As promised, this post has some comments about the discussion started by this post on Wired. If you haven’t yet read it, go read it now. The comments I have to make about it are three-fold: first, what I think it’s not suggesting; second, two of the complaints I have about the post; and third, some thoughts on how its vision could become a reality.
What I Think Scott Gilbertson is Not Suggesting
Contrary to what some of the initial commenters thought, I don’t think the post wants people to be sharing every photo of themselves, or all the contact info they dump on facebook, with the whole world. Rather, I read the post as hoping for a way to allow expression of what two peoples’ relationship to each other is without the need for a community like facebook. As an example, a friend of mine (say Vlad) logs into this blog with an openID authentication; this site recognizes he’s allowed to see my latest post about a mutual acquaintance of ours, and shows it to him. In the end, any software platform supporting openID authentication allows us to share this information, even facebook, provided of course, that facebook chooses to implement it.
Currently, however, there are at least two parts of this that don’t work on facebook. First, I can’t see anything on facebook without having an account, no matter what open standards or protocols I’m using. Second, I have a limited ability to differentiate among my friends, so that wheat I show to Vlad I may have to show to our mutual acquaintance.
There are in turn two criticisms of this thinking. First, there are some things facebook does that aren’t currently supported in my model. For example, group memberships are not recognizable globally. Secondly, in the example I gave, it was this blog that recognized Vlad and my friendship. What we need is for the friendship to be globally recognizable so that Matt’s blog can recognize that Vlad and I are friends with each other (as well as with him) and display our comments accordingly.
Second, if I really want to stratify things that much, why not just use email? There are many different answers to this, but it should be clear that if people wanted to maintain and use so many separate email lists, facebook wouldn’t exist.
Two Complaints About the Post
There are two things, and they’re both straightforward. First, I need to register with Wired in order to post a comment. That’s right. The people who are talking about opening up the spread of information, data, and media, require you to register before you take part in “their” conversations.
Second, on this page detailing how you can “Replace Facebook Using Open Social Tools,” they note that you can set up your own button to allow friends to call you on Skype of all things. And I would edit the page, but that too requires registration with Wired. Oh well.
Some Thoughts on the Missing Steps
I don’t know that much about the specifics here, but I generally tend to think that openID could be enhanced to do the trick. You can find some more thoughts from this blog post, which at least seems to be written by people who know what they’re talking about.
For part III, see here.
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