1. Not all my friends that I would like to read this blog. I’d doubt if three of ‘em do. So I’m going to link to Part I of this three-part post on facebook itself. However, rather than put it in a note, I’m going to put it in a group for a few reasons.

• It will be searchable on facebook. That way, when somebody searches for “Scott Caplan” on facebook, in addition to finding other Scott Caplans there, they will find a group titled “Scott Caplan is quitting facebook” that will point them to this post. In an ideal world, people could just google me (after all, I am result #2 on a Google search for my name), but I don’t think people will think of that for a while. By the way, if you’re reading this and your name is Scott Caplan, you should check this page out.
• I like the comparison to those obnoxious “Hey, I lost my phone number” groups. For a good protest group, see here.
• A note loses its feed audience after its posted. A group gets advertised every time somebody joins it. Hint: if you’ve read this far, and you’re on facebook, join it! You don’t have to quit facebook in order to let your friends (some of which are probably also my friends) know that I’m quitting facebook.

2. Hand over groups of which I’m an administrator to friends who are staying on the closed network.
3. Copy down all the contact information I want to keep. Note: if you want mine, you should write it down now. Once I delete my account, you’ll have to email me. In the long run, I want to set up a private page that’s password-protected/openID-enabled for my contact info, but that won’t be for a while I’m guessing.
4. Get openID working on this blog. I don’t know if I want to abolish the anonymous commenting. In the meantime, though very few people comment. Indeed, most of the commenters here are spambots, and deleting their “comments” is a bit of a pain. I don’t think it exists yet (probably because facebook doesn’t let you play around with their headers), but it would be an awesome app and/or improvement to facebook if you could use your facebook profile page as an openID…
5. I will yank the plug on my account some time before classes start on September 5th.
6. Actively search for ways to make the open social web a reality, and continue to participate in the revolution conversation.

Tags: openID, facebook, scottc229

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.

Tags: facebook, wired, openstandards, internet, scottc229, openID

Given the confusion that some of my friends have had with the concept, let me first clarify some of the reasons that are not behind my decision to delete my account.

1. I am not opposed to the News Feed. Far from it. I like the News Feed. And I’m glad that facebook finally has RSS feeds that work with the status updates and notifications. For a while I used the status one, but that didn’t work very well.
2. I don’t have a problem with the applications being launched on facebook. Some of them are good; some of them are bad. All in all, I think it’s a great thing for facebook that they’ve let people use their own imaginations to do cool stuff with facebook.
3. I’m not worried about my privacy online. Everything I put online I choose to put online. I send emails and letters to friends without worrying how my thoughts could be used against me. I see no difference in putting up pictures and comments. If I did, I wouldn’t have this blog.
4. I have no problem with the fact that anybody can join, or that networks are defined so loosely. In fact, I think they should have done that a long time ago. My membership in this group is really just tongue-in-cheek.

So why am I quitting facebook? The simplest answer is I don’t like telephone network effects, and I think their presence on an internet governed by open standards should be minimized if not eliminated. If I have a friend who, for whatever reason, chooses to use MySpace, I should be able to label myself as his friend without joining MySpace, whether I choose to be a member of another social networking site or not. The same applies to facebook.

In short, I’m quitting facebook because I wish they’d take the direction they’re going in farther. I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but the aforementioned post in Wired convinced me that the time is now. Go read it now, before you read anything else I write.

And once you’ve done so, you can read Part II here.

Tags: facebook, social_networking, myspace, open, wired, network_effect, scottc229, internet

Burt Kaufman appreciation

Tags: burtkaufman, imacs, math, teachers

Since I imagine that many of my friends will be starting blogs at unspecified times in the future, I’m also making this a new category.

Tags: alexjlee,, welcome

Yale chess is at the Pan-ams with two teams. Last night our A team beat Dartmouth 3.5 to 0.5 and this morning we just beat Miami-Dade’s A team 3 to 1. All I can say is I’m giddy as a schoolboy. And I’m excited about our B team because two of the three freshmen on the trip are on it!

Also, for those in the respective areas that I’ve forgotten to tell: I’ll be in New York for new year’s then back to Boston for finals. During the intercession (apparently the official name of the break between 1L finals and the start of second semester classes), I’ll be in France (Tours, one hour from Paris by train) and Germany (Cologne and Munich).
Finally, snobby latin is no longer monthly and no longer Latin. Hopefully the next poster (TBD) will be a bit more punctual than Vlad (not that I’m in a position to complain given my aforementioned tardiness). In the meantime, even though Oid’ ho theleis, logous theleis, I’m afraid I won’t be able to deliver much more for a while.

Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year!

PS. Here are the games from the win against Miami-Dade. You can play them out on an on-line board at monroi.com/wdc/.

And of course, you wouldn’t expect me to forget that we beat Dartmouth! (The chess match against Dartmouth should be on my birthday, October 28th, if all goes according to plan).

Tags: jolt

• My two current favorites (among those with which I’m somewhat familiar) are Captain Canuck, and Leguman. I discovered both through Wikipedia, as well as this Danish band.
• One preference, ceteris paribus, is for something obscure (see above two, for example). Here are some thoughts to get your creative juices flowing (I expect half of these suggestions don’t even have superheroes, but you never know):
• By religion: atheist, Coptic Orthodox, Sunni, believer in the Greek pantheon, pastafarian, Christian Scientist, pagan, etc.
• By nationality: Wikipedia has some good suggestions on this one (same article as above).
• By language: again, the more obscure, the better. For example, Basque, Esperanto, Yiddish, Interlingua, Québécois, Flemish, Cherokee, Luxembourgish, Kalmyk and Magyar are all interesting thoughts.

• On a more serious note, I’d ideally resemble the superhero (or vice versa) in some way. This is at least somewhat the case for Captain Canuck in the sense that I’m Canadian-American, but not so much (though maybe I’m wrong) for Leguman.
• Not a preference, but you may be interested to know that the French Wikipedia article on superheroes goes out of its way to note that Superman was not the first superhero, while the Spanish version is adorned with a picture of Superman and a caption indicating that he is indeed the first superhero, having been created in 1938.
• One Wikipedia source I haven’t yet explored is this list of superheroes.

Also, I note that Yale beat Lafayette!

PS. Pour ceux qui peuvent lire en français, j’imagine que ce poste sur Leguman vous intéressera. J’ajoute que le quatrième commentaire m’a donné un très grand sourire.

Tags: leguman, superheroes, captaincanuck, justiceleague,

The chess club has been packed for the last two weeks. So much so, in fact, that Neeraj could hardly find a place to sit down! Even better, AOB (NB: the schedule there is outdated) has 18 signups for the semester from the Dwight Hall Bazaar, about two-thirds of which Neeraj figures are promising, in addition to the current AOB volunteers.

And Neeraj has already started work on the Police Athletic League tournament this semester. Now for the news (as I heard it):

• Howard Nero and the kids at MicroSociety are going to start going to some USCF-sanctioned tournaments, and get ratings! David Lyons ‘08 and Jaison Oliver ‘09 are going to be helping some of their best kids train, so they’ll be ready to compete for glory at the CT Open (see below).
• Amistad high school (a new school in New Haven that Yale is heavily involved in starting, partly in hopes that it’ll become a feeder school for Yale) is bringing in Jim Celone (Yale ‘83 and the President of the Connecticut State Chess Association) for work on developing a chess club there. Right now the school has 50 students in 9th grade and no 10th graders. Sounds pretty cool.
• The Yale College Chess Club will be sending volunteers to a middle school in Hamden starting this semester to start a chess club there.
• Jim Celone will be putting on the CT Open in March in the Lanman Center at Payne-Whitney gymnasium! I’m hoping to see some Yale-trained teams winning at Yale in March!

But for all this news, Neeraj still didn’t know anything about how the team’s doing this year. So I called Dave Wang ‘08, the ever-impressive, rarely-sober team captain, and asked him if we have any good freshmen. I’ve always said that the club needs one good player a year, and we certainly got that this year. Among the freshman class is a master-level player from Philly. And as if just to prove that it’s a small world, he’s friends with Matt Traldi who was our board 2 until he graduated this year. I’m looking forward to seeing the team’s games on live broadcasts and then live here in Cambridge for The Game (which will also be put on live broadcast)!

And of course, since this is still filed under Chess, I don’t have much to say about Kramnik and Topalov except I’m glad that in a couple of weeks, the chess world will once again have a world champion! Gens una sumus.

Of course, if I left out some detail and you’re reading, please feel free to comment on it through the blog, or email me the error.

Tags: yale, chess, yalechess, jimcelone, neerajsingh, davidwang, ctopen, microsociety, nhps, howardnero, yccc, aob, dwighthall