Posts tagged 'socialnetworking'



Data is cheap, but making sense of it is not

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

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. [Read More]

Latest Links #42


Technologies of Friendship

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

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

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

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:

LinkedIn architecture diagram

Project SocialSite @ Enterprise 2.0

Image from screencast

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

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up ;-)

Getting the word out

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.


Evans Data Corp. Web 2.0 survey

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


Project Kenai: social networking place for developers

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

presentation slide about Project Kenai

It was mentioned in Software VP 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

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

Here are my links for the past week or so and notes about social networking APIs, using the web itself as a social network, JMaki, Abdera and more. [Read More]

Blog server as social networking platform?

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. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” 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 — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — 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.