social-web - eyal matsliah on Diigo

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington

September 4, 2007
Ownership of their own personal information,
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others
Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service
To what extent did Duncan Work’s “A Call for a Social Networking Bill of Rights” from 2004 feed into your thinking on this?
but there’s one piece you don’t seem to have touched: “the right to know who is collecting what and for what purposes.”
you have the right to know (and control) *all* the information that the network has on you, not just information that you’ve provided or information that’s deemed “personal,” and you also have the right to know what the network is doing with that information.

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Social Graph: Concepts and Issues - by Alex Iskold - readwriteweb

Tags: facebook, social-graph, social-network, social-web on 2007-12-10 and saved by25 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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In his post, Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related".
One problem is that currently you need to have different logins for different social networks. Another issue is portability
and ownership of an individual's information, explicitly and implicitly revealed while using social networks.
If at least one person in a group meets someone from a remote part of the world, the whole group is now
connected to another part of the world.
2. Type of Relationships The links between people in social networks are of different types.
Crudely, different types of relationships are a friend, a co-worker, a family member.
3. Relationships Identity Similar to having node equivalence, there is an issue of edge
equivalence. Although, this issue is more complicated. If two people are connected in one social network, should
they automatically be connected in all of them?
However, the crux of the issue is not that -
it is actually discoverability. As Brad pointed out, there needs to be a way for a new user who joins a network
to be able to find friends who are already using that network.
Privacy and ownership of information are at the core of the social graph issues.
Much like there is a conflict of interest
around attention information between online retailers and users, there is a mismatch between what individuals and
companies want from social networks.
But as individuals, we do not care about either
young or old networks. We care about ease of use and privacy.
In the ideal scenario, we would like to spend the least amount of time logging in, configuring,
telling the system what we like. We want to use the network to connect and to communicate. More importantly, we want
to not just feel that we are in control, we want to be in control of our personal information. Just like
we choose who to make friends with, we want to decide how our friendship information is used. We think of a social
network as a service that has our eyeballs and can advertise to us, in exchange for connecting us to people we want
to connect to. And as with any service, we want to control our information.
the best way to take a stand is to form an organization. Organizations have a much better track record of dealing
with corporations than single individuals. The organization can put forth a set of rules and standards
and then work with companies to implement them.
Brad explicitly described a need for an API or a service that would broker
the information between social networks. He envisions an open source base database which
accepts information from multiple social networks, then provides it to end-users
via UI or API - as well as allows users to authorize other social networks to find the information.
Indeed, the problem of attention and the social graph are related, since the social graph can be thought of
an aspect of attention.
The first technical challenge with this approach is to build a system that can scale.
The second important problem is building a system which is secure.
Assuming that both challenges
can be met, the next major issue is getting companies to use this API. Why would Facebook export their
information into this new database? Clearly, it would not.

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Giant Global Graph | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

Tags: foaf, social-graph, social-web, tim-berners-lee on 2007-12-09 and saved by17 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The realization was, "It isn't the cables, it is the computers which are interesting". The Net was designed to allow the computers to be seen without having
to see the cables.
The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. The WWW increases the power we have as users again. The realization was "It isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting". Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on.
Two delights drove the Web: one of being told by a stranger your Web page has saved their day, and the other of discovering just the information you need and for which you couldn't imagine someone having actually had the motivation to provide it.
Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really.
There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it.
Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.
We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph! Any worse than WWWW? ;-) Not the "Semantic Web" term has been established for a long time, I'm not proposing to change it. But let's think about the graph which it is.
So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us.
Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.
In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system.
I'll be thinking in the graph. My flights. My friends. Things in my life.

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From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet - New York Times

Tags: nytimes, presence, social-web, twitter on 2007-05-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Public Relations and the Twitter Scandal at The Blog Herald

Tags: blogging, ethics, pc-magazine, public-relations, social-web, steve-rubel, twitter on 2007-05-01 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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This is one of the dangers of Twitter, or any personal publishing platform that allows/encourages such spontaneous postings, for that matter. As Jayvee Fernandez would put it, blogging (the more traditional sense of it, if there is such a thing) lets one organize thoughts, think and re-think things before hitting the publish button. Therefore there is less likelihood to slip up. Yes, there have been blogging slip-ups, but it is definitely easier to slip up on Twitter and other similar services because there is more spontaneity.
So, for instance, even if Steve’s blog issues a disclaimer that all articles written are personal opinions, these would inveitably reflect back on the company that he represents.
Public Relations and the Twitter Scandal
I learned a valuable lesson. Post too fast without providing context and it can elicit an unintended response.
At the very least, this serves as a reminder to be more prudent in what we publish, even if it’s intended to be about personal or trivial matters, and even if it’s supposed to be for a closed audience.
I’d say this especially goes for people in the PR business.
So here’s one good reason for companies to rethink their acceptable use policies, which should perhaps include a policy (or at least guidelines) on blogging such that people working for them would have to find a balance between being an individual and a member of an organization.

