I’ve just posted a longer piece on Get Real about this topic, and wanted use this short posting now to link together
a) Mark Pincus’s posting on peopleweb
in the next year we’ll see the more enlightened big players realize that they are better off aggregating and syndicating than trying to stand alone defending their franchises and competing with the overall network. join it and extend. dont fight it and get left behind.
b) Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on unlinking
we will all becoming unlinked from today’s style of networks, when we can instead inhabit our own nodes and become networked through tools that help us find other likeminded souls. But we wouldn’t be forced to have ten thousand tinny fragments of our digital identity spread all over the Internet
c) My thoughts on FOAF vs swarm intelligence
I notice on wikipedia that there are no less than 13 different people named Michael Jackson who have wikipedia entries!!! Yet the ambiguity is easily and nicely dealt with: if you go to the ‘main’ or ‘naive’ Michael Jackson entry the first line tells you “For other people with the same name, see Michael Jackson (disambiguation)” and you follow that link you get to a nice clean listing of the full contingent of 13 Michael Jackson entries, with their own unique URLs. In no case is there anything even remotely resembling FOAF’s popular ’sha1sum’ hash-coded email address which maps onto a provably-unique digital identity. Who is ‘Michael Jackson’ then? Who owns these wikipedia entries? Answer: No one / everyone.
d) My trial of Tribe.net’s open profiles
it still suffers from being too much of ‘portal’ (EVEN THOUGH I CAN SEE TRIBE.NET IS BREAKING OUT OF THAT MOLD), but for some reason I’m not a ‘portal’ kind of guy – I used to be, but now if I want to (say) check out or contact Stowe Boyd or Marc Canter, just to pick two contacts at random, the only thing that matters realistically is whether they’re on Yahoo/Jabber/MSN/AIM, or what they’re saying on their blogs
Technorati Tags: tribe, open.profiles, foaf, digital.identity, swarm.intelligence, wikipedia
