Decentralised social networking
6th January 2004
I know I’m late to the party, but my recent experiments with LinkedIn and Friendster have got me all interested in the potential of software that bulids on top of people’s own social networks. There’s just one thing that’s been bugging me, best explained by this quote from Om Malik:
The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a “MoveableType” of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person—me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.
Via John Battelle, here’s the answer: Plink, a social search engine which uses information crawled from decentralised FOAF files. It’s nicely put together and could be just the incentive I need to finally put together my own FOAF file.
Plink is also a nice example of the kind of thing the semantic web hopes to offer. People provide information in easily parsed formats, then others bulid third party applications on top of them that may never have been envisaged by the creators of the original standards. Feedster is another great example of this effect in action.
More recent articles
- Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle - 8th December 2023
- Datasette Enrichments: a new plugin framework for augmenting your data - 1st December 2023
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023