Spring Break
Open Techknowledgy: What makes up your social graph?
By: Dennis Mongello
Issue date: 8/24/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 8/24/07 at 2:56 AM EST
Last update: 8/24/07 at 2:55 AM EST
Originally published: 8/24/07 at 2:56 AM EST
Last update: 8/24/07 at 2:55 AM EST
Fitzpatrick's solution to combine the social networking sites would be a seamless experience for the end user. Upon first entering a new site, the site should recognize who the person is and recognize their friends from other sites that already have profiles on this new site. So basically, he envisions an underlining social system that has the ability to keep track of all your cyber relationships across all social networking sites and can update each site accordingly and automatically. Of course, all of this automatic dissemination of data should be controlled by the end user, who must first give permission as to what, exactly, they want to be done automatically, for privacy's sake.
Fitzpatrick does not intend to make a new social networking Web site. The whole point of this project is to not reinvent the wheel when it comes to these sorts of sites. It should also help limit the amount of personal data we have about ourselves on the Web. For example, if you have a MySpace and Orkut profile, you might have some photos shared on each site. Some might overlap; some photos might be unique. Either way, you don't have an exhaustive list of all of your photos on these sites, because storing photos is not the main draw of these sites, meeting people is. However, you then have your Picassa or Flickr site that has all of your photos, because that is what these sites are made for. Wouldn't it be great to upload your photos once, to one site, and still have all of your friends be able to see them? And still have all of these photos associated with your MySpace profile so that your MySpace friends can see them all? Having data stored once, in one place, means that you can keep track of everything more easily and the chance of it getting hacked or stolen goes down as there are less targets for attackers.
A lot of you might be reading this and thinking that Facebook (and more specifically Facebook applications) is doing this already, and Facebook has become the Swiss army knife of all social networking. Having all of these features under one owner, so to speak, is potentially dangerous.
Fitzpatrick does not intend to make a new social networking Web site. The whole point of this project is to not reinvent the wheel when it comes to these sorts of sites. It should also help limit the amount of personal data we have about ourselves on the Web. For example, if you have a MySpace and Orkut profile, you might have some photos shared on each site. Some might overlap; some photos might be unique. Either way, you don't have an exhaustive list of all of your photos on these sites, because storing photos is not the main draw of these sites, meeting people is. However, you then have your Picassa or Flickr site that has all of your photos, because that is what these sites are made for. Wouldn't it be great to upload your photos once, to one site, and still have all of your friends be able to see them? And still have all of these photos associated with your MySpace profile so that your MySpace friends can see them all? Having data stored once, in one place, means that you can keep track of everything more easily and the chance of it getting hacked or stolen goes down as there are less targets for attackers.
A lot of you might be reading this and thinking that Facebook (and more specifically Facebook applications) is doing this already, and Facebook has become the Swiss army knife of all social networking. Having all of these features under one owner, so to speak, is potentially dangerous.
