Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Championing Citizen Involvement Through Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/13/2009 - 14:44I thought it was pretty cool when I received an invitation on Facebook to testify before the Connecticut General Assembly Judiciary Committee. I thought back to four years ago, when my wife Kim ran for State Representative. Back then, I was told that 85% of people did not know who their State Representatives were. I suspect it is an even smaller group of people that have ever testified, been asked to testify or even considered testifying before a state legislative hearing. Now, I am receiving messages from a State Representative in a different district whom I had friended on Facebook to come testify.
Yet the invitation isn’t really that surprising to people who follow the role of social media in politics. Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield has been participating in MyLeftNutmeg, a progressive blog in Connecticut since July 2006, long before he became a State Representative. He’s active on Twitter and Facebook, using Twitter to update his Facebook status.
With this in mind, I was somewhat bemused by Andy Bromage’s article in the New Haven Advocate, Gary Is Facebooking on the Job. Andy starts off by writing, “The Judiciary Committee joined the group Lawmakers Who Look Like They're Not Paying Attention.” If you missed his subtitle, “Why tweeting lawmakers are good for democracy”, it would be easy to think that Andy is criticizing Rep. Holder-Winfield. A better title might have been something like Gary Uses Facebook to be a More Effective State Representative.
I’ve been following Rep. Holder-Winfield on Twitter for a while. I’ve gotten into good discussions with him there as have others that I respect. What Rep. Holder-Winfield is doing is a good example of how to champion citizen involvement through social media. We need more people doing the same.
Christine Stuart has an article in CTNewsJunkie, Rell Enters The World of Social Media. The article notes that Gov. Rell, unlike Rep. Holder-Winfield does not actually post herself. Instead, she tells her staff what to say. Even with that, she has less than a dozen tweets, none of which are particularly engaging.
I’m doing my part in social media as well. Connecticut NORML has set up a Facebook group and is asking people on contact their state legislators to support various bills including HB 5175, An Act Concerning the Medical Use of Marijuana. I contacted my State Representative and she said she supported the bill, but that it is currently stalled in the "Joint Committee on Judiciary".
It turns out that besides, Rep. Holder-Winfield, I’m also friends with Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Mike Lawlor on Facebook. They are the co-chairs of the Judiciary Committee. I’ve invited them to join the Connecticut NORML group on Facebook and to support HB 5175. If they ever get around to having a hearing on it, I hope Rep. Holder-Winfield will invite his Facebook friends to come testify.
Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools can provide a great way to improve citizen involvement in our government. I’m glad that Rep. Holder-Winfield is making good use of it and I hope other elected officials will as well.
#FollowFriday after #digiday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/13/2009 - 10:00@JasonDPG @ggertz @LorenDavie @JennKim @chaimhaas @RobWilk @ScottyMonty @sweetbitters @jasonbreed @ckieff
As I did last time, I’m writing a blog post talking about whom I’m following for #FollowFriday and why I’m following them. This post will get picked up by TwitterFeed to become a Tweet and will then get passed over to Facebook and beyond.
This week, I attended Engage! Expo on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then DigiDay on Thursday. I followed quite a few new people and picked up quite a few new followers. As of my writing of this, I am now seven people short of following 1600 people on Twitter and six people short of being followed by 2000 people. I don’t pay much attention to these numbers, but 2000 is such a nice round number.
What is more important is the conversations I have with my online contacts. I use Twitter Search and PeopleBrowsr to keep these conversations straight instead of sounding like a cacophony. I weed my lists and find new people to join the conversation with.
DigiDay was particularly good. I followed a bunch of new people and had some great conversations. @JasonDPG did a great job of emceeing the show both at the podium and on Twitter. One of the first people I met online at DigiDay was @ggertz. He was providing some good play-by-play twittering. Yet at one point, his laptop started losing power. He asked if anyone had a Dell power supply that he could use to recharge his laptop with. My laptop is a Dell and so he recharged off of my power supply a couple times during the conference. In addition, he’s doing some interesting work building websites, and was one of the people that talked about working with Social Media and CRM.
@LorenDavie @JennKim and @chaimhaas also did some great play-by-play tweeting of the conference and I’m glad to have connected with them as well. One discussion that was particularly interesting was about how new people can discover interesting people to follow. #FollowFriday is a good starting point. @RobWilk of ChaCha and @ScottMonty of Ford were two of the speakers that did especially well.
Two other people that deal with CRM and Social media are @sweetbitters and @jasonbreed . However, @sweetbitters Twitter comment about deciding about whether to try and get in the Emerging Artists Showcase at Falcon Ridge particular caught my attention. I need to follow up with several of these people.
The last person on my #FollowFriday list, this day after #DigiDay is @ckieff. I’ve met him at other shows. He works for Ripple6 and I think both he at Ripple6 really get Social Media. I’ve talked before about Ripple6 and Gannet. I think it is a great combination and I’m looking for future news about what they are doing together. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any good information from #ckieff about what might be in the pipeline, so my next post about that will either have to wait or may have more conjecture and suggestions than hard facts.
