and now for a few pessimistic perspectives on
explicit approaches to defining social relationships. i was going
to write a much longer post, but i don’t have time, so if you’re
looking for something coherent you might want to look elsewhere:
david weinberger on “social bullshit”
:
“Third, real social networks are always implicit. The
ones constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected
with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the
invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of
friends and relatives.”
:
“TypePad produces the worst FOAF in the world. Take
this typical example. Apparently this geezer ‘knows’ BBC News! I
know that this particular foaf:Person is a British Member of
Parliament but surely not even these super-humans can know
‘things’. And Ross himself seems to know a lot of inanimate
objects.”
ross mayfield understates the obvious
:
“Expect fast growth of this service within the explicit
crowd, but not everyone wants to be so explicit, the absence of
constraints and bad data will hamper its utility.”
and quite related to all this, i’m going to have
to agree with
the assessment at startupskills
:
“My point is that outside of perhaps a novel niche
application here or there, the idea itself will never get beyond
the early-adopters because (to my knowledge) no one has
demonstrated a credible model in which an average person would
willingly adopt it.”
i don’t think i’m mistaking
intentions for actions either
. rather, given the obvious facts that most people won’t see the
value of joining the network [ unlike music sharing ] and those
that do see the value will be stymied by a signal-to-noise problem
which will become more of a problem as the network grows, i see big
problems for the adoption of decentralized “social software” as
it’s currently envisioned.
i’m guessing that it will be 3-5 years before any of this shakes
out into anything that can be adopted by mainstream ISVs looking
for new business opportunities – just look at how long the rss
fiasco has be going on and rss is easy.