Blogging Roller

Data is cheap, but making sense of it is not

2010-04-30T07:49:12+00:00

Wonderful WWW2010 keynote speech by Danah Boyd on privacy in social networks, social norms and the responsibilities of those developing the WWW.

Danah Boyd: As a community, WWW is the home of numerous standards bodies, Big Data scholars, and developers. You have the technical and organizational chops to shape the future of code, the future of business, the direction law goes. But you cannot just assume that social norms will magically disappear over night. What you choose to build and how you choose to engage with Big Data matters. What is possible is wide open, but so are the consequences of your decisions. As you're engaging with these systems, I need you to remember what the data is that you're chewing on is. Never forget that Big Data is soylent green. Big Data is made of people. People producing data in a context. People producing data for a purpose. Just because it's technically possible to do all sorts of things with that data doesn't mean that it won't have consequences for the people it's made of. And if you expose people in ways that cause harm, you will have to live with that on your conscience.

Privacy will never be encoded in zeros and ones. It will always be a process that people are navigating. Your challenge is to develop systems and do analyses that balance the complex ways in which people are negotiating these systems. You are shaping the future. I challenge you to build the future you want to inhabit.

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 #42

2009-03-14T16:00:02+00:00

Bad Times Spur Entrepreneurship, But There's a Catch - Boing Boing
"The day we have national health care is the day that we unleash a wave of entrepreneurship the likes of which we've never seen before."

Ben Hyde - The Misery of Opportunity: Barry Schwartz on Paradox of Choice
"those who maximize a job choice did in fact capture significantly more income, but at a cost."

Jon Stewart creams Jim Cramer on the Daily Show
"I wonder if Rick Santelli will show his face on Stewart's set? Highly unlikely"

Unit Structures: NY Times Botches SNS Privacy
"The conclusion that Stross draws - that adults are now going to massively change their disclosure behavior because of young people - is as flawed as his 'privacy as anachronism' point."

Rich Bowen: More twitter blah blah blah
"To tell me that I need to define a goal for Twitter is somewhat like telling someone: you need to define a goal for conversation, and then every conversation you have needs to be working towards that goal."

Geir's Blog - Dalibor's "Nanny State" Argument?
"I hope I'm just misunderstanding what Dalibor is trying to say"

PC Pro blog: I'm sorry but Dreamweaver is dying
"Web 2.0 isn't an empty slogan, it marks a fundamental break with the past and Dreamweaver lies on the wrong side of it."

Technologies of Friendship

2008-11-24T08:42:19+00:00

I'm honored, excited and now I'm prepared.

I just finished writing up some notes for tonight when I'll be one of four guest speakers talking to Fred Stutzman's Technologies of Friendship class at UNC. Here's Fred's reminder post:

Reminder: Guest Lectures on Work, Organization and Action.

Project SocialSite Webinar, Thursday at 11:15am PT

2008-10-08T08:56:43+00:00

If you want to learn more about SocialSite, here's your chance. I'll be doing a SocialSite webinar tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 9) at 11:15am PT. Here's the summary.

Project SocialSite is taking a new approach to social networking. Instead of replacing your existing web site with a Social Networking system, SocialSite allows you make your existing blogs, wikis, forums and portals social and all backed by the same Social Graph of users. It doesn't matter whether your existing applications are Java, Ruby, PHP or blog/CMS template driven, you can easily add the SocialSite Widgets and and give your users a complete Social Networking experience right in the pages of your existing site. You'll be able to provide Personal Profile and Group Profile pages, a Dashboard for your users to manage their groups and connections and allow your users to install standard OpenSocial Gadgets that operate against their network of friends. Your applications can manage the social graph via the SocialSite web services and via standard OpenSocial Gadget technology.

In this webinar we'll explain the reasoning behind Project SocialSite, the basics of OpenSocial and what SocialSite adds, the SocialSite architecture and its Widgets and Web Services.

You can find the dial-in details on wikis.sun.com.

Project SocialSite (and yours truly) on the LiveMink blog

2008-10-02T16:11:59+00:00

I'm just gonna steal this straight from Simon's blog 'cause I'm lazy.

