SPSN – Climb to the Stars

Encore au sujet de Facebook [fr]

[en] An answer to Carlos's comment on my last post. The "interesting things" I'm waiting for us to be able to do with the new Facebook "friend lists" is to use them for sharing and privacy purposes.

[Carlos](http://blog.osez.ch/) a laissé [un commentaire tout à fait pertinent](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/01/09/facebook-foire-aux-applications/#comment-368971) à [mon dernier billet au sujet de Facebook](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/01/09/facebook-foire-aux-applications/), et j’aimerais y répondre ici.

Tout d’abord, Carlos, merci pour ton commentaire — et ça me fait plaisir de voir que tu es d’accord avec moi sur l’ensemble. Voici quelques points de ton commentaire auquel j’aimerais répondre plus précisément:

> Même si myspace est à la ramasse, facebook ne va pas beaucoup plus loin, le seul + notable c’est d’avoir l’identité réelle des gens (pour autant qu’on joue le jeu) à la place de pseudos.

En ce qui concerne l’identité réelle, c’est plus que “jouer le jeu” qui est attendu de nous. Facebook a viré des gens qui utilisaient des pseudonymes — demande à kittenfluff sur Seesmic — et surtout, toute l’idée de Facebook étant de te connecter avec *les gens que tu connais déjà*, c’est un peu dur pour eux de te trouver si tu n’utilises pas ton identité officielle.

> Si tu en as l’occasion, je serais très intéressé d’avoir ton point de vue et de voir se developper ta dernière phrase “qu’on puissse faire quelque chose d’utile avec sa liste d’amis”.

*Oops. Voir plus bas. Les paragraphes qui suivent ne répondent pas vraiment à la question de Carlos. Voyez après le passage en gras pour la vraie réponse. Mea culpa.*

“Faire quelque chose d’utile avec sa liste d’amis:” c’est justement, à mon avis, utiliser facebook pour partager des faits ou actions réels, et agir sur la réalité. C’est la “réalité” qui est la clé, ici. Alors bien sûr, il n’y a pas que Facebook pour faire ça.

Tout réseau social le permet. Les blogs sont un réseau social, donc la structure est très libre. Avec mon blog, je partage avec mon réseau (les gens qui me lisent) mes pensées ou parfois les événements de ma vie. Idem avec Twitter. Idem avec Dopplr, Seesmic, etc.

Facebook permet de concentrer tous ces petits “actes de la vie numérique” en un seul endroit. Alors, bien entendu, mon blog aussi. Si tu regardes les sidebars, j’essaie d’y fourrer tout: mes [liens del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/steph), [Twitter](http://twitter.com/stephtara), [mes photos](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny), mon [deuxième blog](http://steph.wordpress.com)… et j’en passe. Résultat — on me le fait assez remarquer: c’est trop chargé. C’est pas fait pour ça. Je pense que 90% des gens qui passent par ici ignorent le contenu de mes sidebars. Je les laisse car je pense que ça peut avoir une valeur pour la personne qui débarque ici pour la première fois — mais clairement, c’est pas fait pour ça.

Sur Facebook, par contre, alors oui — c’est fait pour ça. C’est Facebook qui va se charger de rendre “les dernières nouvelles de mon monde” plus digest pour mes contacts. C’est un super-aggrégateur de news, si on veut.

D’un certain côté, il n’y a rien de révolutionnaire à ça. C’est d’ailleurs le cas pour beaucoup de ces “outils web2.0”. Prends Twitter, par exemple: il y a des clones partout, mais pourtant, c’est toujours Twitter qui occupe le devant de la scène. Pas nécessairement pour cause de suprématie technique, mais à cause de la communauté qui s’y trouve. Je ne vais pas quitter Twitter pour un concurrent, car tous mes amis s’y trouvent. Idem pour MySpace, idem pour [Skyblog](http://sbooth.skyrock.com) chez les ados francophones. On reste à cause des gens.

