Comments on: Forget Facebook

By: QuestingElf

QuestingElf — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:56:15 +0000

Facebook, MySpace and its ilk have taken on such a look and degree of high immaturity I’m still trying to decide to what extent I should participate on them, if any.
I’m told that it’s important to have an online presence that includes these, especially if I want to enhance my career. I’m told if I’m not found online then I’m pretty much a nobody.

However, I also hear that employers nowadays Google job candidates prior to job interviews. If I am judged by the company I keep, do I really want to be seen in Facebook and/or MySpace where so many have such a casual attitude that is anything but business?

By: Currence

Currence — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:54:08 +0000

For what it’s worth, I probably wouldn’t have the quality or quantity (not a huge amount) of friends I do if Facebook hadn’t existed. Of course, I started using at the perfect time, for the perfect reason (i.e. its original intent): in the summer before college, before it was open to non-college students, so I could make friends with anyone worth “friending” so I wouldn’t be lonely the first few weeks of school. It was the perfect thing for a socially unambitious kid looking for others with odd interests (meaning, it’s not the case that w/o Facebook I would have gone “out” and made friends the good ol’ fashioned way: I would have just been friends with a smaller, more geographically local group of students, and I would have been less satisfied).

So, I consider the essence of Facebook — or maybe not essence, but at least the original incarnation of Facebook — to be a positive thing. Perhaps it was just that exclusivity (college students, faculty, alums only) which made it good (it didn’t have to pander to any larger interests, etc.).

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:26:15 +0000

Pissed off with that article seemingly imply René Girard is some kind of right-wing neo-con ideologue. Sent a letter to the Guardian to this effect, didn’t get a reply.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:57:40 +0000

We share sort of the same views on this. And while the majority of the text in >http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook < seems like repetitious droning, I can’t say he’s much far off from the point either. But, really – and this is where I think the article really doesn’t do enough here – I think the biggest reason I had deleted my account was not because of the inescapability of capitalist coercion (or anything like that)…but because it never gave me any route to re-invent myself. Here’s The kid I sat next to in math class (we talked?) and Richard Bleekins from Wake Forest University (um, how did we meet?); it felt like apparitional representation of social structures. I’ve got friends who hyperventilate over girls on this thing, manifesting fictitious, alluring personalities of not just themselves but of people they want to meet.
And Facebook feeds off this. They didn’t just stop by one-upping the compulsive away-message-makers of AIM with the “what I’m doing right now” feature, supposedly (could be a rumor) something more confrontational, more illusory is in the works in terms of a person-to-person chat function.
“And the same goes for MySpace, which is less evil only to the extent that it’s comparatively incompetently executed.”
But I have to commend MySpace not just for its ‘democraticization’ , but for its commitment to continue with cursory demarcations. Tt’s ‘incompetence’ is actually more its anti-connection and perhaps more so, it’s phantasmal distinction as opposed to Facebook’s bold attack at turning black to gray.

By: NotDominic

NotDominic — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:11:03 +0000

No doubt you saw this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

By: Dominic

Dominic — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:31:00 +0000

Sam Ruby has a good HowTo on OpenID here:

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:43:43 +0000

True. Also, highlighting breaking technologies which have implications in social networks, Microformats are gonna be a big deal soon, though some tell me that RDF will be a better solution, but as a developer I am sceptical in the short term – I could roll out Microformats in a few hours of hacking on my live site and not have to learn anything new, where as RDF would need a lot more work.

Sad thing is though, that like back in the day when everyone programmed for IE 4 even though its rendering was absolutely shit box when it came to standards competence, the Facebook API is become a de-facto standard – for example, Bebo launched its own application API yesterday, BUT it supports Facebook API now and Opensocial only later this year. Which completely shows the situation.

This is, I feel, because big web standards are naturally slow moving things, where as corporations can just declare this kind of stuff by fiat.

The Facebook homepage ain’t even valid XHTML! – http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffacebook.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 . Don’t even bother with Myspace – “The checked page did not contain a document type (“DOCTYPE”) declaration.”

By: voyou

voyou — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:56:40 +0000

Openid gets you the basics of distributed authentication, I think. If you published a list of OpenIDs that you trusted (as it might be, via FOAF), it shouldn't be all that hard for a web site to then restrict access to people you trust. DiSo looks to be the beginnings of just such a project.

By: Dominic

Dominic — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:36:12 +0000

Yeah, that’s more the kind of thing. Ideally I’d want it to be the case that anybody could host a node of “OpenBook”, with trust relationships between different nodes meaning that logging in to one node would get your credentials recognised by other nodes that trusted that node (there might be different levels of trust).

Publishing an XML document with things like your birthday and a list of your favourite movies is not hard, and neither is aggregating all your friends’ published profile documents and having a page that tells you when they update or alerts you when it’s someone’s birthday. Restricting access to such documents to people who ask for it (and you’re willing to give it to) is a more interesting problem, hence the need for some sort of distributed authentication system. That, I think, is the hard bit…

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:44:50 +0000

I presume you are aware of Open Social (http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/). What are your thoughts?