I'm giving away an idea to every social networking site on the Web for what I'd normally charge big bucks as a consultant. I'll take donations, though.
Please add the feature to your services where you list the "unlisted." The key to managing all of these lists, circles, people tags and is to see whom you haven't tagged yet. Google is probably the biggest offender in this arena - you can't even list your unlisted contacts in your Gmail contacts.
As a part of your APIs that scrape my contacts for one service or another, please port those tags as well. [And while you're at Google, is it really so hard to 'port over the tags I already created in my address book to Google+ - it's the same service!!]
Some say it's a sign of sociopathic behavior to categorize (hierarchical) or tag (non-hierarchical) friends, but it's absolutely necessary to channel the torrents of social update feeds across multiple networks.
Really, this isn't rocket surgery. Just
I don't know if you run into this problem as much as I do, but it drives me crazy and I finally got around to looking for a solution and found this one. The original article has all the pictures if you need them.
Hopefully you'll find this valuable. I’m sure a lot of you have already experienced this unresponsive script warning in Firefox and I’m also sure that you get irritated every time you see this because it wouldn’t stop nagging you. Actually, the reason behind this problem is the JavaScript may take a little longer than its usual time to finish its activity and then the application (Firefox) will think that the script is going wild and will never be finished processing thus causing the application to freeze or sometimes, crash. |
Luckily, there’s a very simple way to fix this problem and that is to increase the amount of time before a script is considered ‘unresponsive’; this can be done in both Firefox and Thunderbird. |
- In a new tab type about:config in the address bar and press Enter
- In the about:config manager type dom.max_script_run_time in the Filter field
- Double click the entry and in the pop-up box type 20 and press Enter
- Close the tab
|
- Go to Tools -> Options
- Click on the Advanced tab on top
- Click on the Config Editor at the Advanced Configuration options
- In the Config Editor type dom.max_script_run_time in the Filter field
- Double click the entry and in the pop-up box type 20 and press Enter
- Close the window
|
I made all of these arguments with Brad myself many years ago. Sometimes it takes a geek to fight a geek, and this guy backs up my arguments with the math of graphs.
Relationships are better described in venn diagrams anyway.
But that would take a graphic (and I mean ILLUSTRATED) user interface, not the crap that Google+ and Facebook give us.
I would further add that you can have *a* social graph, but there is no such thing as *the* social graph. I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I'd be curious to know if it goes back further.
|
At the time he wrote, Fitzpatrick had two points to make. The first was that it made no sense for every social website to try and recreate the same web of relationships, over and over, by making people send each other follow requests. The second was that this relationship data should not be proprietary, but a common resource that rival services could build on as a foundation.
|
I think this is a fascinating metaphor. If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?
|
We nerds love graphs because they are easy to represent in a computer and there is a vast literature on how to do useful things with them. When you ask Google for directions from Detroit to Redwood City, for example, you're interacting with a graph that represents the US road network. The same principle applies any time a site tells you people who bought object X might also be interested in book Y.
|
And then there's the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids - how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can't really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn't work together. I'd like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?
|
You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they're completely inadequate.
|
One big sticking point is privacy. Do I really want to find out that my pastor and I share the same dominatrix? If not, then who is going to be in charge of maintaining all the access control lists for every node and edge so that some information is not shared? You can either have a decentralized, communally owned social graph (like Fitzpatrick envisioned) or good privacy controls, but not the two together.
|
The problem FOAF ran headlong into was that declaring relationships explicitly is a social act. Documenting my huge crush on Matt in an XML snippet might faithfully reflect the state of the world, but it also broadcasts a strong signal about me to others, and above all to Matt. The essence of a crush is that it's furtive, so by declaring it in this open (but weirdly passive) way I've turned it into something different and now, dammit, I have to go back and edit my FOAF file again.
|
You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
|
Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.
|
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
|
III What, then, is to be done? |
Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook.
|
Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.
|
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It's just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
|
Here's the article from Huffington Post. Many of the tech blogs are blogging about it as well.
Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies At 22
|
The Huffington Post
Catharine Smith
First Posted: 11/13/11 06:09 PM ET Updated: 11/14/11 12:52 AM ET
|
No news yet but here's a tribute page
Ilya Zhitomirskiy
-
-
- Male
- Died Nov 12, 2011
- New York, New York, United States
This is a page for family, friends and anyone who wants to remember and celebrate the live of Ilya Zhitomirskiy. Please feel free to celebrate his life with us by leaving you thoughts, memories, photos and videos.
|
More »
Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of co-founders of the social network Diaspora, has died at age 22, TechCrunch reported today. The cause and date of his death were not reported.
Zhitomirskiy was one of four New York University programming students who last year launched Diaspora, which is designed as an open-source alternative to Facebook. Their intention was to build "an open source personal web server that will put individuals in control of their data." A commercial alpha version was released November 23, 2010. The group has raised more than $200,000 in donations using a fundraising platform start-up called Kickstarter.
|
Followers of my Amplog know that I was a big fan of Diaspora, the attempt to create a p2p social network in response to Facebooks continuing violations of common sense ethics.
Now I found out that Ilya has died over the weekend, and I'm stunned.
I'd noticed that he had suddenly resigned from Diaspora recently. It must have been a prelude to this news.
I got a t-shirt as swag from them for my $25 contribution to the project via Kickstarter. I'll be wearing the t-shirt all day today in remembrance of him.
I'm sure there will be more news later from somewhere, and I'll try to keep you updated. Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the co-founder of the open-source Facebook alternative Diaspora, has died at the age of 22. The cause of death is not yet publicly known. |
Zhitomirskiy, along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, created the open-source software as part of a project while they were students at New York University. Diaspora was created as a response to Facebook’s controversial privacy changes in 2010. The team was able to raise $200,000 on Kickstarter to launch the project. |
Muslims turned up in droves for the Coptic Christmas mass Thursday night, offering their bodies, and lives, as “shields” to Egypt’s threatened Christian community |
Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
|
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife. |
I think I'm in love with a website (designer).
Not only is the content of the Infographic Poster itself both informatively and aesthetically pleasing, the website itself is gorgeous, and it incorporates my love of the light-blue-grey color and rounded rectangles that my designer friends *hate.* I can't help it - I have a weakness to aesthetics (4th ranked (Anima) Extraverted Sensing function), and despite the scorn heaped on the look (which I think stems from hatred of Microsoft defaults a... more I think I'm in love with a website (designer).
Not only is the content of the Infographic Poster itself both informatively and aesthetically pleasing, the website itself is gorgeous, and it incorporates my love of the light-blue-grey color and rounded rectangles that my designer friends *hate.* I can't help it - I have a weakness to aesthetics (4th ranked (Anima) Extraverted Sensing function), and despite the scorn heaped on the look (which I think stems from hatred of Microsoft defaults and overuse of them in PowerPoint), in the right hands it's beautiful, and in this case specifically it's appropriate since the metaphor is based around icebergs.
The website also gorgeously illustrates the concept it's trying to convey with this cutesy character standing on an iceberg tip at the top of the page, and the rest of the page tantalizingly reveals the rest of the iceberg. It also has swimming penguins in the pdf.
The other aspect to it that I love is his public-broadcating-like pledge button placed dead center on the initial view. And hence my buried lead - I think this is the future of "capitalism" in the information age (it won't replace it entirely, but will broaden it). There really needs to be a term for this model:
1) voluntary payment of content consumption
2) voluntary level/amount of payment
3) optional token swag in addition to original content paid for
I don't think "public" covers it because in some countries/contexts it implies government funding. "Membership" implies a relationship that may not exist. "Begging" has negative connotations. "Community" implies non-profit (which it may be, but not necessarily so). And please don't suggest "wikinomics" - it misapplies the root word of "wiki" which means "quick" not "communal"
It's a Subjective Valuation, which speaks to the Introverted Feeling mental function (Fi or xxFP ala MBTI). I tell my Public Radio clients that Fi is the mental function to which they're ultimately speaking when asking for people to part with their hard-earned money for a service they get for free. It's a paradox, since Fi is ultimately unknowable to anyone but the target itself. The path to hitting that target is the focus of my seminars with PB clients.
