Alex is currently sticking it to Facebook
I assume most people join it to communicate. Yet how can you build a community on something so closed? It requires you to sign up before you can read people’s profiles. I don’t doubt it provides some authentication, but in the end you’re trusting your information not just to a service with questionable ownership, but to the suppliers of whichever add-ons you inevitably install.
And to think we live in the age of wikis.
Categories: Technical
What would be best is separating hosting and the network, so people can store their personal information anywhere. Each user could potentially run their own server, or at least use a provider of their choice, and people can “network” by having open standards for discovery and data interchange. That would be the true Internet way.
With the sprawling list of social networks around, each network is, in a way, an isolated host. What is needed is a social network of social networks, built on open standards of course, facilitating the creation of rich Web 2.0 mash-ups, so more people can spend time on their computers “socializing”, rather than, heaven forbid, calling them up and speaking to them on the phone, or, gasp, going out and meeting them in real life. Hopefully the (anti)social fad will be over soon.