The Web equivalent of Reno, Nevada
So a friend of
mine sent me an e-mail from an Internet connection
near some sunny beach overseas telling me he has a MySpace page.
This drove me into paroxysms of pointless, defensive
snobbiness where I told him that he has his own web site, which is much
better than MySpace. But I had to relent because there are things that
Friendster and all those other, centralized social networking sites can
do that a personal site can’t. There are some social networking tools
that are hard to decentralize.
The other thing is that this circumstance emerged because of
my own laziness. I had been promising him for a number of months now to
get his site folding to Movable Type. This would at last give him the
ability to edit pages in the way he wants. It would give the general
public a chance to comment on his pages.
I tried once before, about four years back, to get him into
blogging with Greymatter but it didn’t work well. Greymatter is limited
and in some ways harder to use. Anyway we’ll try it again with Movable
Type.
Actually there is an open source social network exchange format that allows you to basically create an ad-hoc social network:
http://www.foaf-project.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_%28software%29
I was going to implement this myself at some point as I think that depending on commercial entities to manage your personal relationships is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
still waiting…
(Jeopardy theme song playing in the background)…