlled by anyone, it's open and
it's already in use (in products like Ecademy
and Typepad.)
Some interesting discussion has been triggered by Jon Udell's
comments on FOAF. I agree with Edd and Dan that FOAF is about more than
social networking and have said as much here on several occasions.
Personally I see two problems with FOAF neither of them big.
Firstly the name causes people to adopt certain expectations about
it's intended usage particularly with general surge of interest (fad?)
in social software. I certainly wouldn't advocate a name change but,
as the exchange with Udell has demonstrated, we need to take care to
present FOAF correctly.
The second problem is just about data. Because there is no central
repository of FOAF data, it's harder to create FOAF applications: you
either need to run a scutter yourself to collect up what's available,
or generate FOAF out of the back-end of another site. Of course you
can also hang out on #foaf and badger someone (e.g. Jim Ley or Matt
Biddulph) to give you a data export; that's what I did.
I firmly believe that playing with the FOAF data that's out in the
wild will generate the most interesting applications, and provide
essential implementation feedback on the vocabulary itself.
So I'm going to try encouraging folk to regularly and visibly
publish the results of their scutter runs. An "offical" data set hung
of the FOAF homepage would also be useful. This should hopefully
encourage the development of more FOAF applications.
Incidentally I mentally classify those applications as follows:
FOAF-generating -- e.g. FOAF-a-Matic, ecademy, TypePad,
etc. Applications that generate FOAF but don't typically process it to
perform any useful function. These are an important step in producing
a critical mass of data
FOAF-gathering -- e.g. a Scutter, FOAFbot, FOAFnaut.
Applications that harvest the web of FOAF data to build a data
repository. Functionality is then built around this repository
FOAF-consuming -- e.g. FOAF explorer/viewer, Dashboard,
Planet RDF. Applications that read specific FOAF data, to fulfill some
function. FOAF-gathering applications also typically consume data in
this way -- to manually refresh their repository -- but I'm thinking
of slightly different application scenarios, e.g. automating web site
registration and preference maintenance, generating a project or
community blog, etc.
For me this classification separates out some of the implementation
issues: a FOAF-consuming application doesn't typically have to worry
about attribution, trust, etc. The data is coming from a limited
number of sources. FOAF-gathering applications have to deal with a
much more difficult set of problems. [Lost Boy]
Back to techy issues. RAP is a FOAF parser in php which we're
using for the PeopleAggregator.
OOOps - until we started building bigger stuff (the PeoplesDNS) and
it broke. The folks at Drupal also didn't want an inefficient
piece of software in their builds, so....
Joel De Gan is writing a new one. Optimized, kick ass, open
source.
:-)
Here's his post!
Real programmers
don't RAP. (I am going to apologize in advance for all
tongue-in-cheek remarks in the following.. I just can't help myself
this morning)
Real programmers don't RAP
Besides the obvious lack of rhythm and soundtrack.. We just
don't have scantily clad women following us around who like to be
called bitch, we also don't own a copy of that bass track that the
rappers are so fond of and is used in every rap song.
Anyway.. Chris wrote a good review for real-life programming and
attempts to use the RAP RDF parser for work in the real world here. I would
like it stated that I have no issue with RAP (besides the fact that I
don't live in a ghetto so it just does not speak to me) but there is
that old addage of trying to make everyone happy and ending up not
making anyone happy.
Why do something so complex when it can
be done simply? I think it is an application that is proof of why
modular programming is such a good thing. Does it 'really' need to be
that big? I can understand that for those monster medical RDF's it
might be the perfect thing, I get that and by all means use it for
that, but for parsing simple RDF files it just does not stack
up.
These guys had scalability issues with RAP, the reality in
trying to use it "they were being called 'bitch' and getting slapped
around". So we took some code cobbled together from comments posted on
php.net, a little hacking around by me and have them a small (very
small) single file parser that can do the job in a tenth of the time.
When dealing with hundreds of thousands of files, that is kind of
important as the latency adds up and becomes apparent to an
application very fast.
Not too mention, it took me a little
less than twenty minutes from start to finish to have them something
workable here is the
proof (05:58:20-06:14:39) from the new #pa logging bot I set
up.
Anyway in summary; programmers have no music talent, we
generally don't have scantily clad women doing the 'booty dance'
around us and RAP is not suited well for parsing FOAF because it
suffers from bloat and for small apps and small (i.e. < 40k) RDF
files it is overkill.
One note, we do share one thing with
rappers.. I have known a lot of programmers who are obsessed with guns
and who blow huge amounts of money on really dumb
stuff..
I spent allot of money in the 90's, but not on dumb stuff. I
was investing in DLAs.
Now that I've met Joel I can safely say that open source does work.
This MT 3.0 is gonna bring the issues to the front burner. And
the PeoplesDNS (as the perfect
complement to the PeopleAggregator) will also gateway and bridge
between every digital ID system out there.