Et Facebook bénéficie aussi de cette dynamique. A un moment donné, Facebook a passé le “[Tipping Point](http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html)” (un livre à lire, en passant) — et on va sur Facebook car “tout le monde” est sur Facebook. On va pas sur Facebook pour pouvoir jouer aux Vampires ou même au Scrabble, on y va car les gens qu’on connaît y sont déjà, et qu’on pourra donc partager avec eux facilement les nouvelles de notre monde, et organiser des sorties Karaoké ou des journées comme le [Website Pro Day](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/12/14/website-pro-day-deuxieme/). Faire quelque chose d’utile avec sa liste d’amis, c’est ça.

**Mince, je viens de réaliser que je ne suis pas en train de répondre à ta question, que je viens de comprendre à l’instant.** Je ne suis pas encore réveillée, j’ai une excuse 😉 — désolée d’avoir réexpliqué tout ceci, que je réalise en fait que tu comprenais déjà. Arghl. Avec un peu de chance ce sera utile à d’autres!

Je reprends ta question, donc. **Faire quelque chose d’utile avec ses listes d’amis**, ces listes que Facebook nous permet de définir, quoiqu’un peu maladroitement. **La** chose utile, c’est de pouvoir utiliser ces listes pour gérer des droits d’accès. Par exemple: “les gens étiquetés ‘collègues’ n’ont pas accès à mes ‘status changes’ ou à l’album de photos ‘soirées’, sauf s’ils sont aussi étiquetés ‘amis'”. Ou bien: “mes ‘copines du jeudi’ ont accès à une série d’articles un peu salaces, mais personne d’autre”.

Tu vois l’idée? (C’est plus court et simple que ma “fausse réponse”, hein…)

> On nous a présenté de belles choses du côté de [l’OpenSocial](http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial) qui permettra à un maximum de services tiers de s’intégrer aux profils et surtout de créer le lien entre les différentes communautés, mais on dirait que ça prend plus de temps que prévu.

> Vu les intérêts en jeu, je me demande jusqu’à quel point le mot “open” est bien choisi.

Ah, OpenSocial. Regarde du côté de [Social Network Portability](http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability), une initiative partie du mouvement des [microformats](http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page-fr). OpenSocial va dans cette direction, mais il ne faut pas attendre de miracles pour tout de suite. Ces choses prennent du temps. Quand OpenSocial a été présenté, c’était quelque chose sur papier. Il faut maintenant que les divers acteurs l’implémentent, et suivant qui… ça va pas se faire demain.

Donc, je pense que là tu es un peu injuste et impatient 😉 mais si tu veux développer plus loin ta pensée à ce sujet, je te lirai avec intérêt. (J’avoue qu’en plus j’ai suivi d’assez loin la saga OpenSocial, laissant à d’autres le soin de s’en occuper.)

Facebook, foire aux applications [fr]

[en] Facebook has become a gigantic app-fest, and I regret it. Many newcomers around me see only that, and fail to understand where Facebook's real value lies. Not in the Vampires, Superwalls, or Secret Crushes. But in the network of people you have there, and what you can do with them: plan events, share online doings, or discover more about them.

Facebook se répand comme une trainée de poudre en Suisse Romande. J’y retrouve donc des amis “offline” qui souvent, m’avouent ne pas trop y comprendre. Ils reçoivent des tas d’invitations pour toutes sortes de choses, qu’ils acceptent, passent plus loin — mais pour être honnête, ça lasse vite, ce genre de jeu.

Quand je lis des articles dans la presse au sujet de Facebook, même topo: tout est centré sur les fameuses applications, qui permettent de jouer aux Vampires, de comparer ses goûts musicaux, et de découvrir qui a secrètement flashé sur nous. Mais que se passe-t-il donc? Est-ce si superficiel que ça, Facebook?

Même si Facebook est devenu célèbre (médiatiquement) dans un deuxième temps grâce à sa plate-forme d’applications, ce n’est pas ce qui m’a attirée vers ce réseau social. J’y étais “avant les apps”, moi 😉

Facebook, c’est tout d’abord un splendide carnet d’adresses des toutes mes connaissances (moins celles qui résistent encore et toujours à l’envahisseur, bien entendu). Un “facebook”, littéralement: un carnet de visages, un répertoire de mes amis et d’informations à leur sujet.