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Entreweb3.0 - preneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense - By John Markoff at the New York Times

Tags: ai, artificialintelligence, metaweb, nyt, semantic-web, social-web, thinkers, web3.0 on 2007-04-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense
By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: November 12, 2006
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion.
“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”
Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.
But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.
Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.
Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.
In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.
“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.
Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.
>
During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”
Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.
“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.
Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.
There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Twitter dot dash

Tags: opinion, roughtype, social-web, trends, twitter on 2007-04-02 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.
Tara Hunt says, "Twitter is a representation of my stream of consciousness." What used to happen in the privacy of the mind is now tossed into the public's bowl like so many Fritos. The broadcasting of the spectacle of the self has become a full-time job. Au revoir, Jean Baudrillard, your work here is done.
Like so many other Web 2.0 services, Twitter wraps itself and its users in an infantile language. We're not adults having conversations, or even people sending messages. We're tweeters twittering tweets. We're twitters tweetering twits. We're twits tweeting twitters. We're Tweety Birds.
As the physical world takes on more of the characteristics of a simulation, we seek reality in the simulated world. At least there we can be confident that the simulation is real. At least there we can be freed from the anxiety of not knowing where the edge between real and unreal lies. At least there we find something to hold onto, even if it's nothing.
The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger.
> Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play.

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John Battelle's Searchblog: A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...)

Tags: diigo, interview, john-battelle, michael-wesch, social-web, web2.0 on 2007-04-02 and saved by22 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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The Untidy Commodification of Social Networks « web1979

Tags: blogpost, social, social-web, web1979 on 2007-04-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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RIP Twitter (2007-2007) « web1979

Tags: blogpost, eyalnow-comment, microblogging, opinion, prediction, social-web, trends, twitter on 2007-04-02 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Rather, I’m calling it now: Twitter will flame-out before the end of 2007, in one of the most awe-inspiring lessons in irrational exuberance we’ve seen since the turn of the millennium. Why? The possible reasons are legion, but let me name a few:
I make no bones about my disdain for Twitter. I’ve commented far and wide about the inanity and potential danger of the tool, and even discussed some of the associated social repercussions on this blog. But I’d like to now go one step further, and predict its imminent supernova-like implosion.
I’ve not seen a single legitimate, value-generating use of Twitter explained or demonstrated.
2. Too Much Effort
3. Key Users Will Bail
Non-existent before the end of 2007, I predict.
1. Where’s the Value?
>
There is no substance to the house of cards that is Twitter. No deep content, nothing to learn, no reason to keep coming back to the trough, other than the thrill/obsession of pre-adolescent voyeurism
> - which is simply not reason enough for busy professionals.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:22 am

eyalnow

Although I’m not using Twitter nor “following” anyone who Twits, I can certainly understand why many people use it and cherish it and will continue to.

It’s for the same reason that people blog about what they had for breakfast, and post photos of their pets, and for the same reason that others read and interact with them about it.

People like to express themselves, and to share these expressions, be it blurbs or snapshots, with others. And people also like to get a glimpse into other people’s lives, activities and whereabouts.

The explosion in the blogosphere is not due to professionals or companies who want to interact with their customers, but rather due to your neighbour who blogs about his stamp collection, and his teenage daughter who blogs at *her space* about her boring family.

Deep value is not the only criterion to judge a service or application. Tetris and minesweeper aren’t that “deep” either, but still very popular.

Busy professionals are just a small segment of potential customers. They are certainly not a representation of the average Myspace, YouTube or Flickr user.

In the same time, there are already professionals who *are* finding ways to harness commercial benefits or twitting.

My prediction: The hype will subside, but Twitter will not close.

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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Customer value and the network effect

Tags: business, ebay, economics, marketing, network-economy, network-effect, social-web on 2007-04-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Customer value and the network effect

March 08, 2007
What's the value of a customer who doesn't pay you anything? If you're running a hot dog stand, the answer is probably "zero." But if you're running a two-sided market - a market, like eBay or Monster.com or AdWords or YouTube or Digg or even Second Life, that needs to attract both buyers and sellers (or content generators and content consumers) - the answer may be "a lot."
But a recent paper by three business-school professors - Sunil Gupta, Carl Mela, and Jose Vidal-Sanz - offers a new approach for estimating the value of nonpaying, or, as the professors term them, "free," customers.
(To put it another way, the network effect of a buyer on a seller was far stronger than the network effect of a seller on a buyer.
While heavy markering spending is required in the early days to attract a critical mass of buyers, the network effect itself becomes a larger attractant than marketing as the business grows, allowing a company to cut back its marketing budget over time.
Gupta says that he's currently

working on understanding and modeling complex network structures such as those of MySpace.
Here the issue that we are grappling with is the tangible and intangible value of customers. In other words, customers provide tangible value to a firm through direct purchases but they also provide intangible value through network effects or word of mouth.
> It is quite possible that some customers have low tangible but high intangible value. Traditional models would label such customers as low value and would miss a huge opportunity for a firm.
In transportation infrastructure planning it has long been understood that the value of a system as a whole increases exponentially with linear increases in the number of nodes. Reason is that the network becomes more useful--you can go more places. This is known, but very frequently not taken into account,