Blogging Roller

The meaning of the Facebook like button

2012-02-11T16:42:54+00:00

far as I can tell, clicking theFacebook "Like" button means "please spam me endlessly"
— Dave Johnson (@snoopdave) February 5, 2012

OAuth and OpenID: take2

2010-05-18T13:48:47+00:00

Lot's of activity in the OpenID and OAuth space recently. Both OAuth and OpenID have suffered from bad user experience, bad developer experience and low adoption. Now they're in the process of re-invention and folks from both Google and Facebook are involved. Here's my reading list so far on the topic:

IETF OAuth working group - The OAuth 2.0 Protocol - draft-ietf-oauth-v2-05 is the latest draft of OAuth 2.0, published about two weeks ago.
Eran Hammer-Lahav - Introducing OAuth 2.0 is an excellent overview of what's different and new about OAuth 2.0, listing the six new flows that are supported including a username/password flow.
David Recordon (Facebook) - OpenID Connect: A strawman... is a proposal for "OpenID Connect" a standard way to do what Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today, allow users to login sites with either their Facebook, Google or other identity provider credentials.
Chris Messina (Google) - Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID Connect covers the thinking behind OpenID Connect and the expansion of the "OpenID brand."
Michael Calore (WebMonkey) - New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes covers motivations behind OpenID Connect, problems with OAuth and OpenID.
Joseph Holsten - Your New New Web Identity another nice overview of the new OpenID and OAuth ideas, pushes back against dropping/reinventing of OpenID Attribute Exchange.
Tantek Celic - I'm calling bullshit on #OpenID Connect. Still too complex, ... is about one run-on tweet's worth of contructive criticism

10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account

2010-05-04T08:51:50+00:00

Dan Yoder's 10 reasons are all good ones, but I'm still on Facebook. My take: if you assume that *everything* you do and share on Facebook is public, and you know how to hide the annoying games, then Facebook ain't so bad.

Dan Yoder: While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Social data flow

2009-08-10T16:52:47+00:00

(Note that I wrote this over weekend, before we all learned about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. It's hard thinking about how things will change because we have no idea what Facebook will do with FriendFeed, but I'm guessing that this acquisition will end-up making Google Reader a more central part of my flow.)

Every time I find something that I want to share with others online, I have to think about how I want to share and whom I want to share it with. Perhaps I've created too much complexity for myself. This diagram below illustrates the situation. It's my social data flow diagram. Take a look and then I'll explain.

The diagram

The boxes are web sites and the arrows indicate data that flows automatically between those sites. I think of the sites on the left as source sites, places where I share blog entries, post photographs, tag interesting articles and indicate that I like specific songs. The sites in the middle are aggregation sites. Things I share on my source sites are aggregated together so that my Facebook and FriendFeed friends see the things that I do on those source sites and make comments.

Different audiences

I treat Facebook and FriendFeed differently. I try to be Facebook "friends" with only people that I know and trust. I feel more free to share some personal things there; family news, political views, etc. because, in theory, only my good friends can see them. For some reason, I'm leery of Facebook and I don't feel like committing too much information to them. For example, I'd rather upload photos to Flickr. That's one of reasons I share on other sites like FriendFeed, Twitter and Delicious.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, I treat as totally public. Everybody can see what I post there and I'll follow people I don't know so well. In fact, everything I do except for Facebook and some Flickr photos is public. This brings me to the topic of Twitter.

Reducing complexity

Since I'm a geek, I don't mind a little complexity. The one part of my flow that I would like to simplify is link sharing. I use Google Reader heavily but when I want to share a link, I feel that I need to post it over to Delicious because I've got a wealth of links there and infrastructure in place to send daily "Latest Links" post over to my blog. Now that Reader has made it so easy to share, tag and comment on links I'm considering dropping Delicious and doing all of my sharing through Reader. Another thing I'm considering is a little more automation.

Automate everything?

To me, Twitter is like a huge public chat-room where you only have to listen to the people you want to listen to. All of my tweets are automatically posted to my FriendFeed account. Because of the chat-room nature of Twitter and the fact that many of my Facebook friends don't understand Twitter, I don't like automatically pumping my entire Twitter stream into Facebook. I use Facebook Application callled Selective Twitter so that only tweets that include the string "#fb" go to Facebook.

I don't like automatically pumping things into Twitter either. I often re-share things that I have shared on my blog by posting them to Twitter, usually using a URL shortening service (bit.ly) because tweets must be short (max ~140 characters). This is not an automatic process and I do it only for specific things that I want to share and comment about on Twitter.

Question is: should I automate the flow between FriendFeed and Twitter? If I did so, my Twitter followers would see a tweet every time I share something on any of my source sites. That would be good, right? The conventional social media wisdom for success on Twitter seems to be that you should ABC or "always be linking." Sounds a little slutty, sure, but there is something to that approach: the more you share, the better your chances of connecting with interesting people. I haven't done it yet because I worry that it's too spammy in a chat-room like setting.

Latest Links: Feb. 16, 2008

2008-02-16T12:48:07+00:00

More on MySpaceâ€™s Open Development Platform - GigaOM
"made up of three APIs â€” primarily Open Social and extensions weâ€™ve added"
ZDNet.com: Progress report on the OpenSocial Web
Summary of latest OpenSocial news and hackathons from Dan Farber
Facebook to Punish Stupid Applications, Reward Good Ones - ReadWriteWeb
"Metered messaging based on user engagement could save the Facebook Platform from a growing sense of app fatigue"
Roumen's Weblog: Android plug-in for NetBeans
"the screenshots look promising"
Rob Williams' Blog: finally ditched LifeRay
"we have finally ditched Liferay in favor of JBoss Portal. So far so good. It is much more stable. The code base is not a rat's nest of untested Struts goop."
Indoor WiFi Signal Booster by Meraki
"Meraki Mini is a small, easy-to-use wireless mesh repeater."

Latest links - Oct. 30, 2007

2007-10-30T16:37:00+00:00

Some reading on Facebook and enterprise social software from my del.icio.us bookmarks collection:

Tim Bray: The Intimate Internet
Bray on Facebook: "Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. "
Fred Stutzman: The Directionality of Social Network Platforms
Stutzman on Facebook: "the ecosystem needs more than fluff, especially if we're going to start talking about the "social operating system."
Phil Windley: What's wrong with Facebook
Windley on Facebook: "social Webs will require similar attention to the structure that emerges from social activity, not nagging people about it";
Doc Searls: Too much face(book) time
Searls on Facebook: "If you're waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation, or a burp or any of that other stuff, don't hold your breath."
Read/Write Web: Big Vendors Scrap for Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy
"The [products] remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products."
Personal InfoCloud: The State of Enterprise Social Software
"Nearly all of the enterprise software product companies are claiming understanding of Web 2.0, but none execute well on it"