Jon Husband on social networks and Gary Murphy's take.#

Jon's awesome comment:

"Ever watch dogs social-networking? They cut to the chase pretty quickly"

Gary's hit:

So why don't they work? Because they are notsocial networks.

A social network is a network with a social cause, a social reason for being. Social networks fill a niche need for interaction. Church clubs, business clubs, square-dance clubs, these form natural, anthropologically sound social networks with the intelligent self-organization moving from the local (chapter) out to the regional and then clustering still beyond. They are also self-governing, electing their executives from grassroots, organizing on the need to expand the social network.

So then, social-networking software should be the desired thing. Software that someone can easily use to help manage their grassroots one. Whether such a network would coexist with something like orkut is up for grabs.

A possible design: You join communities. (Check.) You add friends. (Check.) But, when you add friends who associate your connection with them by the community. (Nope.)

So, I could join the "Berkman Thursday" community, then add "Dave Winer" as a "Berkman Thursday Friend" (and possibly other types of friends.) Then when I'm looking at the network I'm part of I can filter out everyone not in the "Berkman Thursday" community--or look for intersections and what not.

How to make money would be to provide this network online as a service rather than a product which is not conducive to easy, light-weight setup or sharing of information.

MNOT on the stupid orange "XML" buttons.#

It's like having a "get your ASCII here" button; completely meaningless.

There are literally thousands of XML formats out there, so you're not really being helpful by labelling it as such (the */xml media types have similar problems).

Mine says "Feed," I was thinking maybe "Syndicate" though. Hmm?

Jeremy Zawodny writes about why Google needs Orkut and the power it gives them.#

Just think about it for a few minutes. If you've been thru the Orkut registration process, you know that it attempts to collect a ton of data about you. The kind of demographic data that marketing folks drool over. And right now there are lots of folks dying to get that special invite and begin the sign-up process.

Still with me? Good.

Let's assume that Google internationalizes Orkut and lets it run to the point that it has millions of users registered and active. That's not an unreasonable thing to expect. Then, one day down the road, they quietly decide to "better integrate" Orkut with Google and start redirecting all Orkut requests to orkut.google.com.