C’est ensuite un endroit où je peux faire circuler l’essentiel de mes activités numériques: j’y centralise des alertes concernant la publication de billets (comme celui-ci), mes [tweets](http://twitter.com/stephtara), et quelques mots d’humeur parfois un peu plus privés.

En retour, si mes amis font de même, Facebook me fournit via mon “News Feed” les nouvelles de mon monde. Qui a publié quoi, qui est où, qui a rejoint quel groupe. Bref, un condensé de nouvelles provenant de mon réseau social. Et Facebook fait ça intelligemment: je peux lui dire quel genre d’informations je préfère voir, et lesquelles m’indiffèrent. Je peux choisir de mettre en avant certaines personnes, recevant un plus grand nombre de leurs nouvelles — ou moins, pour d’autres. Et maintenant, je peux même indiquer, pour chaque information publiée dans mon News Feed, si je suis contente ou non que Facebook me l’ai servie.

Mais là où Facebook bat tous les autres réseaux, c’est pour la gestion des événements. Il est hyper facile de mettre sur pied un événement et d’y inviter ses amis. Je l’ai fait pour [WPD et WoWiPAD](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/12/17/wwpad-wpd/). On peut aussi facilement mettre en avant un billet publié, un événement, ou une photo en les partageant, soit sur son profil, soit en privé via un message à un ami ou plusieurs.

Ça me désole de voir que pour tant de monde, Facebook se résume à une “foire aux applications”. Il faut dire que la plupart sont bien conçues, vous invitant sans arrière-pensée à spammer vos amis pour qu’eux aussi aient un Superwall et un Funwall (j’en peux plus de ces deux, arrêtez, s’il vous plaît). Oui, bien sûr, c’est nul, toutes ces applications. La plupart n’ont aucun intérêt ou presque.

On retiendra tout de même: Scrabulous, pour jouer au Scrabble (en français aussi!), Books, pour partager vos lectures, et si vous utilisez des services comme Twitter, Dopplr, Pownce, Flickr — installez sans hésiter les applications Facebook qui y correspondent.

Si vous débarquez sur Facebook, souvenez-vous: l’intérêt n’est pas dans l’accumulation des applications diverses sur votre profil, qui finira par ressembler à un sapin de Noël surchargé et bariolé. Facebook, c’est avant tout un lieu de contact avec ceux que vous connaissez, de près ou de loin selon vos goûts. Alors oui, ce contact peut être ludique (certaines applications le sont) — mais il ne faut pas aller par-dessus-bord non plus.

Ah, les fameux “friends”. Sur internet, dès qu’on se connaît, on est amis, n’est-ce pas? C’est peut-être vrai dans les premiers élans de découverte d’un nouveau réseau social, mais quand on commence à avoir quelques centaines “d’amis”, le terme perd son sens. Et si on est quelqu’un de sociable, dont le réseau est passablement présent sur internet (comme moi), on y arrive vite, aux quelques centaines de contacts. Notez que je dis “contacts”.

C’est pour ça que cette nouvelle fonctionnalité de Facebook, qui permet de [faire des listes d’amis](http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7831767130), est un pas en avant super important. J’en ai parlé longuement en anglais: nous avons besoin de pouvoir [contrôler plus finement ce que nous dévoilons](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/16/ethics-and-privacy-in-the-digital-age/) de notre sphère privée. En d’autres mots, nous avons besoin de pouvoir [apporter une structure à nos réseaux sociaux en ligne](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/) — car notre réseau social a une structure. Tous ne sont pas égaux, parmi ceux que l’on connaît. Il y a les amis proches, la famille, les collègues — ceux avec qui on va manger à midi, mais aussi ceux à qui on ne parle presque pas, les copines du jeudi soir, les amis d’école perdus de vue, les personnes qu’on aimerait mieux connaître… etc. On retrouve ce besoin dans [l’histoire récente au sujet de Google Reader](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2008/01/04/desinformation-en-20-secondes-google-reader/): on veut [plus de granularité](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/12/26/granular-privacy-control-gpc/) pour ce qui est “privé”. Pour le moment, c’est un peu tout ou rien. Soit c’est privé, soit c’est public.

