In the latest issue of JOHO, David Weinberger has some truly excellent comments to make about social software. This section of his newsletter deserves to be reproduced here in full. In the post continuation ('Continue reading'), Weinberger goes on to say something about Wallop, MS's experimental ASN, and concludes, 'FOAF and LOAF add value to the Net, enriching it with voluntarily disclosed information about who we are and who we know. In this they are unlike Artificial Social Networks that capture the conversations between us but make them inaccessible to other applications. The trade-off is high, however.'
The truth about why I hate Friendster
I have some good reasons for looking down my long and winding nose at Friendster and other such Artificial Social Networks (ASNs). I will happily tell you those reasons. Then I'll tell you the real reasons.
Fake but worthy reasons
I am a member of Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, Flickr, Orkut, and DeanLink. Friendster aims at dating, LinkedIn at business contacts, Spoke at sales team efficiency, Flickr at photo sharing, Orkut at who knows, and DeanLink at enabling Dean supporters to organize local events. I am equally active in all six, even though one of them is defunct, which tells you exactly how active I am.
The only one I liked was DeanLink, and that was because I wanted Dean to be elected president. All of them suffer from the following problems, to one degree or another.
First, they attempt to recreate our social network by making us be explicit about it. But our social bonds are necessarily implicit. Making social relationships explicit uproots them, distorts them and can do violence to them. Just try describing your child to someone, with your child in the room.
Second, ASNs make us be precise about that which is necessarily messy and ambiguous. This not only leads to awkward social moments (Am I a friend yes-no of some person I met once and don't know if I like?), it also reinforces the worst idea of our age: The world is precise, so our ambiguity about it is a failure.
Third, they inculcate the stupid belief that relationships are commutative. LinkedIn is especially guilty of this. I have been C in a five-term series that A initiated in order to contact E, which means someone I don't know asked someone I marginally know to introduce him to someone I kind of know who maybe knows someone I don't know at all. The formal name for this is "using people."
Fourth, the fact that they require explicitness in public about relationships guarantees that they will generate inordinate amounts of bullshit. For example, some ASNs let you write "testimonials" about your friends, a feature destined to encourage flattery and sucking up. Worse, they don't let you refuse testimonials as part of your profile, so I've had to to explain to a handful of people why I'm not accepting the sweet sentences they spent time putting together.
Those are my reasons. I get to pronounce them with an air that announces my moral superiority, my greater wisdom in social matters, and my fearless refusal to support social bullshit.
Now for my real reasons.
Real but unworthy reasons
Friendster has 6 million users. People are rushing into Orkut like ants into an aardvark. So why am I not excited?
After all, my buddies and I have been saying for years that the Net's key value is that it makes it so easy for new connective applications to arise. Email, listservs, IM, chat, P2P...it's never been so easy to invent new ways for humans to connect.
But ASN's we don't like. Why not?
Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It's called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way?
And the right response is: Sit down, old man!
I don't like Friendster because, well, I don't like it. I'm not dating. I'm not even looking for more friends. I love meeting new people — not a statement I would have made before the Net — but I like meeting them because we first engage in discussion about some topic. An email to me saying, "I disagree with your blog entry about X or Y, and let me tell you why" is much more likely to lead to a friendship than one that says, "Hey, I see we're both interested in video games and Peeps art!" That's just the way I am. And I do think it's generational.
I don't like this thing coming along that implies that the existing social networks on the Internet — my social networks, the ones that constitute my social world — are so inadequate that some badly designed system with a derivative name (enoughster with the "sters" alreadyster!) sweeps the Net like photos of Janet Jackson's poppin' fresh wardrobe malfunction. What's a matter, the Net wasn't good enough for you?
Hey, you kids! Get off of my lawn!
One last reason and two new standards
Remember in the mid-90s when the NewsGroups monkeys would throw poop at you if you dared to acknowledge that you were an AOL user? AOL was perceived as a walled-garden for low IQ types who were afraid of the Wild and Wooly Internet.
I saw a demo of Microsoft's experimental ASN, Wallop, a few days ago and I had an oddly similar reaction. Wallop, a research project restricted to 150 members at this point, is a slick piece of work with a sweet and swoopy UI written in Flash, designed to dazzle. And the functionality is impressive. For example, if you annotate one of your photos indicating that the smiling face in the back belongs to Mathilda, Mathilda automatically gets notified that there's a new photo of her in the system. That's the sort of thing you can do if your Artificial Social Network owns all the data. Think how hard it would be to do the Mathilda trick if you were posting the photo simply on your own Web site: Mathilda would have to send out spiders to crawl around looking for photos of her, and if it found some called "Mathilda," it wouldn't be sure that it was the right Mathilda. That's the price you pay for working in an open network. But if you can close the network, you can monitor every event and know who each person is.
ASNs are closed networks when it comes to data. Of course they exist on the Net and use the usual Net protocols, but these systems get their benefits by walling off their data. The benefits are powerful. But, like AOL back when the Web started, they are protectionist. As a result, as more data is added to them, their value increases but that value is invisible to the rest of the Net. The open Net becomes less valuable as human links are moved into ASNs.
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) proposal attempts to add value to the open Net. Invented by Dan Brickley of the W3C and Libby Miller of the University of Bristol — Dan used to be at U of B and he and Libby are best friends — FOAF is a way for a person to bundle up the sort of information typically expressed by a home page: name, employer, address, hobbies, etc. It can also include lists of friends and acquaintances' sites. FOAF is completely voluntary and you can put in as few or as many personal facts as you like. Applications can then spider from site to site, gathering the FOAFs to build social networking applications. The applications are yet to be invented.
FOAF is kind of catching on. For example, the popular blogging software, TypePad, automatically creates FOAF files based on user profiles. (Leigh Dodds' Foaf-a-matic will create a FOAF file if your blogging app doesn't do it for you.) Applications for FOAF are not catching on, at least not yet.
LOAF is a new proposal for making available information about social networks. It encrypts your address book and makes it accessible to others. The most immediate application is in fighting spam: If I receive a message from someone not in my address book, LOAF (which stands for nothing, although List of All Friends seems to be catching on) can see if it's coming from a friend of a friend.
LOAF is damned clever. It uses a Bloom Filter that works something like this: Create a series of bits of some predetermined length, and set all the bits to 0. Run an application that "hashes" each entry in your address book, creating a unique number for it; hash numbers can't be reverse engineered. Turn on the bits in the series that represent the hash number. Attach this series to each email message you send. Let's say the recipient wants to know if "Marc Cantor" is in your address book. The recipient hashes "Marc Cantor" and checks the bit series. If any of the bits representing the Marc Cantor hash aren't on, the recipient knows for sure that Marc Cantor wasn't in your address book. If all the Marc Cantor hash bits are on, then Marc may well be in your address book; the likelihood of a false positive depends on the length of the bit series and the number of hash functions. Of course this would all happen automatically. The brilliance of the Bloom Filter is that it is compact (a few kilobytes would typically suffice) and absolutely cannot be "decrypted" into the names in your address book.
FOAF and LOAF add value to the Net, enriching it with voluntarily disclosed information about who we are and who we know. In this they are unlike Artificial Social Networks that capture the conversations between us but make them inaccessible to other applications.
The trade-off is high, however. Just take a look at Wallop and you'll see what I mean.
[Thanks to Joshua Schachter for explaining Bloom Filters to me. He is not responsible for the parts I got wrong.]
