Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Meandering through the online social networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/19/2008 - 22:23Yesterday and today, I continued to check to see if my access to the MyBlogLog API Beta had come through. I am hoping it will be soon and that I’ll get some time to experiment with the API. As I checked around I found Kent Brewster’s post about the MyBlogLog API
His post includes a script that takes advantage of the API to show Recent Visitors, with Tags and Social Sites. I was surprised when I first visited the site that for my profile, it said “No social sites found. If this is you, go add some now!”
So, I followed the link and looked at page where MyBlogLog users can identify the other social networking services they use. Their list had something like thirty-five different social networking services and I was only on about three quarters of them.
One of the services they list is Wink. I had tried wink before and it hadn’t worked very well. I stopped by yesterday and it was working a bit better. Wink lists something like fifty-two different social networking services. I wish I could just import those that I’ve already identified on MyBlogLog and then go out and start adding the rest.
Wink is still acting a little strange. It is supposed to have ‘activity’ but it doesn’t seem to find any activity from my sites. I was pleased to see that Wink tags links with the xfn tag rel=" me". This would make it easier for other sites to grab the information and related it. MyBlogLog does not use that, nor does Spock.
So, now, I’m juggling my lists of websites between MyBlogLog, which I’ve always liked for the community aspects, Wink, which seems pretty powerful and full featured, but just hasn’t worked well for me, and Spock, which I really like due to the emergent flexibility.
With all of that, I’m tossing in my MyBlogLog About Me widget in this post. Will I get around to adding it on the side of my blog? Will I use some script built using their API, or just roll my own? We’ll see.
Social Media Developments
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/17/2008 - 16:31It has been a good couple of days for geeks. First, I got an email from Matt at Spock. Recently, my wife disappeared from Spock. I sent a few emails asking what had happened and Matt responded that in the early days of Spock, they would create search results for people based on information from people’s address books. However, the data in the address books end up not being very good, so they stopped the practice. Then, they started cleaning out those entries. Apparently, Kim was one of the few people loaded from an address book that then went in, set up an account, and added data. Since she was loaded initially from an address book, they deleted her, and I was disappointed to find that my profile no longer listed my wife. The have restored her userid. We put in a bunch of new data and everything seems fine.
One of the criticisms of Spock early on, was that people joined Spock simply to get rid of bad data about them. Hopefully with the cleanup completed, people will join Spock as a means of organizing and presenting good information about themselves.
Then, I got an email from MyBlogLog. Their API has entered a limited invite-only beta. I’m busy trying to finagle an invitation. I did a bunch of extracting MyBlogLog data early on and build some interesting graphs of social networks. The new API looks like it may provide a lot of interesting opportunities to mash up different social networks and see how everything inter-relates. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Next, I saw a Twitter message that the Yahoo Developers Network now supports OpenID 2.0. So, now I can tie my MyBlogLog development together with OpenID.
For those a little less geeky, I got a message on Facebook about the Newstrust blog. Tish Grier is doing community development for them. It will be great to see that community grow.
So, lots of fund new stuff for geeks, if I can only find some time to be geeky.
Blogger, OpenID, and Gravatars
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/02/2008 - 11:25The acceptance of OpenID in the blogger community is growing, which IMHO, is a great thing. Today, as I visited various Wordless Wednesday sites, I found more and more people using OpenID, and I appreciated being able to click on their links and go directly to their websites. Unfortunately, the Drupal implementation of OpenID doesn’t handle it quite as nicely.
One downside of this is that OpenID comments on Blogger do not show people’s gravatar. The problem is that gravatar’s are based on email addresses, and OpenID is based on website addresses. One solution would be if Gravatar would accept OpenIDs. Another solution would be if sites managing OpenIDs would support email addresses and connect with gravatar.
ClaimID.com seems like a perfect candidate for this. You can already verify your OpenIDs and your email addresses with them. If they would make email addresses available, as md5 hashes, then Blogger could connect to ClaimID to display gravatars. It would be a nice addition, and I’m sure there are a lot of other neat applications that could be created if there was a source of md5 hashed email addresses associated with OpenIDs.
Emerging Quirkiness
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 15:02O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
- Robert Burns, To a Louse
In 1999, Professor David Jacobson of Brandeis University led a group of anthropology students into a text based virtual world where they were asked to interact with certain residents of the virtual world, and write up the impressions they had formed. Professor Jacobson then used this data to explore how we form impressions of people we interact with online.
I was one of the residents that the students interacted with and I found it very interesting to read Professor Jacobson’s paper about their impressions of me. It was particularly interesting to me since I was going through a divorce at the time and trying to reform my own self-impressions.
It is interesting to reflect on this in terms of my recent experiences with Spock, Spoke, Wink, Zoominfo, and other sites focused on online reputations.
More About Spock
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 15:15Since I wrote my last piece about Spock, I continue to get interesting emails, tweets, and so on about Spock. Three blog posts about Spock that are worth noting are Web 2.0 Experiments, snafus and stumbles, where the author is ‘hoping that Spock ends up in the dead pool’, Dislikeing Spock Even More, where the author compares Spock to Shelfari, and I am not Spock where the author wonders what Spock really has to do with any of the trusts that he has.
One person twitter, I'm surprised they aren't leaving us comments. Well, I sent an email to Maia Bittner a member of the Spock Team that had added a tag to my Spock profile. I pointed her to some of the blog posts and asked why there hadn’t been comments. She said,
We haven't commented (yet) for several reasons. One is that we want to be judged by our actions and not our words. Trust me, we've been paying very close attention to the parts of Spock that users take issue with, and we've been incorporating suggestions from blogs into our development plans.
I cannot emphasize enough to you how dynamic and (hopefully!) evolving Spock is. We try something out that we think is a good idea, and if people don't like it, we change it.
Another reason we haven't commented is that because of how often the structure of the site changes, we can't make any promises.