So for all you Drupal lovers and suppoters out there we have a
question for you......
"What sort of relationships would you like to see established
between DSrupal members? Should we create really specific kind
of relationships, like Project Colleague or more general ones, like
friend - or both?"
We need to know as we're extending the drupal.profile module to
import/export FOAF and........
..... Drupal currently doesn't grok more than just you.
As a programmer working with FOAF and writing a
sizeable application centered around FOAF and the FOAF specification I
cannot help but marvel that this specification has been so widely
adopted. FOAF as it stands is difficult at best to work with and deal
with. RDF by nature is fluid and allows anyone to just hack up
anything into it. FOAF is just some basic guidelines for saying "This
is who I am!" but it is missing some very large and very key parts to
become a true social networking centerpiece. I am going to explain
in a second, but in order to do what I have set out to do here, I have
"add" some things to FOAF in the form of modules, I have to bet that
people will follow them as a standard. This is a tough idea to go
forward with.
One: FOAF is missing a way to be centralized, I
understand this was part of the bargin with FOAF and a lot of people
are hardcore against it, but there is not even a way in the current
specification to 'set' a centralized server, location, website,
anything how do we know which of your thirty foaf files is the
authorative and most recently updated file?
Two: FOAF has not
implemented private/public files, FOAF needs a way to have a private
file so I can email all my FOAF "knows" people (people I say I know)
and a public file that you can view who I know and see how I fit
in.
Three: Any shmuck can toss me in his "knows" statements,
this links that person to me. A lot of people will say "so what" well,
how about this; John Carmack (the creator of games like Quake and
Doom) creates a FOAF file, then every Quake player in the country
decides that they want to be linked to Mr. Carmack (and believe me,
they will.. just look at who links to his .plan file). So now pDNS has
to sort through 30k users who state they "know" this guy. So, who
really 'KNOWS' this guy and who is authorative for knowing this guy. I
mean obviously we would want to let his developers say they "know"
him, his employees etc. And, furthermore "How" do they know him? Are
they a "Fan" an actual "Friend" or a coworker?
Four: There are
no defined "groups" (which like mailing lists: read, yahoo groups
etc..) that are strictly defined. Why? Part of what makes up a
structure is the definition of groups of people, right now it is
free-for-all and is basically impossible to determine peoples actual
groupings. It is like social incest and is difficult to determine how
all the people are actually linked.
So, I have some complaints,
I also have 'proposed' solutions (or I would not have brought up my
gripes) that I would like to hear back from people on.
My goals
in pDNS are simple. Allow people full control over their profile,
implement ttl's in foaf profiles so they are not pinged all the time
(save bandwidth), add timestamps of last updated so we can tell which
is newer and therefore the more accurate. Add in some structure on
where to find the authorative file, either on our servers or on
theirs. Add in methods through the pDNS system so that you can set
your profile so that people cannot be simply adding you left and
right. You can set your profile to always allow people to add you and
add them back, always allow them to add but 'not' add them back, never
allow people to add you, or you can moderate additons. Set up
'groups' of people that have moderators, this way if you run some
site, say "computerfreak" and all your users can join your group, this
will link them in as a user and makes doing private mailing lists for
your users easy.
These are just some ideas that I am mulling
over as I look at an apparent free-for-all mess that is the current
state of FOAF data. I also understand why it has not been universally
adopted due to the issues stated above and others.
My point is,
look at the success of things like ICQ and yahoo groups, think about
why they are adopted so widely and have so many people that swear by
them.
Anyway, feedback would be appreciated, any thoughts or
ideas/solutions you may have.
An Introduction to FOAF02/10/2004 02:49 AM Friend-of-a-friend, FOAF, is an RDF vocabulary for machine-readable
homepages. It enables the expression of decentralized social networks
akin to the centralized ones seen in Friendster and Orkut. Leigh Dodds
provides an introduction to FOAF and its use.
[etech] FOAF
[etech] FOAF02/11/2004 08:25 PM Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to
talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It's an XML standard
that allows people to express information about themselves...the sorts
of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF
descriptions in the world. There are different styles of FOAF files.
You can be very explicit about relationships: "Jane is my arch
nemesis." But there's also a more implicit, evidence-based approach:
Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same
organization. ("I lean toward this one," says...
This is cool. I asked Tim O'Reilly at one
of the press conferences at Etech - how he thought we could jumpstart
and fund many of these open source projects.
His answer was "let the free marketplace decide."
So THIS TipJar idea is one of the ways we can do this. Affero is another.
Right. So, in the never ending struggle that is RDF, foaf:group is
another property that's a "work in progress". Here are some notes:
In the spec, foaf:Group is a container of foaf:Agents (of which
foaf:Person is a subclass). It's ideal for representing groups of
anything, from companies to mailing lists to knitting clubs.
