In the beginning, back in 1996, it was SixDegrees. Last year it was Friendster. Last week it was Orkut. Next week it could be Flickr. These websites, and dozens more, are designed to build networks of friends, and they are currently at the forefront of the trendiest internet development: social networking.
But unless they can start to offer more substantial benefits, it is hard to see them all surviving, once the friend-of-a-friend (Foaf) standard becomes a normal part of life on the Net.
Social networking was one of the key themes of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held recently in San Diego, California. Ludicorp used the platform to unveil Flickr, only just stopping short of writing code on stage. In Software for Skyscrapers, James Crabtree and William Davies from the United Kingdom’s iSociety (The Work Foundation) proposed a practical application: linking the residents of Skyhouse, a new residential tower in Docklands. During the coffee breaks, attendees were adding to their network of friends on the current geek favourite, the Google-backed Orkut.
There was plenty of sizzle, but it remains to be seen whether there is much meat in the sausage.
The chances are slim, but the curious fact is that everybody on the planet is probably connected indirectly, via friends of friends. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram purportedly showed this in 1967, with an experiment that involved forwarding letters to a stockbroker in Boston. If you didn’t know the target, you were asked to forward the letter to a friend you thought was closer. It apparently took about six steps for the letters to reach their target, which led to the idea of ”six degrees of separation”. This led to the creation of the SixDegrees website, which patented the idea. (SixDegrees failed but says it is ”relaunching soon”.)
The expansion of the internet has brought this simple idea to the mass market, as illustrated by the emergence of at least two dozen Friendster-style websites. Most of the sites allow you to fill in your own profile, upload a photo, and add other people as friends.
You can then map your network of friends, and the system can show links to friends of friends. If you have 20 friends you could have 20 000 Foafs, and on Friendster, some personal networks already run into millions.
Orkut is the hot site of the moment. Because Friendster-style software is easy to produce, Orkut’s biggest advantage is its close association with Google. This has helped it attract the ”alpha geek” bloggers and commentators on social software. But being new is an advantage in itself. Join a new service and there are lots of things to do, such as tracking down friends and entering your lists of favourite movies, and so on. Perhaps not until the initial activity has died down, in a few months, will many users start to wonder if there are any practical benefits.
The search for a payback could be the start of a shift from categorising social software by what it does for us instead of how it works, according to Davies. And if the aim is fun or gaming, he says, ”the Flickr presentation showed us that it can be done a heck of a lot better when it sets out with this goal in the first place”.
Of course, Friendster started with an obvious function — dating — and it plans to add more applications as it tries to make money from its millions of users. On an intranet, Orkut would make a pretty good corporate address book and messaging system, with a bit of built-in group conferencing. But ultimately any site’s value depends on the quality of the information it provides, and you can’t really trust unchecked data. If it follows Friendster, Orkut will also have its share of dishonest profiles, people who sign up dozens of complete strangers as ”friends”, and fictitious characters, known as pretendsters or fakesters.
Ludicorp’s Flickr, which could become a hot site, also has a function: sharing photos. It started with the idea: ”What if we put live chat together with social networks and enabled people to share media with one another in real time?” Although this is already possible using instant messaging software and groupware sites such as Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, Flickr makes it far easier: the photos you want to share are in a ”shoebox” along the bottom of the screen, and you send one by dropping the picture on a buddy’s name.
Sharing photos online is likely to become more popular as more people buy digital cameras, and as cameras are built in to most cellphones.
Ludicorp’s Eric Costello says the plan is to have photos uploaded automatically: ”We hope to have ‘watched folders’, so if you drop a photo into a folder it will show up in your shoebox. Also, we hope to integrate it with other photo sites, such as Ofoto, so you could pull in photos from there, or push photos there so you can have prints made.”
A system that can be used to share photos can ultimately be adapted to share all sorts of things, and Flickr could obviously go much further.
Ludicorp’s Vancouver-based founder and president, Stewart Butterfield, says it’s trying to build a system that supports relationships that transcend particular applications — instant messaging, e-mail, Orkut and so on.
Something like Flickr is a possible solution to the problem raised at ETech by Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics: ”There are so many social networks, how are we going to connect them all together?” It’s bad enough having to enter your personal details into half a dozen incompatible sites, so no one is going to join hundreds. But it gets worse. In this context, ”friends” includes acquaintances, colleagues, business contacts, people you went to school with and so on, so you could have 100 friends or more. If each friend joins five sites, you could get 500 to 5 000 e-mails asking you to confirm and classify your relationship. The traffic is already starting to drive some people batty.
Anybody who was going to do this thing rationally would want three things:
l There should be a standards-based, machine-readable data format that could be used by any social networking site. Rather than you having to type in your personal details, the site should be able to load them from a file. The vCard virtual business card is an old example of how this works in practice.
l Personal information management programs should be able to generate correctly formatted files, the way Microsoft Outlook and other Pims generate vCards. You should never have to retype details that are already in your address book, for example.
l Social networking services and other interested parties should be able to use a form of autodiscovery to collect your data automatically, either from your PC, from your website, or from any public place you have chosen to post it. Rather than sending users e-mails asking them to update their details, sites should be able to pick them up (with your permission).
We don’t have all that yet, but a project called Foaf is heading in the right direction. Foaf is part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s semantic Web development, and is based on the W3C-recommended RDF (Resource Description Framework) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language) standards. Both Dan Brickley from the W3C and Edd Dumbill gave presentations about Foaf at ETech, and the Tribe social networking site announced that it would support the system. With Foaf, you can post a machine-readable page containing whatever personal details you like.
”It’s ‘out of control’ by design,” says Brickley. ”It’s there for anybody to play with.” Anyone can create a Foaf using the Foaf-a-matic website at www.ldodds. com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.
Foaf files can be read by computers, so it should eventually be possible to answer queries such as: How old is Marc Canter; Show me pictures of bloggers who live in London; and Find recent articles written by people who went to ETech — assuming people have put the relevant information in their foaf.rdf file. In the meantime, you can look at Foaf pages with Foaf Explorer or FOAFnaut.
There’s not much you can do with Foaf at the moment, but Dumbill, who lives in York, demonstrated his BlueFOAF program at ETech. This scans for ”discoverable Bluetooth devices” — typically cellphones — and if it finds any that belong to friends in your Foaf file, shows you their name and photo in a buddy list. This could be a killer application running on a cellphone in a bar or disco. — Â