0xDECAFBAD - Tag: myspace

Damn kids! Get off my web!

2007-05-16T17:31:13+00:00

Scott Burkett, Stop Twittering and Go Solve a Problem: "Aside from aesthetically looking like something a 12 year old cobbled up, the entire tool seems utterly pointless to me."

For Scott, Twitter probably is pointless at first glance. And that's because no one's talking to him. Really, this should be a FAQ for all social media, to be read by all journalists and commentators: Listening in on random strangers' conversations is more likely to be boring than not, and that's what you're doing if you just go to twitter.com and start clicking around. But, to assume because you're bored that the service as a whole is boring is, again, to be one of the Blind Men with an Elephant.

Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you've amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it's good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people.

This same "I'm bored, so it's boring" mistake has popped up again and again - applied to blogging, MMORPGs, social bookmarking, MySpace, what have you. Replace "bored/boring" with "confused/confusing" or "annoyed/annoying" and you've got my own early reactions to MySpace.

But, really, it's not addressed to you if there's a buzz and you're not groking it. That's a clue that you're probably missing something. Granted, people can be insane, but it really is more likely that you're missing something - even if it's just that there's a particular brand of entertaining insanity in progress to which you're not attuned.

Archived Comments

CraigM
2007-05-16T21:46:56

No, I'm pretty much missing out on the appeal of MySpace and Twitter, but that's because I'm an electronic hermit. Welcome to the Social? Screw that. Welcome to my front lawn, kids, and you're welcome to get off of it. :)

All kidding aside, I think there's plenty of room for any kind of project people want to put together. I thought KDE and GNOME were silly for trying to recreate CDE, but they saw further than CDE. Had I been vocal, I might have dissuaded someone from contributing to the project. What kind of an asshole would I have been had I kept one of the main developers of these projects from developing? So, if Twitter, MySpace, Live Journal, or one of the hundreds of other social networks speaks to someone, by all means have fun. Me? I might check out Twitter. Most of the bands I like have MySapce pages now, so I think it'll be inevitable before I start a MySpace account.

Heck, it took me a while before I started up my Last.fm account, so one thing at a time. :)
CraigM
2007-05-16T21:53:52

Oh, and my lovely corporate overlords think Twitter might lead to dating or personals, so they've helpfully blocked it. They're so thoughtful.
Scott Burkett
2007-05-17T04:05:21

Interesting post, but I should clarify a few things.

First, I never used the words "boring", "confused" or "annoying" in my post. I simply stated my own dislike of the tool. Twitter is a very polarizing tool - if you find value in it, great. But neither of us are alone.

Second, I am a big MMO guy, and use plenty of other social media tools (hell, my last two startups were community/social media plays.)

Third, the whole point of my original post was to point out the very old business trap that a particular young entrepreneur was about to fall into.

If you get value out of Twitter, great. That wasn't my point.

Cheers. Scott
l.m.orchard
2007-05-17T06:51:11

@CraigM: Being a digital hermit, now that's a perfectly fine and reasonable excuse to miss out on Twitter and MySpace. I'm mostly an introvert in person, but somehow am semi-extroverted online to compensate. Some people don't need that. :)
l.m.orchard
2007-05-17T07:26:41

@Scott Burkett: No, you didn't use “boring”, “confused” or “annoying” - though others have. What you said really prompted me to comment on what I've seen happen over and over again, so it's not just (or even mostly) you.

Though, when you write "stop worrying about creating mindless tools to keep track of everything your friends are doing, and start solving real problems" - I have to respond that keeping track of everything your friends are doing is a real problem some people want solved. :) Now, whether there's still room in that market beyond Twitter... well, I dunno. I have a hunch yes, that they're onto something big - but I'm not personally putting money down on it.

