Jonesieblog

When you first heard the term “Web 2.0″, was it a bit of a mystery to you? Did you feel like you must have been asleep when everyone else got told about it? Don’t let it happen again!

“Social Graph” is a concept that will be more important than “Web 2.0″ ever was, so now is the time to familiarise yourself with the exciting ideas that are coming together under this umbrella term.

Readwriteweb.com has a great summary here:

1. The Internet: links computers

2. Web: links documents

3. Graph: links relationships between people and documents — “the things documents are about” as Berners-Lee put it.

The original article from Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) pulls together other key posts on this idea, and with tongue in cheek refers to the Giant Global Graph!

The Social Graph will liberate the information you have stored in sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo from the confines of these particular web applications and give it back to you, to do whatever you want with it. Found a new social software site that has cool features? Great – just hook it into your personal neighbourhood of the social graph, and it will immediately know who all your friends are. No need to go looking for them. The data belongs to you.

OpenID will be a key component of the Social Graph. OpenID provides a categorical declaration of your online identity, and it is these identities which will form the nodes of the graph, with edges being relationships.

This excellent clip uses graphs of relationships to illustrate social networks:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc[/youtube]

What is missing from this explanation is the fact that you have completely separate graphs in each of the social networking sites that you use. The Social Graph will exist independently of any particular site, and the sites will draw upon it to find out about your relationships.

“Why bother” I hear you ask, “if I use Facebook and so do all my mates?” One reason is that innovation is being stifled by the fact that you are stuck in Facebook. What if an infinitely better social networking site comes along? You will be unlikely to use it , because Facebook holds your graph of relationships. Once The Social Graph is implemented, you will be able to use whatever combination of social networking sites you wish, with your choices being made entirely on the basis of their value. Innovation will explode. Exciting times

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If I haven’t convinced you yet about the wholesome goodness of OpenID, how about these wee facts:

• Every Estonian ID card holder has an OpenID (80% of the population)
• Microsoft supports it.
• You can now use OpenID to identify yourself for commenting on this blog

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Crystal ball time! I reckon that everyone reading this will have an OpenID and be using it regularly 12 months from now.

As Wikipedia puts it:

OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID “identity provider” (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity.

Have you got yours yet? If you use AOL or have a blog at Wordpress then you have one already! Otherwise, get one here. I’m http://robertjones.myopenid.com and have also set up this blog to act as my OpenID, following Sam Ruby’s instructions here.

OpenID has a good chance of becoming one of the key elements of a truly open, distributed social network that will render MySpace and Facebook as redundant as Friendster is now. The big fuss about OpenSocial from Google highlighted how clearly people see the need for such a development.

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I was vaguely interested by the launch in the US of Amazon’s e-book reader, Kindle.

Ths morning, via Tom Hoffman’s google reader shared items, I came across this post, which spells out superbly why we really don’t want the future to look like Amazon’s terms of service for Kindle:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-reading

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The Internet cannot be broken by a single point of failure. That it the way it was designed, and that is its great strength. And that’s why I think it’s a really bad idea to use tools like tinyurl.

Tonight I clicked on a tinyurl link, and got an error page from tinyurl rather than the desired link. It was back up in a couple of minutes, but it set my mind a wandering!

Why are we trusting tinyurl to be the single point through which we pass so much information? Do we know anything about the owners of tinyurl? Do we trust them not to do misuse the data passing through their hands?

A quick google on the subject brought up this extensive discussion on slashdot -
Do Tiny URL Services Weaken Net Architecture?

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