Un jour, et c’est ce que j’essayais d’expliquer [dans le Grand 8 du 1er janvier](http://info.rsr.ch/fr/rendez-vous/Les_hackers_informatiques_ne_sont_pas_forcement_mauvais.html?siteSect=1001&sid=8581901&cKey=1199111430000&bcItemName=le_grand_8&broadcastId=545429&broadcastItemId=8486271&rubricId=8888&programId=110451&bcItemName=le_grand_8), on pourra régler finement qui a accès à quoi dans ce que l’on publie, en fonction de comment on “classifie” (bien mauvais terme, je vois plutôt ça se passer avec des tags) les gens de notre réseau. Alors certes, on n’en est pas là avec Facebook. Pour le moment, vos “listes d’amis” vous permettent simplement de les inviter en bloc ou de leur envoyer un message commun facilement. L’interface pour placer les personnes dans les listes est également trop encombrante. Mais c’est un pas dans la bonne direction.

J’attends, retenant mon souffle, qu’on puisse faire quelque chose d’utile avec ces “listes d’amis”. Si Facebook rate cette coche, qu’importe — un autre réseau social le fera. Et croyez-moi, celui qui implémentera ce genre de fonctionnalité correctement aura une bonne longueur d’avance sur les autres.

FOWA: What is the Future of Web Apps? (Ryan Carson, Om Malik, Michael Arrington) [en]

[fr] Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

*Here are my live notes of this [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session with [Om Malik](http://gigaom.com/), [Michael Arrington](http://www.crunchnotes.com/), and [Ryan Carson](http://www.carsonified.com/). They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Chances are I’ll be adding links to extra material later on, so don’t hesitate to come back and check.*

*steph-note: arrived really late to this session (not quite as late as Arrington, though), so vaguely trying to pick up a few snippets here and there as I get organized for the day.*

Gphone. Gphone. Gphone. *steph-note: as I was entering the room.*

Launching a DRM-free music store would be a good business idea right now. But please, says Om, not another Office clone. We have enough.

Plugins. Facebook. [Organizing the buddy-list](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/). Facebook Appls: we haven’t seen that many game-changing apps (besides Scrabble, says Om).

Om: Facebook as directory service. Ryan: critical mass. BBC/Radio4 talk about Facebook.

Arrington thinks there is a chance that Facebook will go the [portable social network](http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability) way. (Ryan seemed skeptical.)

Arrington: more mobile stuff, and more “virtual reality” — using your body to interact with the computer.

Om loves his Crackberry.

Tag-Related Wishlist [en]

[fr] Mes idées/prédictions/désirs pour l'évolution des tags et des technologies associées.

I told you my mind never stops spinning, didn’t I? Here are a few follow-up thoughts on my [previous post on tags](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/22/wordpress-finally-has-tags/). View this as my brain dump of what I’d like tags to do in WordPress and around.

Bear in mind that I haven’t tried 2.3 yet, don’t know exactly what it does and doesn’t do, and haven’t done much homework. So (hopefully!) some of the stuff I’m speaking about here already exists. If it’s the case, please leave a note with a pointer in the comments.

Some of the stuff here might also be stupid. If it is, please tell me.

I don’t think all this should necessarily be in the WordPress core. Plugin makers, feel free to delve in here for inspiration. If I like your plugin, I’ll plug it.

#### Links Between Tagspaces

So, based on what I’ve understood, WP2.3 will provide a local tagspace. This means that if I tag a post “cat”, the link on that tag will take me to something like myblog.com/tags/cat. That’s cool.

But I want more.

I want the myblog.com/tags/cat page to contain configurable pointers to other tagspaces. For example, [my Flickr photos tagged “cat”](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/cat). [My del.icio.us links](http://del.icio.us/steph/cats). [My videos](http://www.viddler.com/explore/steph/tags/cat). [The Technorati tagspace](http://technorati.com/tag/cat).

See what I mean?

