Late last week, Plaxo and Google unveiled an implementation – currently in limited testing mode – of OpenID and OAuth working together to create an improved user experience. In essence, the implementation affects Gmail users receiving invites to join Plaxo Pulse. They call this a “hybrid approach” and I think it will have a significant impact as it significantly simplifies the flow. Read more…
Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:
I only recently came across this post from Adam Greenfield in which he explains why he believes that computer-mediated social networking is inherently bad: “Antisocial networking.”
It’s an important and powerful critique, though one with which I ultimately disagree. Greenfield essentially argues that:
Social networking applications must, necessarily, oversimplify human relationships: they couldn’t possibly represent the complex and dynamic nature of any graph connecting a pair of individuals, let alone the mesh of a whole community.
As a result, they inevitably create emotional distress, anguish, and pain for users (and sometimes even for non-users)
Therefore, we should not use them.
The problem, as Greenfield sees it, is that we’re allowing technical architectures to intrude upon the pre-technical, social space of human relationships. We’re allowing the web of human relationships as-modeled-by-software-systems to reduce, pollute, and corrupt the web of human relationship as modeled in the human psyche and history of culture. Read more…
Two exciting and (relatively) new projects this morning for those interested in social network portability, the social graph, and related concepts: Apache Shindig and DiSo. Both are critical, necessary, and sizable building blocks pointing in the direction of a free (as in freedom AND beer), open, portable, distributed social network infrastructure. Read more…
