Friend of a Friend was a panel on NPR with Jonathan Abrams (Friendster), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), and Duncan Watts (researcher).
Daily Archives: July 20, 2003
FOAF
Dan Brickley’s comment on an earlier post reminds me that i’ve never even introduced the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) Project. Part of this is because i’ve heard so many conflicting stories about what FOAF is and what FOAF is not that i feel too naive to properly address it.
To the best of my understanding, FOAF is a document framework that would allow you to articulate categories of and relations between people and information.
As Dan noted in his comment, FOAF poorly addresses the nuances of relationships between people. Because they couldn’t determine how to weight or contextualize the relations between people, they went with a standard “knows” relationship (similar to Friendster/Ryze, etc.). Of course, this is certainly the easiest approach, but it fails to truly capitalize on the value of nuanced relationships.
Dan continues on to remind us that FOAF is a distributed document type that has both its strengths and disadvantages. This is where i see FOAF as *potentially* having a great advantage. As a distributed tool, FOAF can easily be connected to one’s functional behavior and not simply rely on their strength in articulating their social network. What i mean is that if one is able to maintain the actual document of their relationships, it could easily be generated by their email/IM/SMS/phone behavior.
People know how to contextualize their relationships to others; they do so regularly through their behavior. The biggest weakness in Friendster is that it expects people to articulate their relationships. People are *dreadful* at this. So much of relationships is about showing face, about having relationships that are purely for mutual advantage and have nothing to do with liking one another. Professional friendships out of need. Yet to say that these relations are equivalent to that of one’s lover or one’s mother or one’s actual friends is utterly foolish. To suggest that people want to connect all of their friends with all of their other friends is naive.
My hope is that the FOAF folks will figure out how to move away from articulated social networks and emerge as a tool for people to evolve their networks through behavior. Of course, this will also require a level of privacy and non-publicness that is not currently in any of the FOAF specs i’ve seen or heard about.
fakester genocide
In one of the responses to my survey today, i received a great note from someone bemoaning the “fakester genocide” on Friendster. S/he argued that it was through these fakesters that s/he found known (old and current) friends or familiar strangers. For hir, the primary use of Friendster is to connect with actual friends (and dating happens to be a fun side element).
Aside from the clear usage model for this user, i love the term “fakester genocide” in reference to the deletion of artificially generated characters. In my head, this truly conjures up an image of a child horrified of the genocide of the imaginary people, or the stuff animals.
my capitalization rules
In my moving notice yesterday, Rory made reference to my odd rules for capitalization. As many folks know, my name does not have capital letters in it. When i was going through the process of changing my last name (and cementing the non-capitalization of my name), i did a lot of thinking about rules around capitalization in general. It always bothered me that “I” was a special case in english. Of course, i find it inherently indicative of the culture that we live in.
Well, it bothered me enough that i decided that i didn’t need any capital letters when i refer to myself. Not only is my name not capitalized, but i’m not that special. Plus, one of the main reasons to capitalize the letter was to typographically indicate it in a culture where everything was handwritten. In computer-land, it’s easy enough to see it separate from the rest. Of course, i still believe in capitalizing certain things – those of importance and letters at the beginning of a sentence to indicate that a new sentence is about to begin. Wouldn’t it be a bit funny though to start capitalizing You since i definitely believe that You is more important than i. Tehehe.
I will refrain.
Fact of the matter though is that my capitalization rules are just part of my quirks (except for that associated with my name, which are due to my mom’s quirks).
it took a village, but i moved to amazonia
Wow. My friends descended alongside the two Irish boys and moving just happened. Seriously, it was the smoothest move i’ve ever witnessed. So many people, so many beers and just a lot of positive energy. We wisked through my old house, moved it, cleaned it and voila, i’m now in my new room! The new place isn’t fully unpacked, but it’s full of danah color and i feel like it will be really good. I feel calm, relaxed and happy to be in my new home. Now i just need to start processing all that has been forgotten in my recent whirlwind.
Overconnected: On Friendster, It’s Not Who You Know, It’s How Many
Overconnected: On Friendster, It’s Not Who You Know, It’s How Many (Sean Nealson in The Stranger)
“Friendster is just another piece of driftwood in the weblog ocean, akin to the countless personality tests, polls, and petitions that are wildly popular one day, spread like viruses, and are soon forgotten, quickly supplanted by the next meme of the moment”
Sean Nealson’s negatively slanted Friendster article focuses on the efforts to amass friends and search for acquaintenances. He compares LiveJournal to Friendster and provides endless fun quotes:
“Where a blog offers the chance to expand on one’s self, Friendster reduces the self to a trading card, suitable for collection.”
Friendster: “the newest trend in online extroversion, like LiveJournal for grownups” … “this is a pyramid scheme without the money, or the advancement, or the pyramid, for that matter. It’s just a scheme”