My particular issue is you can make a "group" FOAF file, in which
the group describes all it's members, but there's no easy way
for a "person" FOAF file to say that it's a member of a group.
Now, that seems a bit complicated. I can parse it and fish around
for the right way of looking at things, but wouldn't something like
this make more sense:
So foaf:memberOf would have a domain of foaf:Person (foaf:Agent?)
and a range of rdf:resource that points to the "authoritative" group
file that has all the other info in it (join dates, membership
classes, etc.).
(side rant: Here's where a really sticky part of FOAF which
confuses the hell out of some, and others ignore. Where do I go to
talk about this / suggest things? The Issue Tracker?
The wiki? The IRC
channel? The mailing list?
The project web site? The
weblog? Too many tools!)
So, what am I forgetting? Does this make sense? And if it doesn't
make sense, how would you go about representing that
a foaf:Person is a part of a group without the group FOAF file?[esigler.2nw.net/blog]
I will be reposting this to the rdfweb list. But Eric's right
- there are too many places to. But that's whty they call it
'open'. If there were only one, and someone controled it, then you'd
complain that it was closed. This anarchistic way of adding
features to FOAF is kind of fun.
But the big test will be once Eric launches the next version of PeopleAggregator (next week -
right?) at which point, we have to ask the existing world of FOAF -
which is basically Typepad and Ecademy and a bunch of research/open
projects - to update their definition of FOAF to include foaf:topic -
so we can define a FOAF file as being MY FOAF file.
FOAF logos
FOAF logos03/13/2003 10:16 AM I've added one of Ian Davis's Tiny FOAF buttons to the menubar above.
Nice....
Word press has been getting a lot of word in the press about being
"the" replacement package for MT. However, by default, there's no FOAF
input or output, and that's never a good thing.
So, I present to those of you who may be switching, a presentable
version of FOAF for WordPress. Basic, as it only spits out the values
that you can set in wp-admin: admittedly minimal. However, it is
something. Anyway, I figured some of you might be switching over -
mortenf, specifically, asked for some help on the topic.
So,
http://crschmidt.net/w
phack/profile2.txt is how to set up a
profile page - and FOAF - in your WordPress blog. I'll be
working with the wordpress developers to clean this up and get it into
the Core version of wordpress, but not until after the 1.2 release, as
they've got enough on their hands as is.
The FOAF autocreation script
takes two links - one to your current FOAF file and one to your OPML
blogroll - and produces a brand new FOAF file for you. How? By
crawling through the sites in your blogroll looking for autodiscovery
links and combining any data it finds with the <foaf erson> data from your existing FOAF file.
Leigh brings up Eric
Vitiello's Relationship Scehma which enables finer granual
levels of realtionships - than just friend or not. That's so
black and white.
That's exactly what our PeopleAggregator.com social
network does! It allows for defining 7 levels of
realtionship:
- close friend
- friend
- acquaintance
- know by reputation
- know in passing
- don't know at all, but want to know
- related
This is what I'll be talking about and showing at Etech.
BTW PeopleAggregator is
being created by Eric Sigler - and he sure could use some help. It's
completely open source and available on SourceForge as PeepAgg.
I just heard from Paul Martino, the CTO and Founder of Tribe.net that they were working on
FOAF and RSS support for Tribe. Cool. There are going to be a lot of
issues such as privacy, but I think that having companies like Tribe
seriously working on FOAF will bring these issues front and center and
make some of these theoretical discussions very concrete and
productive.
The FOAF project is based around
the use of machine readable Web homepages for people, groups,
companies and other kinds of thing. To achieve this they use the "FOAF
vocabulary" to provide a collection of basic terms that can be used in
these Web pages. At the heart of the FOAF project is a set of
definitions designed to serve as a dictionary of terms that can be
used to express claims about the world. The initial focus of FOAF has
been on the description of people, since people are the things that
link together most of the other kinds of things they describe in the
Web: they make documents, attend meetings, are depicted in photos, and
so on. The FOAF Vocabulary definitions presented here are written
using a computer language (RDF/OWL) that makes it easy for software to
process some basic facts about the terms in the FOAF vocabulary, and
consequently about the things described in FOAF documents. A FOAF
document, unlike a traditional Web page, can be combined with other
FOAF documents to create a unified database of information. This has
been added to World Wide Web
Reference Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.
In 1995, he was sending his
friends in San Francisco e-mail messages with lists of local events.
With their encouragement, this became Craig's List, which has now
expanded to Boston, Seattle, New York and 19 other regions. Nine years
later, Craig's List now gets 500 million page views and 4 million
unique visitors every month. The staff numbers 14, and the site runs
on about 30 Linux boxes. Craig says his success is based on "a culture
of trust." When I asked about his business model, he just laughed.
