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Pony: foaf, fwiw
1.27.2004
I am trying to get up to speed on this whole FOAF (friend of a friend) and YASNS (yet another social networking service) phenomenon and its correlative new lingo.
I got the following lowdown from Henson:
FOAF is like RSS for social networking. RSS describes content, FOAF describes people. From http://www.foaf-project.org:
"The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of
machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do."
What is the diff between FOAF and YASNS?
You could build a SNS out of FOAF, FOAF is just a language to describe personal networks, not a service per se.
Cory writes a good rant about it on Boing Boing. He also cites Foe Romeo.
Friendster is the social software tool we can most easily reference, I think, and as most of us have noticed, you kind of hit a wall. Once you have joined up your gallery of friends, signed their yearbook pages with appropriate witticisms, had a few fun reconnections, and marvelled at how purdy your 35 friends are, you begin to realise that you have given over your entire social network and marketing-worthy interests to a commercially-driven enterprise. Creepy, right? And if you are not cruising for love or lays, where's the payoff?
Then everyone was buzzing about tribe.net, an interest-driven network that has a more controlled member access and more appealing forums, and the ablility to block trolls.
I kinda snoozed a bit, cuz the backlash is on, with a bunch of people calling for social network builders to create more refined, intuitive and useful community software that we will value beyond the novelty of the first few days.
some linky-dinks that I am checking out:
foaf project
plink.org
ecademy(business network)
people aggregator
Ryze (business network)
Orkut (google's new closed social network "The community will, in essence, create a closer and more intimate network of friends.") UPDATE: It was taken down cuz of scaleability issues)
Joeys jokes
essay on "the augmented social network" on Peer Review Journal.
favors ('A community is a group of people doing favors for each other').
net deva
kottke rants about the surfeit of social software and calls for a meta-friendster to manage all his profiles/accounts.
I've got to read up.
I have always been skeptical about "lean forward" interactive narratives and mediocre flash experiments becoming high art. Community, as far as this whole New Media shizinit is concerned, has always been where it is at. Now, it seems, non-geeks are able to articulate what they want in their online communities/networks. And that is very cool.
In the olden days, I hear, they would hire a band,rent out a space, and people would dance together.
