What websites that have elements of social networking do you use?
What aspects of your identity and the identities of others do you consider most vital? What should be encouraged for everyone to provide?
Is there anything about existing social networking sites that annoy you?
Are you familiar with FoaF? Do you think it’s worth implementing?
How and where would you most want to share your personal identity? On a site you host yourself? In the profile at a site you use most often?
Do you think there is value in having all your information collected and linked to from one page?
How important is it to you that a new, decentralized format adopts the standards already in place? Would you rather simply including existing formats?
Should decentralized social networking also have complimentary, optional directories of users?
6 comments on “Decentralized Social Networking”
Decentralized Social Networking is social networking without relying on a site like MySpace. You could use Google, directories or just rely on your friends linking to each other.
FoaF = http://www.foaf-project.org/
What I want to do is take rss data from various social networking and other sites and allow users to collect all their data onto one page and include unique data.
I wouldn’t have anything required, but I’d have a “basics” section that I’d encourage to be used.
Yes, unless someone made it a private page with a password protection or something similar.
And not just links, but data, journal entries, anything they choose to include.
There’s also Yahoo 360.
One thing that annoys me about a couple of sites is the persistent invite e-mails that have a link to “accept” but not one to reject the invite. Ringo is one site that does that and it really ticked me off until I saw a “Block future invites from All Ringo Members” link. Not a good option for anyone who might want to join in the future, but great for me because I know I won’t change my mind.
Speaking of RSS feeds, have you ever used Pluck RSS Reader? I just downloaded it today and it seems pretty spiffy.
But Yahoo is a nasty company. Flickr is the only good thing they have, as far as my experience goes, and they had to buy that.
I like just being able to choose who to list as a friend and being done with it. The system I wish to create will just let you link to the people you want in your network.
I use Sage for Firefox because I prefer having everything done through one program, and it works very well. I did use a branch of Pluck to upload to my Clie for a while, though.
I’m not sure I totally understand what you’re asking in some of those questions… for instance, I don’t know what FoaF is… but I am pretty active on a couple of on-line netwroking sites, so here’s my two cents.
I use Live Journal, My Space, and Deviant Art (although I’m not sure that one really counts since it’s more of a huge collective gallery than anything else). I also have an account on Yahoo 360, although that site irritates me so much, I don’t use my account except to shunt traffic to my other sites.
As far as what aspects of my identity and that of others that I consider most vital, I’m mostly interested in making friends with people who have interests or backgrounds similar to mine, as well as networking with other artists and writers, so I consider a list of interests and hobbies to be essential. It’s also nice if people include a few pictures of themselves somewhere, either as avatars or in a gallery. I like having a face in mind when I interact to the person, although looks don’t really matter to me when it comes to whether or not I want to get to know someone.
I also like to see something from the person as far as why they’re on the site in the first place, as I’m not interested in wasting time on anyone that just wants to get to know me because they’re looking for a date or only want to click through a bunch of photographs of me because they find me attractive.
That brings me to the aspects of on-line social networking that annoy me. Probably the number one thing is all the people who are just there to flirt or whatever, and don’t bother to read through other people’s profiles first to see if they’d be open to that before they start sending messages of that nature. That’s the number one reason why I can’t stand Yahoo 360. Every last person who has contacted me through there was some guy who just wanted to flirt with a pretty girl and obviously didn’t bother to read a word of my profile before sending me some disgusting message, because they would have seen how much that bothers me as it’s all that’s written in my information section.
I’m also not real big on the huge number of attention whores and fakes that sites like My Space or Live Journal tend to have around. The anonymity of the internet gives people free reign to make up any identity they wish and tell whatever lies suit them, and at times it is a real pain sifting through all those individuals in an attempt to find the “real” people it’s actually worth getting to know.