You’ve seen it I’m sure. Myspace purports “a place for friends”, Bebo says it “is a social media network where friends share their lives and explore great entertainment” and Facebook says it “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
They all are lying. Granted it may be a lie of omission, but that’s a lie just the same. What they are forgetting to tell you is that they are little islands of popularity that are only as useful as the percentage of your friends that they have already tempted onto their bosom. Which means that most of us are constantly taunted to join up to one or more of them to connect to our friends, and we can’t shake the nagging feeling that we’re missing out on re-connecting with what’s-her-name, the cutie you snogged back in grade 12 and have been wondering about lately when the lights are low. And pretty soon my friends we have 2 or 3 or 12 different sites maintaining lists of our ‘friends’ with varying (infuriating in some cases) levels of overlap and omission.
Everyone claims the web 2.0 is all about communities and openness and sharing and blah blah blah lies. What we really have is a bunch of people who see what they think is a problem. And they have this grandiose idea of how to organize us and the stream of information we generate daily into useful and manageable pieces. Granted some of these apps work great, but the problem is that they all either seek to lock your entire online world into their framework, or do one thing really well… but only that one thing. The sheer hubris of FaceBook and MySpace trying to lock your friends, and pictures, and videos all up inside their walls is staggering and yet the omission of anything other than the one thing that Flickr of Vimeo does leaves them somewhat lacking. Someday, probably soon; someone will come invent something better than whatever the social network site du-jour is and users will go running abandoning their old profiles to become husks as a snake shedding its used skin. That is life in the big bad void. MySpace becomes GeoCities becomes Prodigy and the cycle repeats.
What I want to see some pervasive, accepted way of having one giant friend list that is bound to me that I take from site to site so I don’t EVER have to rebuild it (or worse: harass my friends to join the new hotness so I can ‘friend’ them.)
I don’t care what it is under the covers be it FOAF, or XFN, or some other thing that someone else invents, or hell all of them. I just want one goddamn friend list that I can take everywhere.
Granted this means something like XFN is going to have to get into bed with something like OpenID, but damnit the technology is there and wouldn’t you rather keep all these little husks of Internet identities all tied together and relevant?
I started thinking about this a little while ago and was set off by an update by jwz on his livejournal. My irritation at this phenomenon became even worse when I started to organize all the profile pages I had out there. It is getting so cluttered that most of the information out there about me is old, unloved and abandoned.
Something really needs to be done.
PS, you can follow me on:
to name a few…
Tags: internets, technology
Matt,
I couldn’t agree with you more and have refused pointedly to avoid all the above (with the exception of Google and last.fm, of course).
Regarding the statement “What I want to see some pervasive, accepted way of having one giant friend list that is bound to me…”, why not just carry a USB thumbdrive with your friend’s email addresses?
Works for me :-)
P.S. I stumbled on your site through the ipv6_enabled list and like you have been running linux almost exclusively at home for about 15 years (starting w/slakware) and hope to soon have a public facing ipv6 web site up and running – it actually runs like a top now, but I’m working on some routing issues – ipv6.flny.us – and as you have probably guessed, flny stands for Finger Lakes New York.