So, that is it for this weeks edition of #FollowFriday. Let me know whom else you are following that you think I should follow.
OpenID, XRI, XRDS, and Portable Content
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 11:27I continue to dig into what it would take to build a good Social Network Contact Management System. Yesterday, I had a long discussion with Arron Kallenberg from DandyID. I had talked about my difficulties with the DandyID API and he wanted to address them. In a nutshell, their API is evolving and the documentation had not caught up with the current usage. Now that I know about the updates, I’ve got the API working nicely.
As part of the discussion, we talked about Portable Contacts as a standardized method of receiving contact information that people enter into their social networks. DandyID provides access to information in Portable Contacts format. I also learned that Plaxo is supporting the Portable Contacts API. Details can be found at Portable Contacts at Plaxo. The Plaxo API Endpoint requires OAuth or HTTP Basic authentication, so I started looking at doing OAuth authentication from PHP. I still need to dig deeper into this, especially for trying to call functions from a php script that isn’t part of a webpage.
As I read the Plaxo documentation, I also got interested in XRDS Simple discovery. With that, let me talk about OpenID, XRI and XRDS. OpenID is a method of sharing authentication. In other words, you can use an OpenID userid and password to login to any site that accepts OpenID. This makes it so you need to remember less userids and passwords.
Some people express concern about OpenID phishing. If someone manages to get your OpenID password, they can get to all of the sites you’ve used OpenID with. On the other hand, if someone gets your password, you only need to change it once, instead of either changing the password at a lot of sites which have the same password, or keeping a file somewhere which lists all your passwords for every site you use. I know that I can’t remember all of the passwords I have for all of the sites I’ve registered with, without a bit of help.
Also, using OpenID delegation, you can point back to your site when you use OpenID. For example, I always use OpenID pointing back to my blog when I place comments via Blogger.
This leads me to XRI. XRI is the extensible resource identifier. It is sort of like a URL on steroids. There have been major arguments over when to use URIs and XRIs, but being the geek I am, I have two XRI identifiers that I use regularly, =aldon.hynes and @ahynes1. In XRI, a personal name starts with an equal sign, and an organization name starts with an at sign. I registered @ahynes1 since that works out to be my identification on Twitter, Identi.ca and other services.
One of the things that is interesting about XRIs is that OpenID version 2.0 supports XRIs. So, I can log into services that support OpenID V 2.0 using my id @ahynes1
To support XRI, XRDS, the Extensible Resource Descriptor Sequence was created. It can be used to discover information about a resource. As an example, in OpenID V 2.0, you would use XRDS to find the appropriate OpenID server for a given XRI identity.
With this as groundwork, I am now back to Portable Contacts. My contact information and the other services that I’ve subscribed to is additional information about me and my resources. So, it would be great if we could use XRDS to find servers that provide Portable Contact information about me.
It looks like I can do this using my XRI accounts and DandyID or Plaxo. Both 2idi.com which I use for my =aldon.hynes identity and 1id.com which I use for my @ahynes1 identity provide the ability to edit the ‘service endpoints’ that are revealed through XRDS.
As best as I can tell, what I need to do is add
<service>
<type>http://portablecontacts.net/spec/1.0</type>
<URI>http://www.plaxo.com/pdata/contacts</URI>
</service>
to my XRDS document, and people should be able to find my portable contact information via Plaxo. If I use http://www.dandyid.org/api/poco/ as my URI, they should be able to get my portable contact information from DandyID.
1id.com uses a webform to create this information, and I need to choose options like select, append and priority. I took the default values and we’ll see if they work
You can see my XRDS documents here and .
The next step is to add pointers to them in the header of my blog using the format
<meta http=equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://xri.net/=aldon.hynes?_xrd_r=application/xrd%2bxml;sep=false” />
I need to decide if I should use =aldon.hynes or @ahynes1 and if I should have those point to Plaxo or DandyID. Then, I need to find good ways of testing and taking advantage of this. It seems as if Portable Contacts, discovered through XRDS may be a great building block for OpenSocial and other efforts to share information across platforms.
If you’re a non technical blogger, you probably don’t want to start playing with this yet, but you should keep it in the back of your mind as part of the direction social networks may be heading. If you’re more of a geek, kick it around. Share your ideas. Let’s see what we can do with these tools.
#FollowFriday - @JoeCascio @sara6633 @wkossen @SHHHE
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 09:52A popular meme on Twitter is to post a list of interesting people that you are following on Twitter on Fridays. Since my blog posts are fed into Twitter, I thought I’d post it here and get some double coverage as well as use this as an opportunity to talk more about my ideas for a Social Network Contact Management System.
The idea is to have a system where you can keep track of all your friends on various social networks, as well as the contacts you’ve made with them. #FollowFriday is a great example. Currently, I’m following nearly 1500 people on Twitter. As I pick out people for #FollowFriday, it would be nice to pick out people that I’ve been talking a bit with recently, but haven’t posted on #FollowFriday before, or at least for a long time.
