Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed.
The problem is that their only talking about allowing users to *add* activities into the news feed, not to take their facebook news feed and take it elsewhere. As TechCrunch put it: Read more…
Lots of activity in the last week on the distributed social networking front.
Matt and co. at Automattic released Prologue, a WordPress theme (GPLv2) which creates a twitter-like experience based on posts to a WordPress blog. (It’s already been updated once).
Check out the Prologue Demo Blog for a sense of how the theme works. This could easily be used to create a kind of workgroup twitter, and given the number of different plugins / mechanisms for creating a blog post it could be extended to mobile, IM, and other integration points. The important difference, of course, is that you’d be hosting your own experience, not relying on Twitter – though that also means you’d need to build your own audience.
lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles on various services. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren’t trapped in any one service.
You can see a great example of this on David Recordon‘s site (he’s the Open Platform Lead for SixApart) and in a group context on the Movable Type Activity Stream page.
Both of these represent significant advances toward an open source, open standards, portable data approach to social networking and lifestreaming.
Since the implementations are open source, expect similar functionality to be ported across platforms.
Good video interview (about 20 minutes), if you can get past the conceit (in the rhetorical sense of the word, not the egoism sense) of the self-interview.
Only part I really struggled with was about 16 minutes in when he starts to talk about the “Gestapo like tactics” of Facebook. I’m a huge supporter of what DiSo is trying to do, but I don’t think closing people’s accounts for terms of service violations passes into the realm of the Gestapo (Remember Godwin’s law?).
Mentions at one point the goal of having a working demo by SXSW – I look forward to seeing it!
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…