Simon Phipps: I got the chance to speak with Dave Johnson last week and catch up on his work building Project SocialSite, a social graph framework exposed as widgets and web services for use by websites wanting to build collaborative communities. Both technically interesting and destined to be an important part of the social media scene, I'll be looking forward to seeing SocialSite in action.
[ MP3 | Ogg ]

LinkedIn: 99% Pure Java

2008-06-05T09:07:23+00:00

Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn because it mentions the ROME RSS/Atom feed parser. I'm really sorry I missed it at JavaOne. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. Here's an example:

Project SocialSite @ Enterprise 2.0

2008-05-30T13:09:07+00:00

Looks like we made it to the final round of the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad competition and so Project SocialSite will be one of the five projects that will "present their ideas in front of an audience of creators, evangelists and adopters of cutting edge technologies who will provide feedback in real-time and decide the winner." Thanks to all who voted for SocialSite.

And in other news, Arun Gupta has put together a very nice ten minute screencast that shows Project SocialSite in action.

SocialSite on the LaunchPad

2008-05-06T21:36:47+00:00

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point <a href= "http://launchpad.enterprise2conf.com/node/18">video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up

Getting the word out

2008-05-06T21:36:31+00:00

Jamey Wood and I presented our Introduction to Project SocialSite yesterday. We had a much larger crowd than I expected, given the number of concurrent talks -- I'm guessing there were close to 300 people in the room. I hope to be able to post a link to the slides at some point in the near future because right now we've got almost no information on Project SocialSite on the web. Now that we've got permission to talk about the project, I'm going to try to change that.

I spent most of the day in the Sun booth answering questions about SocialSite and demonstrating our widgets and web services in Roller and MediaWiki and talking through some key slides in our deck. At this point, we only have a handful of our widgets implemented and they're pretty bare bones, but folks seemed to "get it" and liked the idea of adding social networking features to existing web applications.

If you're at JavaOne, then please stop by the Sun both and say hi. Look for us under the banner Social Networking for Glassfish. And if you want the full scoop then check out our Birds of a Feather (BOF) session:

BOF-5857: Turn your website into an OpenSocial container with Project SocialSite
6:30 PM on Thursday
Esplanade 307/310

Jamey and I will be ready with slides and demos and answers to (almost) all of your questions and you'll have plenty of time to make it to the After Dark shindig.

Latest Links: open source, social networking and etc.

2008-03-23T14:00:05+00:00

cgwalters - A software tsunami
"OpenJDK is finally changing that. Now, you can write a library using Java, it can be sensibly integrated with Free operating systems"
Countdown for IBM Project Zero | Reg Developer
"bringing the feedback typical of an open source project without any of the obligations to give the resulting technology back to the community."
Soviet-era JCP needs change, concedes top commissar | Reg Developer
Patrick Curran has reached a firm conclusion on his organization: "We have to change," he said. "No more smoke-filled rooms."
Glynn Foster: Why Our Governance Doesnâ€™t Work
"Thereâ€™s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesnâ€™t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute."

Skype Journal: Skype and the Social Network Stack
"We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing"
An Open Letter to American Express ~ Chris Pirillo
"You know, for all the buzz that FaceBook getsâ€¦ I get far more value out of Twitter."
buddypress - Google Code
"suite of plugins that will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform"

App Platform Strategies Blog: Looking for SOA success stories
"SOA is not working in most organizations"
OLPC News: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days
"the end of a dream".
Atlassian Dev Blog - Maven in our development process. Part 4.
"Maven users need training."

Evans Data Corp. Web 2.0 survey

2008-02-28T12:42:59+00:00

Evans Data Corp. is doing a survey on Web 2.0 development and they've included some interesting questions on social networking:

How is your organization using Social Networking?
What is keeping your organization from using Social Networking now?
Why are you planning to use Social Networking technology?
Which of these Social Networking APIs are you most interested in developing with?
What are your plans for OpenSocial?
What are your plans for developing Facebook applications?

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."

Project Kenai: social networking place for developers

2008-02-06T09:17:55+00:00

Kenai was announced yesterday at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS 2008):

It was mentioned in Software VP <a href= "http://www.sun.com/events/sas2008/docs/07_Green_Software_SAS_2008.pdf">Rich Green's presentation.
I think that's just about all I can say on the topic.

And by the way, the audio and slides for all of the SAS 2008 presentations are online now. Ian Murdock's presentation is especially good, as Redmonk's James Governor tweeted yesterday "Ian Murdoch (the ian of debian) is doing a phenomenal job of explaining what Linux, and distributions are. A great education for analysts."

