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Where's "Networking" in Today's Social Web?

Reading David Dahl's post on "antisocial networking", I finally found a way to express what's bothering me with today's "Social Web" (no, I don't call it "Web 2.0") services:

People, and even the services themselves, talk about them as "Social Networking" but all I see is monolithic, non-networked single-corporate-hosted blobs.

Where is the network of independently operated Facebook servers that are all can easily communicate with each other but are not in control of one giant operator that has an unclear objective?

Where are the same networks for twittering, sharing personal map data (think "Google My Maps"), videos, photos?

Where are the messaging services that connect social networking messages with instant messages and email?

If those services were on independently operated but interoperable services like blogs or the original web, there wouldn't be a few large operators in charge of all datamining, we wouldn't need to fear that one service goes down because its operator goes bankrupt or some parts of the service go down because it's sold or even one company going towards a data monopoly by acquiring one social web service after the other (see Google buying twitter, etc.).

I want control of my data (e.g. by hosting a good amount of things myself) but still have all the cool tagging stuff and other awesomeness out there being connected with it. But all I see is monolithic services instead of real social networks.

No, I don't have a Facebook, Twitter or Flickr account - yet. Even in 2009. The thoughts above are probably the most rational expression of some part of the uncertain feelings that drive me to still appear so much "backwards". I really care about the open Internet, but that includes open networking, and I still have some problems seeing that in those services.

What about you?

Beitrag geschrieben von KaiRo und gepostet am 10. April 2009 21:24 | Tags: Mozilla, open networks, Social Web, Web 2.0 | 1 Kommentar | TrackBack

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KaiRo

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@anonymous guest:
Where is the "My Maps" feature on OSM? You know, I have been contributing substantial parts in my home town to OSM and other small things wherever I go (just spent about 1.5h yesterday with creating/improving some OSM data), but things like "places I was on in this holiday" or "important spots when doing Berlin sightseeing on my MAOW stay" are not common data to be stored with the real street data on OSM, it deserves something like Google has done with "My Maps". How can I get those on OSM?

@larffy:
It's not like my browser can read IMAP, the Facebook database or Google map databases right now, you know. It's websites that know how to talk to those and represent them in the browser. And if the services were networked, it still would be websites that pull things together to interact with them. Of course, it can be non-website applications as well if the data is networked the way I think it should be.

Interestingly, I watched what Tim Berners-Lee said about "linked data" yesterday evening - after writing this blog entry ;-)
11.04.2009 12:48

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