transcyberia.info - socialnetworking

autonomo.us cloud computing

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:50:00 +0200

A flurry of activity on free software blogs addresses the losses of freedom brought about by cloud computing.

The Free Software Foundation is concerned, that:

the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

Cloud computing presents a centralization of resources, hence a centralization of power. The software you're using doesn't run on your own PC, it runs on a distant server. The documents you're creating aren't saved on your local harddisk, but somewhere on the intarweb. The combination of the two presents a major shift of control away from you, an individual, towards a few giant global technology corporations.

That's scary. Read on for countermeasures.

Continue reading "autonomo.us cloud computing"

trust in XFN social graphs

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks, as discussed earlier here and there and elsewhere. Summary: If I create a malicious page and put a rel="me" link to your page, your XFN "identity" contains my malicious page and is therefore compromised. The same holds true for links to other people.

We can arm ourselves against such an attack by requiring that all links are bidirectional, i.e. reciprocated. This is, in practice, too burdensome. If you have 10 pages, you'd have to link to all 10 pages from all 10 pages to truly establish identity. If you have 20 friends with 10 pages each, they'd have to put all your 10 pages on all their 10 pages. And everyone would have to do that for everyone.

Continue reading "trust in XFN social graphs"

living in the glass house

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:54:00 +0100

Webmonday Aachen yesterday featured great talks (video available) and lively discussions.

Technologies like XFN enable exchange of social network data between different carriers. Now people can search your social network through the Google Social Graph API.

As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their ‘consent’.

Suddenly even people in the dataportability camp start scratching their heads about the implications of unbridled data sharing.

The separation between our online identities is a feature, not a bug. Unifying our fragmented online selves into a total identity is not only technically difficult (XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks). It's also epistemologically unsound.

Not everything that can be done, should be done. We should be talking less about technology, and more about what we want. And especially about what we don't want.

If you start thinking about social data control, it soon becomes clear that ownership of social data, like opensocialweb.org claims in their Bill of Rights, is a fiction. If Alice publishes a link rel="friend" relation with Bob, and Claire publishes a link rel="coworker" relationship with Bob, we know a lot about Bob without having to ask Bob. It ain't Bob's data, and it ain't under his control. That's because it's social data.

Combine this brewing privacy backlash with mounting signs of social media fatigue and you may start to wonder if, maybe, social networking has reached the peak of it's hype cycle?

Facebook apps leave nest, lose appeal

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:12:00 +0100

The announcement that Facebook apps can now also be deployed on other websites (outside Facebook), has gone largely unnoticed, except for some Dutch press coverage.

Following the introduction last year of the Facebook platform, which precipitated the OpenSocial effort, widening the scope in which Facebook apps can be deployed is potentially a big deal. Deployment of Facebook apps across the web is attractive for both application developers (gain exposure) and for Facebook (drive traffic).

However, Facebook may have passed the peak of it's hype cycle already. The proliferation of apps results in a deluge of spammy messages that seriously annoys the user population.

Exporting this problem to other sites will only hasten the "Through of Disillusionment."

the internet galaxy revisited

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:51:00 +0100

In 2001, Manuel Castells published an instant classic: The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Re-reading it strikes you full force with the enormity of changes we've seen already, in the few years since 2001.

Here your are, in the age of World of Warcraft and Facebook, reading a text that analyzes role-playing chat environments and The Well as premier instances of social behaviour on the internet. Meet The Flintstones.

However, in other respects, Castells turns out to be a powerful visionary.

Continue reading "the internet galaxy revisited"

dataportability gains traction

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:59:33 +0100

With Microsoft joining DataPortability.org, an impressive line-up of major web2.0 sites is now co-operating on establishing common ground for exchanging social data.

This augments Google's launch of OpenSocial, a programming standard for social networking environments, last november.

Continue reading "dataportability gains traction"