wanderingstan

I feel a split happening in the blogging world. Not a revolution, but a general trend.

Blogs used to be many things at once:

1. Hang out with friends
2. Have a presence on the internet
3. Get your opinion heard
4. Make money

People doing blogs for the first two reasons are moving into social networks like MySpace/Facebook. There are more toys there, and you can be active without having writing skills.

On the other hand, people in blogging for the money are either giving up (witness the number of dead blogs out there) or (if successful) becoming more like traditional media: teams of writers, careful ad selection, celebrity status.

So the ones left as the blogging core are those who just want to get their opinions out there. Thank goodness there are no shortage of those!

Related: Facebook: Where are the Stars?

Today I’m going to a local mini-conference to discuss “Social Graph Unification”, a topic that’s been hot the past few weeks. It’s exciting to think that you could unify your friend lists across Facebook, MySpace, and Gmail. But we should not be content with a mere synchronizing of friend lists. Friend lists are merely one class of data that you might like to have synchronized. (In fact, I think it’s stupid to have your replicated across different services, but that’s a post for a different day!) Here is a rough sketch of the different types of data that you might create online these days, across all services. The question for today is, how many of these would you like (or be comfortable with) being synchronized?

Interesting dimensions to think about:

Pointers vs. Raw Data: Identities and Relationships are not data themselves, but point to other data sources.  Profile and Content are data in themselves. Bookmarks are a type of content that is a pointer to other content.

Serialized vs. In-Place: Profile data is typically not serialized, but Content data is. Some fields are in flux between them: E.g. Twitter showed that “Status” could be serialized, and other companies are trying to serialize “Location” (So that you could a feed of someone’s location history.)

Push vs. Pull: Blog posts are messages that are put out there for anyone to ‘pull down’ are read. Emails are messages ‘pushed’ directly to someone else.

Also interesting to think of the coverage that different services achieve. General purpose social networks like MySpace and Facebook cover almost all most of these types of data. Other services have carved out specific niches: LinkedIn does a little bit of profile data, business contacts, and email. Twitter does a little bit of profile information, subscriptions, and status. Flickr does a little bit of profile information, subscriptions, friends, photos, and email. 

Will people remain content to have this data scattered across services? Will syncronization enable this? How the hell do you manage permissions across all of this!? I’ll let you know how the conference goes!

CNET reports that Email is, like, sooo dead.

When I was in Germany for grad school I was surprised when a classmate said he stayed in touch with faraway friends primarily via IM. “That’s odd”, I replied, “most of my friends aren’t on IM. They just email.”

His reply was short and to the point:

“That’s because you’re old, Stan.”

Ouch.

But it’s true. Young people do most communication via texting, IM, and social networks.

Eric Rice suggests that this is because of “social authentication. I have to approve you as a contact before you can communicate with me. If I approve someone who is a spammer, I can drop with a single click.”

I agree, but this also makes me sad. I don’t mind being contacted by non-friends (or long lost friends) who have a real reason for contact. And I don’t want to have to personally approve each potential contact. That sounds like a lot of work!

The solution is to delegate this “social authentication” out to people I trust. If someone is a friend of my friend, they should be able to contact me with no problem. Likewise, if a friend of mine has identified someone as a spammer, they should be automatically blocked for me. Visually it would look like this:

(That graph comes from my old Outfoxed days, in Keeping your network clean.)

The funny thing is that none of the big social networks employ this technique. LinkedIn comes the closest with their “ask a contact for an introduction to one of their contacts”.

Similar social networked trust solutions could be used for comment spam, product reviews, and even code execution.

That’s my prediction. We’ll see how this plays out.

How does your social network affect your voting? I had dinner with some friends at Sherpas this weekend, and conversation turned to the upcoming election. “My sister’s a teacher and she says to vote no on that amendment” explained my friend. And based on that comment, I’ll probably vote no. Yeah, I should do my own private research but let’s be honest about this. I simply don’t have the time or expertise. I suspect this is the way many people make their voting decisions.

It’s another case of the long tail of authority.

What are the implications for web social networking apps? Can networks identify these topical influencers? My friend’s sister was probably influenced in turn by a someone from her school. If you’re running a campaign, these are the people you want to reach.

And if I can dream for a bit, I would love to see a Lijit-like service on the voting machines. I want a system that knows who I trust and what I trust them about, and knows this information about everyone else in the system, and can give me voting recommendations right there when I’m in the ballot box.

In other words, I want to optimize the process of what happened this weekend. What if I hadn’t run into my friend? What if another friend of mine has three teacher friends who think I should vote yes and have even blogged about it…only I don’t know about it because the topic hasn’t come up in conversation. I want a system that can scour my network for opinions, sort them, and display them to me right there when I make the decision.

Social networks are great sources of trusted information, but the current distribution methods are slow, unoptimized, and incomplete.

On a side note: The new spell checker feature of Firefox 2.0 is fantastic! How did I ever write in a browser before?