This model is what is going to solve the problems in the music industry, even if it means the destruction of "music labels as we know them." There's been a few high-profile examples of it lately (Radiohead and Public Radio itself as examples) but they're hardly the first. It's not limited to the music industry either. Home consumption of movies, newspapers and magazines, and software (the programs themselves and the companies, too; as Diaspora and Kickstarter show), fall into this category.
So I've never seen a term for this model. Has anyone? URL: www.paznow.com
I came across Amplify from a Peer on Diigo, noticing that the most recent bookmarks he was sharing there were posted via the service. So I went there to see what it was, in the hopes that the name indicated it was something along the lines of my VoxBox concept - a point upon which I could center my extraverted content (introverting the extraverted basically). I found out it was much more, and so easy to jump in and start using.
Since then, it made me change a few things - I unprotected my Twitter account for the first time since I started using it (which was pretty close to the founding of Twitter). I also started viewing my Twitter stream more often since there was more inter@action going on with my followers and me. And this past week I suddenly gained 15 followers within 15 minutes because two tweets suddenly became a meme. As a shy extravert (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing), I was quite taken aback by it, and since I didn't know the majority of them (but had indirect connections to two of them) it almost made me retreat to my quiet extraversion.
Also, since discovering Amlify, I've started "blogging" more. I put it in quotes because I have a very narrow and fundamentalist view about what blogging is. I think blogging is producing original content from scratch. I think many blogs today are just blogging about other blogs, a sort of distributed wiki forum. There's nothing wrong with that at all, I just don't think that blogs-as-we-know-them are set up for that kind of blogging, and it's not what I use my blogs for. (Amplify is different, more below)
Then I noticed today that I have more followers than sources on Amplify (a first on any service). Now the founder of Amplify, @egoldstein, has this "thing" about follower counts - he thinks they result in popularity contents (and they do if that's the only stat you look at). But the ratio of subscribers to subscribees is a telling one, even if it's less than 2:1. I think if the ratio is above 1 it says something about your work (not everything, but something).
There are other stats and ratios to consider, but it's a milestone nonetheless (keeping in mind that milestones are usually arbitrary and like models and metaphors, inherently "incorrect"). Some of those other stats are number of recommends and comments (on Amplify and other sources, notably Twitter) and number of posts overall. There are others, but that's the off-the-top list. I'd like to coin a term here - these measurements can combine into an algorithm to form your "Amplitude" and one of the features I'd like to see is a top-level-UI quick-reference link to them.
Amplify has a sort of goldilockian "sweet spot" to it - a combination of features and services that are just right for social blogging. Yes, it's not perfect (I have some unexpressed issues with the UI, but that's my personal Jungian bailiwick), and it has the potential to move out of that sweet spot, but that's because the potential of it is so great [side note to Eric: I just noticed I have a rich text editor for original thoughts -is that new? is it there for all forms of Amping now?]. Choosing which features to integrate into its own code and which to outsource I think is the key set of decisions for its direction. Twitter, Facebook and Google are all examples to critically observe here, for reasons both good and bad.
Part of the sweet spot nature of it is that the team is so interactive with its users, which may not be as easy to do later if it succeeds, and why Amplify needs to learn from the mistakes of other startups and successes: the interactive support team needs to increase early and often to handle the load. The current model of TomSawyerish whitewashing wikisupport throughout the "Web 2.0" world is atrocious (emphasis on Google and Diigo). I feel fortunate that I have access to the top right now, but don't expect it in the future. I do expect some access to somebody though.
So Amplify alone seems to be a network-effect product not just in an inter-social way, but intra-social as well - it's brought me out of my shell and I'm holding thing less close to my psychic vest. If my sources don't get sick of my seeming obsession with all things Jungian, this is a good thing. One of the contravening aspects to the "Triumph of the Subjective" is the "Tragedy of the Subjective" - where the collection of one's knowledge and opinion into one source can lead to its loss if unexpressed. Amplify by its very nature helps prevent that.
|