Somewhere, WordPress would ask me “What other tagspaces would you like links to?” and I’d enter “http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/”, “http://del.icio.us/steph/”, “http://www.viddler.com/explore/steph/tags/”, “http://technorati.com/tag/” in some pretty form (we know how to do those now, don’t we?)

#### Alternate Tagspaces

Some people may not want to use the local tagspace. Hell, most people who tag their posts right now point to the Technorati tagspace. An option to do so could be nice.

#### Tag Combinations

I’d like my local WordPress tagspace to allow tag combinations. This is [the stuff I wrote about nearly 3 years ago](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/16/thinking-about-tags/). Del.icio.us does it: here are [my links tagged “books” AND “read”](http://del.icio.us/steph/books+read/).

We need more of this, particularly if we start thinking multilingual. I want to be able to point to a page containing posts I tagged “adolescents” OR “teenagers” OR “ados” or “teens”. I use all those, but I’m sure (given the nature of tagging) some posts have slipped through the cracks and have only one or two of these tags.

Less multilingual, maybe I just want to have “cats” or “cat” (sometimes I use plural, sometimes singular, and the distinction isn’t important to me in this context).

#### Related Tags

Del.icio.us does this. My local tagspace pages should have this feature too.

And how about an option to be able to see (in a click) posts tagged “cat” AND all the posts tagged with one of the related tags? (This could become a bit unwieldy though.)

#### Tag Management

The “obvious” stuff. Rename tag “stephaniebooth” to “Stephanie Booth” everywhere it is. (Flickr does this well.) Merge tags. Add a bunch of tags to all the selected posts (result of a search or by-category selection). Remove tag X from all posts which are tagged Y.

This is the kind of stuff I wanted to make possible for categories when I wrote [Batch Categories](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/06/24/batch-category-editing-for-wordpress/), a lifetime ago. I haven’t touched this “hack” for years now, and I’ve heard conflicting information about its compatibility with recent WordPress versions. I think somebody somewhere updated it for WP2.x — if you search you might find it.

#### Public Tagging

Now, this would be a source of tag spam, unless it’s for example limited to registered users of the blog, or people identified by OpenID or on a “trust list” (e.g. people who have commented on the blog before). I’ve encouraged people to [open up tagging to the community on Flickr](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/06/20/flickr-open-up-tagging-your-photos-to-the-community-please/), and the feedback from those who have done it has been great. I’d like a way to do this for my blog posts, too.

I’m sure [structured portable social networks](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/) have a part to play here.

#### More Importing/Conversion

Ages ago, I [added keywords](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/11/multilingual-weblog/) to my blog posts. (I now know it’s not very useful — [maybe even, not at all](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/14/le-placement-dans-les-moteurs-de-recherche/).) Around the same time, I used [Topic Exchange Channels](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/19/easier-topicexchange-trackbacks-for-wordpress/) for some of my posts, making the ITE channel visible on the post by adding a link to it (gosh, come to think of it — I hadn’t heard of tags yet, but what I was doing was some form of proto-tagging… quite impressed with myself!)

Anyway, leaving the self-congratulatory stuff aside, my wp_postmeta table contains old information about posts which has long since disappeared from this blog, but which is still there, ready to be recycled. I could turn those old keywords and ITE channels into tags with an importer.

So, how about a very “customizable” importer? I would give the meta field name I want to convert to tags, and indicate if the tag data is comma-separated, space-separated, or simply placed in multiple fields.

(For my old keywords, there is one meta field called “keywords” which contains a comma-separated list of words, whereas for the ITE channels there is one entry per channel called “ite_topic” (IIRC) with a unique word as a value — but there can be more than one channel per post.)

So, “manual importer”, anybody?

#### That’s All, Folks!

There, I think I’ve told you what was on my mind. Feedback welcome. And plugins. Code. Solutions.

Ethics and Privacy in the Digital Age [en]

[fr] Même si tout le contenu numérique que nous produisons court le risque de se retrouver un jour sur l'internet public, cela ne veut pas dire pour autant qu'il est acceptable de rendre public des informations qui ne le sont pas.