I chose these four people because they have helped shape, either directly or indirectly, some of my thoughts about a Social Network Contact Management System. Joe and Willem have both spoken with me about the programming issues. Sara is co-founder of DandyID which is a great source for keeping track of your social networks. Priscilla is a key person behind PeopleBrowsr, which does some interesting cross social network stuff.
The thing that I’ve always liked best about PeopleBrowsr is the ability to group people by tags. With that, I can look at various streams, such as the stream of people in Connecticut, people in a Tweetup group in Connecticut, Newspapers from Connecticut, bloggers that are on EntreCard, bloggers that are on CMF, and so on. I’m not sure how people can follow more than a couple hundred people on Twitter without a tool like PeopleBrowsr. I used FriendFeed in a similar manner before PeopleBrowsr came along, and I’ve heard you can do some really nice similar stuff in TweetDeck, but I haven’t tried it.
Also, I’ve just started playing with another feature on PeopleBrowsr. You can bring up a stream or grid of Facebook, LinkedIn, or Plaxo friends on Twitter. Unfortunately, it seems to try to do a match based on name, instead of their actual userids, so since one of my friends is named Tim O’Brien, it is bringing up lots of different Tim O’Briens on Twitter. Not quite what I want.
Beyond that, I would like to be able to extract the information in PeopleBrowsr concerning the services I’ve subscribed to as well as the services my friends have subscribed to, much like I can with DandyID, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and others. Even more importantly, I would love to be able to extract the tag information.
Using my first very early pass of SNCM, I’ve found about 140 people that I follow on other social networks that I don’t follow on Twitter. I need to start following some of them. I need to explore the tool in PeopleBrowsr to see whom else I ought to be following, and then, there is always Mr.Tweet as another source of good people to follow.
So, if I’ve recently added you on Twitter, that could be the reason. I may do similar adds for other networks as well, once Twitter is under better control. Hopefully, I’ll even come up with a better way of tracking how I contact people.
Social Network Contact Management System, Gathering People Details
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/05/2009 - 11:13The other day, I wrote a blog post talking about my desire for a Social Network Contact Management System. Essentially, I would like a system where I could easily see which services my friends are on, and track my contacts with these friends.
I’ve received some great comments on the idea and want to expand a bit on this. Joe Cascio spoke about some of his efforts in this area, which were based upon people self identifying and suggested it probably wasn’t likely to take good shape until OpenID became more ubiquitous. Willem Kossen asked if we couldn’t get a bunch of programmers together to build something closer to what I was envisioning.
Meanwhile, I’ve done a little bit of programming and my ideas are starting to take better shape. Already, there are many sites where people can self identify the networks they are on. Some of these sites provide a programmatic interface.
The first one that I worked with was MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog provides a FOAF file listing all of the services you are on, all of your friends on MyBlogLog and all of the services they have listed for themselves.
I wrote a program that analyzed my FOAF file. I found that I have 369 contacts showing up there. 176 of them, or 48% have identified their Twitter accounts. 72 have identified Friendfeed accounts, and on an average they have about 8 accounts each.
I mention Friendfeed, because they are another service where people can self identify. They have a nice interface that returns all of the friends and all of the services for a given user. They do not combine all of this in a single file, so I would need to write a program that would iterate through my 250 friends on Friendfeed.
DandyID provides a great list of services that users can self identify and has APIs to extract the information. However, on a first pass, I didn’t get the API to work. However, I did get their Portable Contacts feed to work very nicely. DandyID is still a fairly new service, so I only have twenty friends there. 19 of them are on Twitter, and my average friend on DandyID has 35 services.
Twitter has a decent API and I can retrieve my followers and whom I am following. Identi.ca returns a FOAF file of connections as well, but like Twitter doesn’t track other services. By combining the data from these services, I should be able to get a fairly good view of my contacts.
There are a bunch of other services I would like to add to this list. BlogCatalog allows users to self identify their other services, and I can find my friends and neighbors on BlogCatalog programmatically, but I haven’t found a way to extract services via the BlogCatalog API. It does provide a way to retrieve which BlogCatalog users have recently visited your blog, which could be helpful in the second part of the project, tracking contacts.
EntreCard gathers user’s services but doesn’t provide an obvious mechanism to retrieve that information. They do provide an RSS feed where you can extract people who have recently dropped a card on your site as well as who has dropped the most cards on you.
Disqus, Lijit, and Retaggr also gather information about services but don’t provide any obvious method to programmatically access this information. I haven’t even started looking at Facebook or FriendConnect.
With this, I just need to come up with a good data schema, normalize the data and I’m on my way. In a later post, I’ll probably get more geeky and talk about the data schema and normalization and then talk about how to track what has gone on with contacts on the various services.
Any thoughts about other services that I could use to build up a better view of my social network contacts, as well as thoughts about the data schema or normalizing the data would be appreciated.
As to where I go with this, my current thinking is to make all of this available as an open source project. If you are interested in looking at my code, let me know. However, at this point it is still a bunch of small disconnected pieces of code, more like a developers notebook then something like alpha version 0.001
