Luddite 2.0
A heated discussion between a pair of librarians 2.0, Shannon and Barbara, and a pair of software developers, Jeff and me, led to an unlikely event: I was accused of being a Luddite. Why? Because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for facebook and other centralized social networking sites.
I don't think I'm a social networking n00b; I was a member of the One Big Cloud on sixdegrees. (Remember sixdegrees?) I use social/2.0 sites like flickr and last.fm. I have a page on LinkedIn. (If you're hiring for a telecommuting position with no measurable goals and you pay via direct deposit, with occasional site visits required to someplace interesting, message me.) I had to admit, however, I had no experience with facebook despite the way it and its cousin myspace have caught on inside the cornelii firewall.
So I got myself a facebook
.
First the cons:
- 2.0 social networks are redundant. Your friends are your friends from site to site. On the other hand, the way you interact with people in your LinkedIn network is likely to be different from your interactions with your facebook friends, even if there is overlap in the network.
- Social networking sites are disjoint. If you're a booker, and a friend of yours is a spacer, how do you communicate? This is more critical if you're a professorial-type booker, and among your students there are spacers, particularly if you're a booker because that's where the constituency is supposed to be, as was explained to me by the Libs 2.0. Difficulty: Email, I'm told, is for the old and infirm, screaming toward irrelevance behind gopher and usenet. (Remember usenet? Remember gopher?)
- Bugs. Spam. I encountered both within five minutes of signing up with facebook. What's the benefit over email again?
- Ads. I don't see them, but I hear they're in there.
- It's distracting. I admit, this is more of a problem for me, whose occupation is more solitary, than some. Time spent cultivating relationships is time spent not writing code.
And pros:
- The user interface is straightforward and one need not host one's own server to take advantage of the capabilities of the site.
- It's fun. Even for a curmudgeonly introvert like me. I like seeing how I compare to my friends, playing little games with them, seeing how our scores stack up, looking at pictures, etc.
- Speaking of introversion, that combined with a little exhibitionism creates opportunities to learn things about your friends and acquaintances that you didn't even know you wanted to know.
- A social network, with its connections, reconnections, and reciprocal relationships, is a community. It feels good to be a part of a community. Immediacy within the community creates intimacy. That feels good too.
The whole online social network phenomenon raises questions for me. What are the social ramifications of neglecting the messages zipping back and forth within your network? Do you befriend your boss? What if you don't? What threshhold of acquaintance calls for befriending?
It would be interesting to put together a coherent set of distributed
social networking tools: feed aggregators, nanoblogging tools, and an XFN or
foaf
browser extension for firefox, along with a toolbar interface for simple
management. It must be easy for the users of such a system to integrate
things like flickr and last.fm in to the mix. That's kind of what the
feed aggregator is about, though. There will probably need to be some
kind of cryptographic protocol for establishing reciprocal
relationships; the browser/spider will need to be able distinguish
between reciprocal relationships that have been confirmed vs.
unconfirmed relationship. Maybe none of that is important; the
relationship only exists if it's reciprocal. One-way relationships are
qualitatively different, like the fan
designation used by some
sites.
Uh-oh, I've gone all stream of consciousness
.
I wonder if a distributed, self-hosted (or lightweight hosted) social networking system could catch on.
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Missing Features
There are some features missing from Get Up 8, notably comments and feeds. Those should be back soon. I've cleverly used mod_rewrite to preserve Seven Falls permalinks that might be floating around, and rewriting them to the new style of URL.
After the functionality is there, it'll be time to turn to styling and sidebars. I'm getting away from categories, opting for web-2.0-ier tags instead.
Watch this space...
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