En l'occurrence, les réseaux sociaux comme Facebook permettent uniquement aux amis ou contacts d'un utilisateur d'avoir accès à leur profil. On n'y pense souvent pas, mais de plus en plus, ce qu'on peut voir sur le web dépend de qui nous sommes, et des relations (enregistrées) que l'on entretient avec d'autres utilisateurs.

Il convient donc d'être vigilant, sous peine de commettre des erreurs diplomatiques. Un ami à moi a ainsi rendu public aux 10'000 lecteurs d'IBcom une partie de mon profil Facebook, en illustration d'un article qu'il a écrit. Pas de gros désastre heureusement, mais s'il m'avait demandé, j'aurais tout de même fait un peu le ménage avant qu'il fasse sa saisie d'écran.

Over the last year, I’ve repeatedly asked for finer privacy control in the social tools I’m using (see [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/12/12/you-should-twitter/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/03/24/brainstormdiscussion-the-future-of-blogging-technology-gabor-cselle/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/) and [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/)).

To summarize, tools need to let users add **structure** to their social networks, which in turn will allow privacy management of data made available in or through the tool: “let people I tagged X see everything, let people I tagged Y see this and that, and let people I tagged Z see everything apart from that.”

If you think of how relationships and social networks function offline, this makes perfect sense: some people are part of your friends circle, some people are close friends, some people are co-workers, some people are acquaintances, others are business contacts, judo pals, people you meet up with to play cards. And you don’t say the same things about yourself to all those people.

Your “social network” is not homogeneous. It’s a collection of little sub-communities (which can be as small as one person), with fuzzy edges, overlapping, ever-changing. Why on earth an online social network should place all the people I’m connected to on one level (or even two, or three levels) is beyond me.

Were getting there (but way too slowly). [Pownce](http://pownce.com) and [Viddler](http://viddler.com) allow you to tag your contacts and use those tags to control privacy (though with interface issues). [Facebook](http://facebook.com), [Flickr](http://flickr.com), and probably various others don’t allow you to tag your contacts, but do provide a few (insufficient) levels of privacy. [Twitter](http://twitter.com) lets you choose if you want to protect your updates.

What I’m getting to is that in today’s web of social tools, what you get to see is more and more personalized. And **the information you can access about other people is often the result of your relationship to those people**, and what they decided to give you access to. **Just like in offline relationships.** This means that you, as the person with access to the data, **have an ethical responsibility towards the person who made some of his/her personal information available to you**.

**Because you have access to it, does that mean you have the right to publish it in a more public space? Well, I’d say the answer is most obviously “no”. By doing that, you’re betraying the trust of the person who made the data available to you.**

Now, of course, I’m the first to say that [you cannot control digital stuff you create](http://www.ciao.ch/f/internet/infos/2.3) and should be aware that you run the risk of seeing your private digital data ending up on the public internet at some point. “Even if it’s in a private setting, anybody can copy it and make it public.” Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s *right* to do so.

So, why am I writing this? Somebody just brought to my attention that [IB com](http://www.ib-com.ch/) published an article about Facebook in their latest issue. And **to illustrate that article, a screenshot of my Facebook profile was used**. The article was written by a friend of mine (“friendly-business-acquaintance” friend), who obviously had access to my “friends only” Facebook profile.

He didn’t ask me if it was OK to publish my Facebook profile in print. If he had, I might have said “no”, but I might also have simply sanitized my profile so that he could take a screenshot I would have felt comfortable showing to the public.

He didn’t realize that by publishing my Facebook profile or showing it to others outside my friends’ circle, he is making information I would like to keep somewhat private available to people I would not necessarily choose to give it to. In this case, it’s not disastrous, because I *am* pretty conservative about what I put online, even on my Facebook profile (and I’m more transparent then most, so there aren’t *many* things I keep private). But there are at times things there I would rather keep for people I know — not the 10’000 readers of IBcom.

Just like most bloggers do not consider everything said in a conversation over a glass of beer “fair game” for blogging (when in doubt, ask, unless you’re ready to jeopardize your relationships over this kind of stuff), not everything you access in social networks is fair game for publication.

