Yay to David Weinberger for another good breakdown on why social networking software is socially peculiar (through logic).

He’s reacting specifically to Jeremy Zawodny’s commentary that includes a great little quote that resonates well with my thoughts on the matter:

If you really think that Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, or any of those other sites are going to survive doing what they’re doing today, you’re really smoking something. However, if you think that also means the technology isn’t worthwhile–that the notion of modeling social networks in software is a pointless exercise, well then you’re really smoking something good. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Of course, my favorite quote out of his commentary is his call for action:

Start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them.

Jeremy’s blog entry also sparked Ev to offer one of his favorite truisisms:

We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

This is a great quote given the approach that social software is taking. Here we are, asking others to make explicit and actionable their social behavior. Yet, we do not understand this ourselves; we only understand our intentions wrt social behavior. Furthermore, as the models we build do not exactly mimic the real world, we expect others to follow the same social mores and understand our intentions in performance. For example, no one is consistent about what they present on their blogs, Friendsters, wikis. Everyone has what they think are the appropriate norms and thus they read others actions based on these perceived norms. No wonder we’re all quite confused.

I love traveling with my best friend because everything involves: 1) plotting; 2) adventures. So, we decided to road trip into Mexico. Of course, neither of us knew anything about Mexico. We stopped at AAA to acquire maps and acquire Mexican car insurance (apparently necessary) and then wandered past Tijuana down to Ensenada. Folks at AAA told us that it would be a good 4 hours drive. Of course, i forgot that the 80 on the side of the road was km/h and proceeded to drive 95 mp/h, happy to be in a country where speed limits were reasonable. Thus, it took us 1.5 hours to get there… It was still cold (not remotely beachable) so we decided to grab some yummy food and aim for the Eastern side of Baja.

Apparently, it is wise to read the guide book BEFORE going to Mexico (we read the whole thing while waiting in line to get back into the States). If we had read the guidebook, we would have learned that cops are not on the highway after 8PM but that there are plenty of bandits. So, we’re driving, listening to “This American Life” on iPod when we see fires in the middle of the dark road. We slow down and find that there are movements of people in front of us. So, we stop and i let down the window to be face-to-face with a machine gun carrying man in black with a black mask with only his eyes showing. Eek. So, we jet off. Fast. From this point on, we’re terrified of everyone on the road. As we’re approaching the other side of Baja, we slow down because of a road block, see a guy on the road and i speed through FAST. As we’re speeding through and the guy is waving at us, we realized he’s wearing army fatigues. Five minutes later, we get stopped again and this time, it’s fully clear that it’s a check point so we stop and in broken English explain that we’re going to San Felipe.

We land at San Felipe and wander the town. It’s very clearly a town dedicated to frat boy spring break travelers. We are one of 3 people in the hotel and very few tourists are out and about. The only thing that’s alive and open to grab a drink is the Rockadile, a tacky spring break club playing dreadful progressive trance, hip hop and gay house… from 5 years ago. No one is dancing and after a drink, we get the nerve to dance around. I’m feeling like a fool, not knowing how to dance to such slow dreadful beats. Still, we manage to bounce around until some other traveler from Ohio comes out and makes just as much of a fool with us. We chat with the tourist and the funny bartenders and then wander back to our hotel to watch the Lion Pride special on the Animal Kingdom.

Fell asleep, woke to a gorgeous sunrise over the beach, fell back asleep and woke to a sleepy town without a church but with lots of kids trying to sell us trinkets. We grabbed food, went shopping and wandered through the beach (still cold) and cactii before heading back through the desert of Baja, playing in Mexicali and wandering back to San Diego.

A short jaunt with a lot of dreadful attempts at broken Spanish, but silly nonetheless. I love random adventures.