OpenLife

This new show which was inaugurated following the Supernova2008 conference is worth watching, if you want to follow the developments within the “not only open-in but also open-out” social web discussions.

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supernova2008, socialwebtv

On my summer reading list is Jonathan Zittrains new book The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It. Probably, one of the best ways to get an idea of what the books is about is to see the Colbert interview with the author.

Below is Jens’ reaction to the interview and further down, the more serious Charlie Rose version.

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jonathanzittrain, colbert, charlierose

Check out the numero uno photo sharing of the web: 23 - the brainchild of Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and others. It has just launched a redesigned version of the web-site. Notwithstanding that Thomas is a good friend, I honestly think that 23 is the best choice for online sharing and storage. Keep of the good work guys.

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thomasmadsenmygdal, 23hq, photosharing

In the opening panel at Supernova2008 Esther Dyson got into a discussion with Bob Iannucci, who is the CTO of Nokia, about markets for online exchange of infomation between individuals and businesses. Bob Iannucci seemed to make the point that markets for the exchange of personal information could mitigate individuals’ fear of giving up adresses, preferences and so on to companies. In other word he advocated that the price mechanism would enable efficient exchange of personal information based on its value to the individual as opposed to its value to company.

Esther objected to this quantification of the personal utility of private online users. She said that “Businesses has to acknowledge that not all users are online either to buy something or to sell something, in this case their personal information”. People has much more nuanced motivations for exchanging information with others. Just like in the offline world the by far largest number of exchanges that involves real humans are completely non-market based.

Bob Ianucci described markets as languages enabling exchanges. I agree that this is often the case but its important to understand that the price mechanism more than often is extremely insufficient to express complex and emotional relations between human beings.

Markets may be languages but with vocabularies and grammar far to poor to understand much of the interaction between human beings!

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supernova, supernova2008, estherdyson, bobianucci

Here is my own attempt at a web 2.0, semantic web application with the potential of exploitation of the “power of many” and of changing the way that people find information on the Internet.

This is Nodeville

Nodeville visualizes data relations such as bookmarks, social bookmarks, XML, documents etc. Our system will determine the relation if a node has a shared id (globally unique identifier (GUID)) or let you decide the relation.

You can collaborate with people you know and people that shares the same node id (GUID).

We will soon release an API that lets you utilize our system and build some innovative web applications.

Register at http://www.nodeville.com/register. By invitation.

All the technical work is done by my friend - Jacob Friis Saxberg - a talented Danish hacker. My contribution is at the concept level.

BTW, if anyone has 100.000 USD to invest in an extremely risky but potentially very rewarding project, send me an e-mail

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nodeville, jacobfriissaxberg

The recent (10 April 2008) survey in the Economist on The New Nomadism is a must-read.

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economist, digitalnomads

Interesting and very operational post by Brad Fitzgerald with Thoughts on the Social Graph.

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bradfitzgerald, socialgraph

One of the things that I don’t like about all these much hyped social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and so on (don’t get me wrong I am a heavy user and addict of these myself) is that they are not really “social” in the sense that their users do not control their personal data and more importantly their “social graphs“.

The use of social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn is entirely based upon private standard form contracts (sometimes referred to as an adhesion contracts or boilerplate contracts). Of course, sometimes a number of users while acting together will be able to “force” the service operator to change its standard terms and conditions such as was the case with Facebook when the community strongly objected to its completely unfair terms of use that gave Facebook almost unlimited use of photos uploaded by users. But such actions remains the exception.

The fact is that merely on the basis of these private contracts the service operators can more or less at will decide to terminate with immediate effect users access to the services. This also applies to access to data through APIs. The terms and conditions covering API will normally also allow the operator to shut down access with in effect no notice.

Yes, it might be that you will be able to get access to your raw data such as contact info of the people that are listed as friends in the social network. But all other information, in particular all the knowledge about your relation with your friends, will be lost. And you will have to rebuild these from scratch when you migrate to another services. This creates an unhelpful user lock-in.

So in my opinion these social networks cannot be considered open in any meaningful sense until users get more control over not only their raw data but also the metadata that make up their social graph.

I don’t know when we will see a succesful social network based on users’ full data control. I am sure that we will see such emerge in the extremely competitive private market for web 2.0 (maybe web 3.0) services. But until then a possible alternative (at least for people related to Copenhagen, Denmark) to Facebook and the likes might be Kbh.dk, a non-profit social network for everybody that live in or care about Copenhagen that will launch in May 2008.

Here is the Kbh.dk development team consisting of good people from Signal Digital, MitKbh og Webcom.

Full disclosure: My law firm Bender von Haller Dragsted is advising Kbh.dk on certain legal aspects of the service.

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kbh.dk, signaldigital, mitkbh, webcom