As social networks get smarter about privacy, I think we’re going to bump into this kind of problem more. For the moment, it’s up to each of us to be vigilant about what we take of others’ content and make available elsewhere. And maybe we need tools that can help us keep track of privacy settings better, and warn us when we’re about to make such a “faux pas”.

Lijit Feedback [en]

[fr] Un peu de feedback sur Lijit, un moteur de recherche sympa qui s'organise autour du contenu en ligne d'une personne et de son réseau.

I lost the first version of this post in a Firefox crash while I was writing [my post on structured portable social networks](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/) (that’s what I get for doing too much at the same time). With a bit of luck it will be better 😉

So, as promised, here’s my feedback to Barney about [Lijit](http://lijit.com). First, for those of you new to Lijit, [Stowe Boyd blogged about Lijit](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/08/lijit.html) about a week ago, which is how I discovered it. (Yes, go sign up now, but come back here to read the rest of the post when you’re done. Thanks!)

Signing up must have gone reasonably smoothly, because I don’t have any screenshots of it — which is a good start. (When I bump into any interface problem or bugginess nowadays, I quickly [grab a screenshot](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/screenshot) with [Skitch](http://plasq.com/skitch) and upload it to Flickr with a few notes. Photographs of my online life, if you like.)

I was disappointed that I could only add my del.icio.us and MyBlogLog networks. The latter is a good addition, but how about my Twitter network? Or a blogroll on [my secondary blog](http://steph.wordpress.com)? CTTS doesn’t have a blogroll (pure laziness). I tried importing my network from Facebook, but it was way too creepy, I disabled it as fast as I could. I got the feeling it was going to allow people to search through my friends’ notes and stuff — as well as mine. I do take advantage of the “walled garden” side of Facebook to publish slightly more personal stuff there than “outside”, and I know I’m not alone here.

What would be really neat would be if I were able to export *just the connections* I have to other people from Facebook, and if they are Lijit users, import their blogs and content into my network. Think [portable social networks](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/).

Being able to import the blogs I read (they’re my “network”, aren’t they?) directly from Google Reader (filter with a tag though, so I can keep all those naughty sex blogs I’m keeping track of out of the public eye).

I used Lijit twice to find the old posts I linked back to in the post above. First, on the Lijit website itself:

Then, using the wijit I installed on my blog:

That’s pretty neat. Lijit opens a “fake window” over the current page with the search results, and when I click on a link in the results, it loads in the initial browser window. Sounds obvious, but I like that it works — many ways it could have gone wrong.

I’m moderately happy about the space the wijit takes up on my blog:

I know companies are hungry for screen real estate (“make that logo visible!”) — but be less obtrusive and I’ll love you more! Notice that I now have Lijit search, normal Google search, and WordPress search. Way too many search boxes, but for the moment there isn’t one that seems to do the job well enough to be the only one. (Maybe Lijit, but I haven’t had it long enough…)

Stats page is neat, though I’m still totally unable to tell you what the two pie charts on the right do:

What on earth is Ma.gnolia doing in there?

There, that’s what’s on my mind concerning Lijit for the moment. Watch out for [the screenshots](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/tags/lijit) if I bump into anything else!

We Need Structured Portable Social Networks (SPSN) [en]

[fr] Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux que l'on peut importer/exporter d'un outil/service à l'autre. Nous avons également besoin de pouvoir structurer ces réseaux sociaux qui contiennent souvent un nombre important de personnes. Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux portables structurés.

Christophe Ducamp s'est lancé dans une traduction de cet article. Allez donner un coup de main ou bien en profiter, selon vos compétences! Je n'ai pas lu cette traduction, mais je suis certaine qu'elle est utile. Merci Christophe!

Scrolling through my “trash” e-mail address to report spam, I spotted (quite by chance, I have to say) a nice e-mail from Barney, who works at [Lijit](http://www.lijit.com/). Barney asked me if I had any feedback, [which I’ll give in my next post](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/lijit-feedback/), because I need to digress a bit here.

