Facebook vs Twitter, by the numbers
(Source: bendiken)
a brevissimo andrà online un lavoro in corso su privacy e advertising, applicato attraverso tecnologie del Semantic web .) #metafora stuff
"As a fellow web developer, I have to disagree that this is good for the web. At all. Yes, Facebook’s new toy, er… protocol is kind of semantic. Yes, part of the graph is embedded using standard HTML metadata markup. But all of the data it gathers and analyzes become centralized. Stored in its own databases! How can that be good for the web? The point of the semantic web is to be connected, yes. But to be connected in a certain way: namely, in an open and decentralized way (like RDFa supports). Not closed and centralized and irrecoverable. Since Facebook only got one of three things right, and that thing (connection) is the only thing that matters to the masses, there will be little incentive for everyone to move to another service later that is connected, open and decentralized. So while one third of the “open” graph is useful, the other two aren’t. And I think that if Facebook’s graph becomes the “standard”, apathy will prevent the web from evolving further."
— Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective (via dagoneye)
Is this true?
pero’: considerazioni per niente malaccio
Towards a Decentralized, Non-Propritery Social-Network
- Imagine a world where you just need to maintain one online profile and the same profile information is valid on Face-book, Orkut, LinkedIn, your blog or any other site on the Internet.
- Imagine you don’t need to befriend your friends time and again on each social networking site.
- Imagine you have access to a Social-Graph irrespective of where the nodes may be; some friends from Face-book, some from Orkut, and some are independently hosting their profiles on their websites.
Hard? It Shouldn’t be.
- Open-Id has given us a mechanism to use a single user-id & password for use across multiple sites.
- And Now FOAF has the potential to do that to social graphs.
I do not wish to discuss FOAF in detail here because, there is already enough about FOAF available out there (see: links at the end).
Very briefly however, FOAF is a vocabulary that can be used for describing people and their relationships. You can create an FOAF Profile in XML format in which you can describe yourself and also point to profiles of your friends.
Here is my FOAF profile visualized:
In the visualization above you can see people I know (under the “Knows” heading). The last person in the list, libby, is a link and it leads to Libby Miller’s FOAF profile. Interesting isn’t it?
Some creases that need to be Ironed out w.r.t FOAF:
- Trust: How can you trust that the FOAF profile shown above really belongs to me?
- Privacy: How can I make some sensitive information in my foaf-profile like Date-of-Birth, email-address etc accessible only to people I trust? (I have SHA-1 encrypted some sensitive information in my profile but, that’s not a solution)
- How can my FOAF profile become my universal Profile?
People are suggesting ways to solve problems. There are already some proposals to solve the issue of trust (see PGP Signing FOAF-Profiles),
I hope to see some discussion on the Privacy of FOAF profile information, I wonder if there is some value in bringing Open-Id and FOAF closer.
With the right questions getting asked and answered, I don’t see why an FOAF-profile cant become a universal profile on the Internet.
