load of tosh : Social Networking Services

What kind of social software are you?

Tosh Meston — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 02:36:00 GMT

Apparently, I'm a GNE. What are you? http://undergroundlondon.com/social/index.html

Insomnia Leads to XFN Participation

Tosh Meston — Sun, 22 Aug 2004 08:33:00 GMT

Just set up a block on this site with some links from my opml file with XFN rel attributes, then I posted my URL on www.rubhub.com to get crawled. I wonder where this standard/proposal will go. Possibly nowhere, but it might be interesting to have RubHub's crawler create an SNS from what's out there on the web. .Text's link sections don't allow one to add rel attributes to the anchors so I added the HTML to the "Static News/Announcement" section. There's a tool which will create the anchors for you if you are inclined to do it yourself.

Incidentally, if you're inclined, you can add a XFN "contact" link to me like so:

<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/tmeston" rel="contact">Tosh Meston</a>

Discovered XFN

Tosh Meston — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:21:00 GMT

I find XFN (XHTML Friends Network) via Tantek. What it is...

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

FOAF Spam

Tosh Meston — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 03:40:00 GMT

FOAF Spam - Unsolicited "junk" e-mail sent to large numbers of people by way of social networking services to promote products or services.

(All the junk messages I get on Orkut just by being "friends" with Scoble)

Of course, the lamest part of the internet for me is that whenever I feel I am being clever and original, I can search and be reminded that I am not. See here, here and here. Thank you.

Impressions on Orkut

Tosh Meston — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 21:39:00 GMT

I decided to pass on Scoble's offer to send an invitation to Orkut to anyone who wants one and wait to see how long it would be before I got one through my usual channels. The invite came on Thursday or Friday through one of my geeky friends in the bay area. I am on Friendster too, but haven't tried LinkedIn.com. Overall, pretty neat. Fast, which I appreciate, but parts of the UI are difficult to find. Took a bit to figure out where all the profile sections were. There are sections of profile information that can be secured by groups (ie, viewable by friends only or friends of friends or everyone) so for instance, you can display your address to your friends and maybe your email to friends or friends. I like that feature, but it seems not all sections can be secured like that, which I would like. I also like the idea of the “terminate” button. With these social network sites, I like to sign up and see who is connected to the people I know and see what they have to offer, but after a time I just want off because the site fails to be useful or interesting. Communities are pretty cool as well, if only to find people you know to build your network. I am also enjoying seeing who is on the friends list of the industry “players”. For fun check out Newsweek's Steven Levy's friends list. It's a who's who list of the industry bigwigs. Wow.

(feel free to add me as a friend if you want to network or just for fun)

Social Software

Tosh Meston — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 06:31:00 GMT

So Esther Dyson was on campus today, I didn't have a chance to go over and watch in person, but I watched the feed on the intranet. She talked a bit about the buzz of "social software" amongst other things. The term "social software" brings to mind sites like Friendster, but what does it mean? People might say it is software that enables people to interact with other people more easily. Doesn't e-mail do this, doesn't IM? Somehow these "old" technologies are not included in set and yet the “new” software powering weblogs is.

Social software seems to be very much about the revolutionary. Social software seems to carry with it a promise of happier days ahead, about finding that right person, about finding out that a friend of a friend is a captain of industry who's been looking to give you that killer job. It would seem to be software that you want to spend eight hours a day using. It’s the next killer app.

I don't know what it really means. What does it mean to you?