Lijit is a really fun and smart search tool which allows to [search through a person’s complete online presence](http://www.lijit.com/users/steph “See mine.”), a remedy, in a way, to the increasing [fragmentation of online identity](http://twitter.com/stephtara/statuses/200579442) that’s bothering me so much these days. Actually, it was already bothering me quite a few months ago, when I wrote [Please Make Holes in My Buckets](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/):

>So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (”OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. Plaxo is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think coComment and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

One thing the 2.0 world needs urgently is a way to abstract (to some extent) the social network users create for themselves from the particular *service* it is linked to. **We need portable social networks.** More than that, actually, we need **structured portable social networks** (SPSNs). I’ve already written that being able to give one’s “contact list” a structure (through “contact groups” or “buddy groups”) is vital if we want to manage privacy efficiently (in my horrendously long but — from my point of view of course — really important post “[Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter.](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/)”):

> I personally think that it is also the key to managing many privacy issues intelligently. How do I organise the people in my world? Well, of course, it’s fuzzy, shifting, changing. But if I look at my IM buddy list, I might notice that I have classified the people on it to some point: I might have “close friends”, “co-workers”, “blog friends”, “offline friends”, “IRC friends”, “girlfriends”, “ex-clients”, “boring stalkers”, “other people”, “tech support”… I might not want to make public which groups my buddies belong to, or worse, let them know (especially if I’ve put them in “boring stalkers” or “tech support” and suspect that they might have placed me in “best friends” or “love interests”… yes, human relationships can be complicated…)

> Flickr offers a half-baked version of this. […]

> A more useful way to let a user organise his contacts is simply to let him tag them. Xing does that. Unfortunately, it does not allow one to do much with the contact groups thus defined, besides displaying contacts by tag […].

In fact, we need structured social networks not only to deal with privacy issues, but also (and it’s related, if you think of it) to deal with social network fatigue that seems to be hitting many of us. I actually have been holding off writing a rather detailed post in response to [danah](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/)’s post explaining that [Facebook is loosing its context for her](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/08/10/loss_of_context.html) — something that, in my words, I would describe as “Facebook is becoming impossible to manage in a way that makes sense with my life and relationships.” Here’s what she says:

> Le sigh. I lost control over my Facebook tonight. Or rather, the context got destroyed. For months, I’ve been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a “friend”? Where’s the line? For Facebook, I had been only accepting friend requests from people that I went to school with and folks who have socialized at my house. But what about people that I enjoy talking with at conferences? What about people who so kindly read and comment on this blog? What about people I respect? What about people who appreciate my research but whom I have not yet met? I started feeling guilty as people poked me and emailed me to ask why I hadn’t accepted their friend request. My personal boundaries didn’t matter – my act of ignorance was deemed rude by those that didn’t share my social expectations.

danah boyd, loss of context for me on Facebook

I think that what danah is expressing here is one possible explanation to why people are first really excited about new social networking sites/services/tools/whatevers (YASNs) and then abandon them: at one point, or “contact list” becomes unmanageable. At the beginning, not everybody is on the YASN: just us geeky early adopters — and at the beginning, just a few of us. We have a dozen contacts or so. Then it grows: 30, 50, 60… We’re highly connected people. Like danah, many of us are somewhat public figures. From “friends of our heart”, we start getting requests from **people who are part of our network but don’t fit in *segment* we want to reserve this YASN to**. We start refusing requests, and then give in, and then a lot of the value the YASN could have for us is lost.

Unless YASNs offer us an easy way to structure our social network, this is going to happen over and over and over again. For the moment, [Pownce](http://pownce.com) and [Viddler](http://viddler.com) allow me to structure my social network. A lot of work still needs to be done in the interface department for this kind of feature. (Yes, [Twitter](http://twitter.com), I’m looking at you. You said “soon”.)

So, to summarize, we need **tools and services** which make our **social networks**

– **portable**: so that we can import and export our relationships to other people from one service to another
– **structured**: so that we can manage the huge number of relationships, of varying and very personal degrees of intimacy, that highly connected online people have.

**Update, an hour or so later:** [Kevin Marks](http://epeus.blogspot.com) points me to [social network portability](http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability) on the microformats wiki. Yeah, should have done my homework, but remember, this post started out as a quick reply to an e-mail. Anyway, this is good. There is hope.

Tag: SPSN

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