You. Me. Your friend.

… Is now my friend. Social networking is an amazing phenomenon. Although I’m really late to jump on this whole social bandwagon and hate some of the things, the number of users using those sites are amazing. Talking about social networking in front of a crowd that’s well versed in the topic and use most of the popular social networking sites in a daily basis is no easy task. I tell you :-)

Two of the popular sites that existed in the pre web2.0 era that I know of are Hi5 and Myspace. Look at the numbers of registered users of these sites. Contrary to 50 million Hi5 users, my personal belief is that, the only way to deal with someone who’s using Hi5 is this. Ditto for myspace. Like someone said, may be it’s just a matter of time for facebook to come into the firing range of the Redeemer. The thing that made facebook so popular seems to be the ability to write your own apps and hook them up to the facebook platform. So users have more stuff to do once you run out of friends to add.

Every social networking site comes equipped with different functionalities and could be classified into different categories based on what they do. Social bookmarking is one category and there are plenty of different sites that fall under this. Delicious is one such service that I really like. After they got acquired by Yahoo, while trying to install the delicious Firefox extension you have to accept a license agreement. Here’s an excerpt,

b. YOU MAY NOT:
(i) decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, modify, rent, lease, loan,
distribute, or create derivative works (as defined by the U.S. Copyright Act)
or improvements (as defined by U.S. patent law) from the Delicious Software or
any portion thereof.

This is a load of crap. Delicious is a wonderful service, you could get your data exported as XML, they also provide an API. Done all this, they felt the need to make the Firefox extension proprietary. Bollocks. Will write more about social bookmarking later.

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Posted in social networking · November 22nd, 2007 · Comments (2)

2 Comments

  1. In addition to building cool apps as Facebook allows you to do, social networks can also be used to build a web of trust as (the not-so-popular?) Advogato [1] seems to be doing.

    Also, another rather obvious way to look at social networking is to put the whole thing into a giant global graph. Here’s timbl’s view on the subject:
    http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

    [1] http://www.advogato.org/

    — Oshani #

  2. Interesting .. Thanks for the pointer!

    — Chintana #

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