by Flemming Funch
Recently I've accepted invites to LinkedIn, Ryze, Friendster and probably other networking sites I'm forgetting. Stuart Henshall has some excellent commentary on experiences with these. And it also reminds me, of course, that I have my own contact networking site, NCN, and I went and looked at my own contact list. And, regardless of what kind of nice features it is surrounded with, I must admit that it suffers from some of the same problems that any of these schemes will suffer from. All of them require that one signs up into a central database, and fills in one's profile from scratch, and then one has some way of adding new contacts to one's network. Unfortunately that only works really well if the networks happens to be so super popular that *everybody* is using it.
When I look at my own NCN contact list of 216 people, it has some nice features, quite competitive with the other guys. But most of the people on the list haven't logged into the network for a long time, so their information isn't particularly up-to-date. 3 of them are dead. It is not a big wonder. The network has existed for 8 years, and of course the close to 8000 people who have signed up are not going to sign in every day, unless there is something mind-blowing going on that doesn't happen anywhere else. So, at any given time, maybe a hundred people or two are paying attention on a very regular basis.
What would change it would either be if most of that kind of networking sites and directories of people would work together and share and aggregate information, OR, if one's public persona isn't stored on multiple island databases, but on one's own computer. I can't really go around remembering all the places I've signed up. Really makes the most sense if I maintain my own version of who I am on my own machine, or at least in one particular place I've chosen to be authoritative.
But what about all the relationship info? What other people have to say about me. What level of data-sharing friendlyness they choose to extend to me. It shouldn't be too hard to work out a scheme where this might be stored redundantly both with my data and with theirs. I make a comment about you, it gets stored in my file for you, pointing to your site for the details of who you are. My machine would also ping your machine and let it know that I said something in relation to you, and your machine would have the opportunity of grabbing a copy of it.
Is FOAF - Friend of a Friend - something that is suitable for this? I don't really understand it well enough yet.
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