Earlier this month I mentioned OpenSocial, and Decius replied:

If the same people show up in every social networking website, doesn't that defeat the individual value of each community? Do you really want to "import" your linkedin connections to facebook? Sometimes its useful to maintain different sets of associations in different contexts.

On that thought, here is Tim Berners-Lee:

People running Internet systems had to let their computer be used for forwarding other people's packets, and connecting new applications they had no control over. People making web sites sometimes tried to legally prevent others from linking into the site, as they wanted complete control of the user experience, and they would not link out as they did not want people to escape. Until after a few months they realized how the web works. And the re-use kicked in. And the payoff started blowing people's minds.

Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

Giant Global Graph | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a study released last week.

Pull quotes:

"We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined."

"We think it's a mistake to treat telecom like a luxury and tax it like a sin."

Internet Could Max Out in 2 Years, Study Says

While at Sony in 1994, I was sent to Virginia to learn how to build a Sony "app" on AOL (the #3 online service, behind Compuserve & Prodigy at the time) using AOL's proprietary "rainman" platform.

Fast forward to Facebook 2007 and see similarities: If you want access to their big base of users, develop something in their proprietary language for their people who live in their walled garden.

Facebook is the new AOL

I mentioned this book in August; now it's available.

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.

Praise:

"A timely, vivid, and illuminating book that will change the way you think about privacy, reputation, and speech on the Internet. Daniel Solove tells a series of fascinating and frightening stories about how blogs, social network sites, and other websites are spreading gossip and rumors about people's private lives. He offers a fresh and thought-provoking analysis of a series of wide-ranging new problems and develops useful suggestions about what we can do about these challenges."
—Paul M. Schwartz, professor of law, UC Berkeley School of Law

"No one has thought more about the effects of the information age on privacy than Daniel Solove."
—Bruce Schneier

"As the Internet is erasing the distinction between spoken and written gossip, the future of personal reputation is one of our most vexing social challenges. In this illuminating book, filled with memorable cautionary tales, Daniel Solove incisively analyzes the technological and legal challenges and offers moderate, sensible solutions for navigating the shoals of the blogosphere."
—Jeffrey Rosen, author of The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd

About the author:

Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free.

Previously on Solove:

Cell Phone Number Research

"This is a person's associations ... It's a real wealth of data to find out the people that a person interacts with."

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

We know everything about you

... we are almost entirely powerless against these vast bureaucracies ...

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

From best-selling author Donald A. Norman, the long-awaited sequel to The Design of Everyday Things: a critical look at the new dawn of "smart" technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators.

Donald A. Norman, a popular design consultant to car manufacturers, computer companies, and other industrial and design outfits, has seen the future and is worried. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Design of Everyday Things, he points out what's going wrong with the wave of products just coming on the market and some that are on drawing boards everywhere -- from "smart" cars and homes that seek to anticipate a user's every need, to the latest automatic navigational systems. Norman builds on this critique to offer a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines. This is a consumer-oriented look at the perils and promise of the smart objects of the future, and a cautionary tale for designers of these objects--many of which are already in use or development.

The Design of Future Things

Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.

Carnivore

One hoary truth of computing technology is that most of the pressing problems today have solutions discovered or developed, at least in part, twenty years ago. (This nicely avoids the patent problem.)

Google’s announcement of the OpenSocial API brought up yet again the persistent problem of walled gardens on the Internet, as myriad social networking sites spring up, offer to invite all of your friends if you divulge your address books, and then slowly wither as you realize that visiting half-a-dozen sites every day to read messages from your fragmented social groups is busy work.

If Social Networking Sites *Really* Wanted to Interoperate

I've seen a lot of claims that there is something fundamentally new about service-oriented architectures. I don't buy it. Distributed computing has always been about the same set of problems. The speed of light is fixed, bandwidth is finite, and networks can be relied on to fail periodically. What we discovered in the 80's and 90's is that it's hard to build a completely general-purpose system that deals with these issues. Service oriented architecture is all about solving these problems in the context of a specific set of domain objects and business needs; that is, defining restrictions which make a viable solution easier to create. But SOA is no more a silver bullet than the approaches which preceded it, and the fundamental techniques and strategies used for the previous generations of distributed systems are the foundation of a well-designed SOA.

From Here to There, The SOA Way

The simplest human network is brainstorming: people connected by streams of shared thoughts (MemeStreams) that result in “aha” moments.

In large part, the broad sweep of the Internet has been about recreating the plumbing of the human network. Technology has solved the need for physical location (space), and it has solved the need for simultaneity of communications (time). We're now facing the ability to solve the problem of augmentation -- accelerating the “aha” moment.

In the enterprise, this “augmentation” lives somewhere between knowledge management, corporate wikis, “social” networking, search, and business intelligence.

In the world of the end-user, it lives somewhere between next-level discovery, attention, aggregation, relevance, trusted relationships and tagging.

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

Defrag

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