On the other hand, the point I take your post otherwise is that just being a copy-cat isn't enough. Twitter's addressing a problem for some people. That problem might have room to be solved more effectively. But, if you can't figure that out, or if the problem's really not that deep, then yeah: Find something else to make.
Steve S
2007-05-24T14:38:59

Twitter is in no way useless, simple maybe but not useless. I agree completely. It seems that their is a distinct lack of patience among the web going public when it comes to certain technologies. If it doesn't immediately wow them with AJAX then it serves no purpose.

meetro asks myspace who i am

2006-08-23T15:43:20+00:00

Now, this is what I'm talking about. It's just too bad they're only importing from Myspace. And that it didn't apparently work when I tried it.

Archived Comments

vinnie
2006-08-29T19:51:45

hey, i'm one of the folks behind meetro, sorry to hear it wasn't working when you tried. If you want to give it another try, everything is in order. We're working on adding support for other sites.

Don't ask me who I am

2006-08-17T17:24:25+00:00

I'm tired of filling out profiles, and I'm tired of building up networks of others' profiles online. Everyone needs to adopt something like ~~FOAF~~ hCard and XFN (updated per suggestion from Kevin Marks), and be done with it. The networks should be semi-automated, or at least suggested, by detecting who I know from other places as they hop on another bandwagon with me. (The separations between implicit groups bounded by the particular service are as important as explicitly defined groups.)

LiveJournal was my first experience with much self-disclosure online, into which I dove with much enthusiasm. But since then, I just haven't felt the need to replicate self-disclosure anywhere else but on my own site. Orkut, Rize, LinkedIn, MySpace, Vox, del.icio.us, last.fm, flickr, 43 {Things|People|Places} -- these are sites in which I've had some passing or lasting interest in the last few years, but I wish I could just point them all at a single source for learning about me. It all needs to be turned inside out, and lock-ins removed.

Centrallized identity and social network management for distributed service providers is what I want. I'm sure there's already a movement afoot, and I've just not reached that spot in my to-read list.

Archived Comments

Mad William Flint
2006-08-17T18:42:12

bah. they should take vCard data and be done with it. So much already does.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-17T19:47:00

Well, one thing I like about FOAF, is that it's extensible. So, as more categories of self-disclosure become popular, they can be dumped into that one central thingy
Geof F. Morris
2006-08-17T20:23:01

Actually, Les, I haven't seen it either. I'm with you: I sure as hell would love to only write this crap once. Even copy-and-paste is just too much shit to do!
Bob Zoller
2006-08-18T00:38:27

This is basically Marc Canter's current mission in life, from the sounds of it. See his PeopleAggregator (http://peopleaggregator.com/) project.
Mad William Flint
2006-08-18T01:43:17

Foaf's cute. but I don't think it's any more extensible than vCard is (iirc)

However, it is nice for actual F-O-A-F semantics. But you'll never see someone's foaf at the bottom of their email, auto-imported into exchange, etc.

Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but there's all ready too damn much xml in the world by my reckonin'
Martin Spernau
2006-08-18T07:49:15

Yes, the Peopleaggregator sets out to solve this :) This http://traumwind.de/tindertraum/archives/debabelizeing_profiles.html is the beginnig of the "IdentityHub" -Martin
Terrell Russell
2006-08-18T13:45:20

claimID, claimID!

http://claimID.com

Give it a whirl and see if you like what we're doing. Point to it. Point from it. Keep it in one place.

Terrell http://claimID.com/terrell
Mad William Flint
2006-08-18T14:51:47

Nice. I'll concede the point to hCard.
Jim Renaud
2006-08-18T16:48:39

Can't we just use the information the NSA is compiling for us? This way we don't even have to enter it ourselves!
Ian Bicking
2006-08-18T16:51:10

http://videntity.org/ seems to be offering a bunch of these things together; more as an example, since anyone offering the same information would be a peer.
Bob Aman
2006-08-18T23:34:44

I'm a minor fan of claimID, but I much prefer hardcore decentralization. FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn't rely on RDF. XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they're still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF. Sadly, there's no good format that solves a sufficiently large number of the problems in this space (that doesn't carry the RDF baggage anyways).
Danny
2006-08-19T09:01:02

Right on Les! There are two issues, identification/authentication (hard, but the outlook looks promising) and personal profile/description (easier, already pretty much solved by the tech you mention). Hopefully the two should be joined up before long...

re. Bob's comment: "XFN and hCard are good for what they are, but they’re still a far cry from the expressivity of FOAF.". Indeed, they also help considerably with the problem of expressing this kind of machine-readable data in HTML. But "FOAF would be a lot more useful if it didn’t rely on RDF." - the power, the expressivity of FOAF comes from RDF.