AtomPub in OpenSocial 0.7

2008-02-05T11:38:30+00:00

I missed this one in my social networking API link-fest yesterday: Google announced version 0.7 of the OpenSocial API, some of the data APIs are outlined in the spec and they're still using AtomPub protocol (just like GData).

I had heard there was some push-back against AtomPub, but I really don't know what is going on because there is no transparency at all in the specification development process. So, who knows, but I really don't think they have time to invent an all new protocol. In fact, they'd better wrap things up tout de suite because Google's planning to go live with OpenSocial on Orkut during the last week of February.

Lots of latest links: social networking APIs and more

2008-02-04T14:00:07+00:00

First, some links from open source projects I'm trying to follow. Check out the JMaki Webtop widget, it looks pretty useful. Now that I've got JMaki support in Roller, this could be the basis for some cool drag-and-drop blog layout. Wish I had time for that; I'm still trying to carve out some time to dig into the Abdera server framework.

jMaki Webtop
Cool iGoogle style portal interface via JMaki
JSPWiki: JSP Wiki 3 Design
JCR back-end, wiki spaces and more...
Abdera Server Implementation Guide
"The Abdera Server module provides a framework for constructing Atom Publishing Protocol server implementations."

I'm also following OpenSocial and Shindig (the reference implementation of OpenSocial) pretty closely, but thus far have not had time to dive into the code. There's lots of activity on the Shindig list, but thus far there's no server-side and security is still up in the air -- both are pending change to the spec itself. Marc Cantor has an interesting perspective on the OpenSocial.

ShindigStarted - hyves_api - Trac
"a small guide on how to get started on Shindig."
CNET Mark Cantor: Waiting for the OpenSocial hammer to drop
"We all hope that MySpace, Bebo, and others will open up and go beyond the original scope of OpenSocial to lay the groundwork for a truly open world of social networking."
<a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/kickapps-publishes-api-kit-adopts-facebook-and-opensocial-platform- standards/">KickApps Publishes API, Adopts Facebook and OpenSocial standards
"KickApps has adopted Googleâ€™s OpenSocial developer platform standards and is working with Facebook to adopt that companyâ€™s standards as well."

I'm also following Facebook. While Google and friends scramble to catch up, Facebook Apps are getting easier to write, thanks to a new JavaScript API, and easier to deploy thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Facebook Extends Platform to the Web - The Unofficial Facebook Blog
"This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the social graph"
JavaScript Client Library - Facebook Developers Wiki
"Applications that use this client library should be configured to load in an iframe, not be rendered with FBML"
Facebook JavaScript Client Library
"This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications"
Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS For Facebook Applications
"we've teamed with Facebook to collect all of the resources that you need to be the next big success story in one convenient location."

Personally, I really like the idea of the web itself as the social network and your blog as the home for your personal profile. So, I think the new Social Graph API is a step in the right direction, as is the blog-based Distributed Social Networking (DiSo) project.

BuzzMachine:The internet is the social network
"The internet doesnâ€™t need more social networks. The internet is the social network."
Social Graph API - Google Code
Project homepage
Google Social Graph API Released on Dion Almaer's Blog
"Would you like to be able to make a quick call to get a JSON response that ties together a social graph made up of resources available on the Web?";
diso - Google Code
"DiSo (dee â€¢ zoh) is an umbrella project [for] as Chris puts it: 'to build a social network with its skin inside out'"
The Existential DiSo Interview on Vimeo
Factory Joe interviews himself re: Distributed Social Networking

And, I'm happy to see support for Twitter-like microblogging in Wordpress and Facebook like activity streams from Movable Type.

Introducing Prologue: WordPress.com
"Weâ€™re fans of Twitter around here, [but] while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more"
Building Action Streams - MovableType.org
"framework for collecting your actions from services around the web into one place for you to share back out as you see fit."
Action Streams | Plugin Directory | movabletype.org
"aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web "

And to wrap up: maybe I don't need to worry about the intersection of Blogging and Social Networking at all. Maybe there's no need to following all these APIs. Maybe the hype has peaked and Facebook and friends are about to go the way of the CB radio. Apparently, folks aren't spending quite as much time Facebooking as they used to:

ZDNet.com: Ohmigod! Social networkers just canâ€™t take it any more!
"it is entirely possible that people are beginning to question just how much time they spend socially networking, rather than socially living."

Blog server as social networking platform?

2007-12-11T19:39:25+00:00

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. Heâ€™s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to â€œbuild a social network with its skin inside out.â€ DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.
This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features â€” such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin â€” that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.