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Social networking and freebase

Byrichard

As you’re painfully aware by now there are hundreds of social networking websites but none of them have a communal database. If you’re on orkut your data stays there, if you’re on yahoo communities your data is there. All these social networking websites are very similar in what they ask of you but different in how they link you. Loudmouthman got me thinking about how you could use a database like freebase to share this data between networks, sort of like openid but with more data.

Freebase is a database for volunteers, similar to a wiki but whereas the wiki is a collection of articles this is a database where you write the front end and implement it according to your needs. If you’re interested in video production and television for example you could take the television section of that database and make it accessible within that site. If you encouraged your users to create their profiles within that communal database then details which are not so critical to your persona (whilst being careful not to make phishing to easy)  could be used so that you input your data only once.

By having a communal database the migration from one social networking website to another would be far smoother, more transparent. You’d have the same user profile in a number of places and you would have more freedom to concentrate on what you feel is important. If one website goes down then that is not as critical since your presence is spread in a number of places therefore there is less opportunity to be in trouble should your main social website go down, as was the case with Facebook and Skype within the past few weeks.

RSS feeds are already helping to spread your presence across a number of websites and sites like Jaiku and tumblr help aggregate your daily output to a number of locations.  As a result of such practices. In effect you’d have built in redundancy. If one node goes down then five others can be used whilst waiting for your preferred  social network to come back online.

In summary since we are members of more than one community there is a demand for a communal database from which the sharing of certain types of data would promote the spread of online presence between more than one community at a time. By facilitating the process of setting up a number of communities there is less opportunity for us to be bogged down in content we are uninterested in. Communities, rather than forums could be far more specific to our needs.

I would welcome your views on this topic.

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Cheapening the user experience

Byrichard

There are a great diversity of websites out there and each one has it’s own strengths. As a result of this it is not unusual for me to visit twenty to thirty websites on a daily basis, from the likes of twitter, my own website, news sites and more. What this means is that I find the tools that are best for what I want to do on a variety of websites. To each website it’s own purpose. That’s why I’m so dissapointed with what facebook has become at the moment.

In the good old days of e-mail use you would start with a clean account and every e-mail you received you wanted. As a result you might get one or two e-mails every few days but they were of interest. Over time spammers started sending their junk and this personal space was less personal space. At around the same time friends began sending chainmail, participating on “which character are you most like” and other activities. As a result of this there was a lot of static which meant more time would be wasted processing the influx of information.

This problem then came to social networking websites. One of the weaknesses of myspace was that everyone could put megabytes of junk on their pages and the website would slow down and crash certain browsers. In other situations people spam you via the bulletin boards in such way that you start to ignore them.

I thought that facebook was different. I used to view facebook as a mature online community that was about people keeping in touch with their friends. The sharing of personal images, personal videos and personal work was great. That is, until the api came along.

A I look at the daily requests on facebook I have zombies biting me, I have several application requests that do the same thing for music and more. The “questions for friends” api is one of those useless api that makes you sign into a service you don’t want to use so that you can read the question a friend wants to ask you. The “compare me to my friends” api is another annoying one. Yesterday I noticed that I was more likely than someone else to do something and I signed up for the api, unselecting all the elements that would advertise the api to those in my news feed. I wanted to see whom I had been compared to but found out that I had to answer fifty questions before being able to use the api. At this point I removed the api.

The beauty of the World Wide Web is the vast amount of specialised websites and tools that allow for the sharing of a variety of elements. If I want friends to know about my travels then I’ve got World66, website I used before going to Poland. If I want to talk about good food and restaurants then I’ll drop by Trusted Places and read what users have written. If I want to play games online then I’d go to Kraland, nainwak, travian and a number of other websites.

I see Facebook as the modern version of the phonebook where I can keep up to date with what friends are doing and where they are geographically. I enjoy the ability to see photographs and videos of what they’re doing but hate being spammed with movie trailers and other junk. I want facebook to be about my network of friends and what they’re doing in the real world. If there is too much extraneous content then I shall be looking for a less populist website. The fact that it’s been banned in certain work environments demonstrates it’s declining value as a social networking website.