Subscribing to People
Dave Winer asks “how do we open up social networking?”
Well one clear way is to just ’subscribe’ to someone and then find out what they’re doing - wherever they are. This can only be done across vendor’s offerings - so it’s a great use case for open standards.
Pierre Wolff reminds me that I’ve been thinking about subscribing to people - for years. I tried oget Mark Pincus of robe to add thsi feature back in 2004. Paul Martinoa nd I fought for it - but “oh well”. Pierre was there at Tribe and he knows how hard we fought.
Muliply, Bebo, Tribe, 1UP, AlwaysOn, hi5, ecademy, Xing, Mixi and Cyworld - all have strong communities - but each within their own world. In this mad, crazy world - Dave doesn’t think that vendors will do the right thing. I think we can guilt them out into doing the right thing.
Since humans are migratory beasts and move around allot - some of them are bound to be our friends! And we want to keep track of our friends - so an open standard for pings and human activity updates is needed.
Maybe this is something Dave can help with? Afterall - he is the GRANDFATHER of pings.
Next up - group aggregation!
June 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Marc,
You raise an important point re: Subscribing to People
This is the trust of social-networking i.e. this is what we do when we establish links (technology is just catching up). We subscribe to a persons views, insights, and a myriad of other attributes.
Also note, that this is what is typically referred too as URI dereferencing in Semantic Web technical parlance. Thus, monikers aside, the concept of identifying and peeling back the layers of ones digital onions is basically getting ready to explode. A FOAF profile URI is the digital container of said personal attribute data which can be exposed Blog posts, Wikis, shared bookmarks, feeds etc..
As you know, blogrolls where an early attempt to do something similar, but as predicted, it use has waned due to semantic deficiency.
btw - have you had a moment to revisit SIOC?
June 30th, 2007 at 10:19 am
[…] to play a bigger role and that every one needs to open up their networks. In Marc’s most recent post (which is a tad self-referential since he points to one of my previous posts) it appears that Dave […]
June 30th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
[…] Is OpenID the answer? Maybe not, but it is a continuing conversation that is important. http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2007/06/subscribing-to-people […]
June 30th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
[…] « Subscribing to People […]
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[…] trovato molto interessanti le riflessioni di Dave Winer, Marc Canter e Paolo Valdemarin su come in realtà i social network come Facebook o Twitter sono ancora […]
July 10th, 2007 at 3:57 am
[…] IM and communication interop, profiles, app platform, widgets, universal widgets, subscribing to people, […]