A self-described nerd, Craig has become somewhat of an
international celebrity. He has been asked by San Francisco
mayor-elect Gavin Newsom to join the mayor's transition team. "In San
Francisco City, people have given up because they seem to feel that
their leadership has told them that it doesn't matter if they're doing
a good job. It doesn't matter that much if they get things done."
Craig's mission -- should he decide to accept it -- is to recommend
how the use of computer systems and the Internet can better serve the
public. "So far, it looks pretty good," he says.
And coming soon to a theatre near you -- no kidding -- "24 Hours on
Craig's List." That's right -- the movie! Look for it to premiere at
South by Southwest or the San Francisco International Film Festival.
[IT
Conversations]
OK I got just one question: "It's been over six months
since the Tribe appeared - aiming right
at Craigslist and their Listings service. So how long will it be till
Craigslist support FOAF and opens up to the world?"
Though I'm not credited on the web page, I did have something to do
with coming up with this new concept called MeNowDocument.
Really I'm just the cheerleader/marketing guy and it was Joel De Gan, Chris Schmidt
and B.K. DeLong. MeNowDocument is to
Presence what PersonalProfileDocument is to
About Me pages.
Chris Schmidt has now been working with that schema recently.
he has some interesting insights below about......well just take a
read. BTW Joel is also the guy working on the PeoplesDNS, who created some new kind of
filters recently and who is implementing the php version of the
FOAFnet APIs.
:-)
Here's Chris' post....
Metadata
, the quick and easy way. One of the biggest problems with FOAF is that it's difficult for
people to use quickly and easily. Even with the FOAF-A-Matic or
other similar tools, designed to make creation of RDF data simpler,
take a concentrated amount of time to use to create good
information.
Lately, I'd been playing with the menow schema that Joel
and a couple other people interested in FOAF came up with. The basic
idea behind it is to be able to describe yourself at the moment - an
instantaneous description of what you're doing. This fits in along
with other projects that I've worked on, such as Dashboard, where it
tells you more about what you're doing on the computer at the moment.
For example, a menowdocument could describe the fact that I'm out
driving with Jess, with a goal GPS destination: something that FOAF
typically doesn't do.
The MeNowDocument could be the first
step towards solving Neil's Where was Social
Networking? issue - how to connect the people better. The first
step towards connecting is getting the information in a way that
agents can understand it - and if both agents understand "late night,
10pm", then you're on your way.
Tired of all the problems
related to creating these things by hand, I wrote two bots, both
connected to the same backend for storage information. One bot hangs
out on IRC - in #pa, on irc.freenode.net. The other is on AIM:
menowbot.
These two bots aren't all that complex - in fact, the
next step will be to add a bit more complexity, in creating the
ability to alias different personalities together. The code for the
bots is available at http://crschmidt.net/pa/menow/ . However, what they do do is set up an easy way to add
information to a database without having to think about it much. It's
not completely simple yet - and it's not particularly complete, cause
you can add any predicate you want. However, for those people who just
want something to hang onto their data for them as a reminder to
others - something perfect for the quick "hm, remember this" note.
A quick transcript to demonstrate:
<crschmidt>
menow, menow? <menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at
2004-06-01 19:17:33 menow:browsing = http://schema.peoplesdns.co
m/menow/ at 2004-06-01 19:17:33 < crschmidt>
menow, forget browsing <crschmidt> menow,
menow? <menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33 <crschmidt> menow, add writing dc:description post
about the bot <crschmidt> menow, menow? <menow>
crschmidt : menow:writing = dc:description post about the bot at
2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33
Of course, no bot like this would be complete without
the ability to browse other people:
<crschmidt> menow,
crschmidt now? <menow> crschmidt : menow:writing =
dc:description post about the bot at 2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood =
tired at 2004-06-01 19:17:33
Lots of interesting uses, and I
plan to keep developing it, but I believe in "release early, release
often." So, here's version 0.1.
The FOAFnet is about to show
working FOAF interchange between systems liek Tribe, Ecademy, Orkut,
Drupal, LiveJournal and..... [insert your system here.]
I'm here in a quaint university town named Galway, Ireland - which
is Europe's furthest west city. It's got some old Spanish ruins and
lots of frsh faced Irish semantic engineers.
Our hosts are SWAD
and DERI - and there are loads
of semantic web/W3C types here - all discussing how they're using FOAF.
I
awoke this morning to an explosion of invitatons to a new social
network called 
Orkut Toolbar is a Firefox extension that helps
you to format the text of your posts in the Orkut
forums. With Orkut Toolbar, all you need is to
type your entire text without any formatting code
and then select the desired parts of the text and
apply the format using the toolbar buttons, much
like you do in many other text editors.
erson> data from your existing FOAF file.
This is a great 
It seems that the past year
hasn't been wasted - as FOAF is coming into focus on many people's
radars.