I suspect Bob (like Mad William) may be assuming RDF (including FOAF) has to mean RDF/XML. But RDF is a model, it doesn't have to serialize to XML, there are other formats - including HTML (via eRDF). Note too that microformats like XFN and hCard can be interpreted as RDF (including FOAF terms as appropriate) with GRDDL.

(Incidentally I got to this post before even looking in my personal agg via Marc Canter's on Planet Web 2.0)
Steve
2006-08-19T17:37:36

But you're forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn't want all my profiles to be identical. I don't use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.
Bob Aman
2006-08-19T22:24:28

Danny, I am actually aware of all of those acronyms, however, I completely disagree on the point about FOAF's expressivity relying mainly on RDF. I would contend that FOAF's expressivity actually relies far, far more, simply on XML's ability to namespace things, and thus allow for extensions. Something that a simple XML dialect would also have, but with the added bonus of an infinitely simpler parser, fewer confused programmers, and quite a bit less bandwidth consumed.
Tantek Çelik
2006-08-20T07:22:55

Indeed Les, this is exactly what hCard solves on the Web with the minimum of duplication of data into hidden places and mimetype hackery/configuration (problems of the other approaches mentioned).

You can either use a 3rd party service like claimID as mentioned to claim your various profiles on the Web, or you can simply continue to publish your profile information on your about or author page, simply add just a bit of hCard markup, and use XFN Identity Consolidation (rel="me") to turn your about page into your consolidated identity hub.

While services will undoubtedly continue to ask you a hundred profile questions, the better ones will do something as simple as use the simple open source hKit Microformats Toolkit by Drew McLellan to let you simply enter your hCard URL and fill out all the questions automatically from that.

And the best services will help you, the user, keep your profile as portable as you would like it, by marking it up with hCard as well. Already, profiles on numerous services, in addition to the abovementioned claimID, like Flickr and Technorati are marked up with hCard and thus ready for reuse with services that use hKit.

Finally, some have brought up "extensibility" as something that is desirable yet recent lessons have taught us that in terms of standards and interoperability, the opposite is true. The more well-defined not-infinitely-extensible a standard is, the sooner implementers know they are "done" implementing it (interoperably even!), and the less chance there is of a zillion non-interoperable extensions randomly emerging (i.e. Tower of Babel problem) which then cause headaches not only for all implementers, but users as well as the users then have to contend with their data not quite working interoperably across all the different services that all support slightly different sets of incompatible/non-interoperable extensions.
Mike Macgirvin
2006-08-22T20:38:14

I agree with Steve. Who am I? It depends. Who are you, and based on that - what do I wish you to know about me? Who are my friends? Same thing. Even if I wanted to divulge them, I then need to respect their privacy wishes and decide if they want you to know that they are a friend of mine (or not) and how they came to be tagged as friends. A web service which tries to consolidate all of this info is presented with too many privacy conflicts to ever get it right (IMAO). I can recall this concept being tried by a hundred different companies (not to mention open source projects) going back to the early 90's. It was never an issue of technology. The hurdles are primarily social and revolve around trust and privacy - and delegation of these rights to third parties in language even my mother would understand.
Wohnaccessoires
2007-03-16T22:04:59

But you’re forgetting that a lot of people, myself included, like to represent themselves in different ways on different sites. This would only really be useful as a starting point, I wouldn’t want all my profiles to be identical. I don’t use the same info for business (linkedin), school (facebook), friends from home (myspace), people i know from various music forums (last.fm) etc.