One week with Web 2.0: Facebook and Mugshot
24 May 2007
This time last week I finally joined Facebook, just out of curiosity and because I should really know about such sites.
It is a semi-private little world, you have to be a member to see anything, where individuals can create little online profiles of themselves. They can then see other users' profiles and send private messages to each other, or write public messages on each person's 'wall'.
I have had a public homepage in some form or another since 1998. I have email and IRC. So I do not really need any of this personally. If you search Google for Zeth then it will not take much time to find me. However, one nice thing about Facebook is that non-technical students, graduates and so on are on there. The kind of people with no other web presence.
Facebook is also is free at the point of use, unlike the close to useless 'friends reunited', which did not reunite me with anyone, you could read lists of people but do nothing about it.
Those of you who have Facebook logins can click here to see my profile. Those of you who do not have Facebook logins, I would not bother, there is currently nothing there that is not on this blog or my homepage, far less actually.
Facebook has some primitive access controls. I set my profile to be as open as possible, but you can also set it so that a certain amount of the functionality of your profile is only available to your 'friends'. 'Friend' here is in the sense of 'acquaintance'. The extra functionality gained by being a friend is not that exciting, but it is these linkages that makes the magic happen. When an old schoolmate adds you as a 'friend' then you can look it his/her friends to discover more people. When someone from a hobby adds you then you can discover new people and so on.
I joined one week ago, and while I was filling out the joining forms, I accidentally said yes to import my gmail contacts. What this meant was that it looked through all the email addresses in my gmail account looking for existing members of Facebook. It then sent 'friend requests' to everyone that matched.
This turned out to have unintended consequences, if me and some other (so far unknown) person happened to be once emailed together by a mutual friend, e.g. a forwarded email joke or whatever, then it counts them too. This meant that two people that I had not heard of were caught in the crossfire.
I joined a week ago and within 24 hours had '26 friends', this has slowly crept up to 32, including my two accidental new acquaintances.
In general I do not yet see the whole point of it, although I have had some nice little chats with people I do not communicate with outside of Christmas cards. There are many people that I have had deep and meaningful relationships with earlier in my life, but then neither of us got around to keeping it going, a few of these have emerged on Facebook (i.e. 'guiltbook') .
Mugshot
I also joined mugshot, but have not had time to play with it yet or find anyone, this is a similar networking site but it uses completely open-source software, it also has an optional desktop software client (available for Linux and Windows) that I have not installed yet but which aims to give a richer experience.
A nice thing about Mugshot is that it is a much more open platform, it pulls together different sources and supports a few dozen other online services into a nice profile page. So far I have added my blog, my Facebook profile and my rarely used flickr account (I use a private install of Gallery2 instead), so I think in the long run this might be the better bet.
Here is my mugshot profile, non-members can actually see most of what I have added (which is not a lot), which is more useful than the closed off Facebook.
That's it so far, I will set up the desktop client and some point and see if anyone else in the whole world is on mugshot. What networking websites do you use and why?
1 David Grant says...
"The extra functionality gained by being a friend is not that exciting."
Well, maybe not in your case because your profile is open. But generally the difference is huge, because the default is that non-friends can't see anything.
I'm not sure why you call the access control "primitive." I found it to be quite detailed and fine-grained, and you don't explain at all why it is primitive.
"guiltbook" - haha, that's true, I have a lot of those friends on there too
Posted at 4:51 a.m. on May 24, 2007
2 Zeth says...
Hi David!
Well primitive is not a bad thing, I just meant you can make things available or not, while 'Access Control' might imply other things that would be over the top.
I would like the ability to show my profile over the public web, but I have not found a button for that. A determined stalker can make a facebook account in no time at all, so it is only stopping innocent people from finding it.
Posted at 8:14 a.m. on May 24, 2007
3 Zeth says...
Facebook and Control
As an update to the post, my colleague Prev sent me this link, which is a Flash movie explaining some of the privacy questions concerning Facebook. But it also goes on to attempt to make connections with the US Security Services and rich and powerful individuals.
There are, of course, not many large IT projects in America without links to the security services. After all, some of Linux's most advanced security features were invented by the NSA and other governmental users. Many of these more military-based US organisations are trying to make technology an advantage, unlike the UK government which sees technology as a cost to be tendered out to large companies and best forgotten about (until the failure of the projects come back to bite).
If we accept for a moment that the powerful people in the US are a very small group of interrelated families and companies, a new monarchy attempting to centralise power and ownership through national and international treaties and laws such as patents and so-called 'intellectual property'. We should also realise that there are worse people out there in the world too, not least the more traditional barbarian attempts to control people and build empires, new Hitlers and new Stalins, now using IT also, as well as old fashioned methods such as torture, blackmail and execution.
Decentralisation allows freedom
There is also the rest of us, normal people trying to take control of our own technology, who understand that the freedoms that our ancestors fought for could be undermined if the new technological age is owned and operated by the few not the many. In short we must quietly resist the re-introduction of Tudor monarchy through technology. Centralised so-called 'Web 2.0 services' are problematic of course because we control very little. However, that does not mean that we should pull out our Ethernet cables and go back to swapping reels of ticker tape. We need to create and support a decentralised Web 3000, become active stakeholders rather than 'service users'.
What this means in practice is a very large set of questions indeed. However, as an analogy, email comes to mind, if everyone used GPG or PGP to sign their emails then we would not have a spam problem. Spammers who signed their emails could be traced and arrested, while unsigned email would just be discarded into an unsigned folder and ignored.
The centre is lost
However, if the large email providers tried to do the same thing through top down control, could it have the same outcome? No, because that is not how power works, the spammers would continue while individual freedoms of ordinary people would be crushed. Indeed no doubt the spammers would have a prime seat at the table.
One just has to look at the trade in illegal drugs, prostitution, prohibited weapons and terrorism to see analogies. Sadly, like these other things, spam pays, and he who pays the piper calls the tune in our multi-national world. According to British public policy, no one should own handguns, no one should sell cocaine or heroin, no one should control sex slaves, no one should be a terrorist.
Even through Tony Blair has had ten years with an all-conquering parliamentary majority, the closest thing in Western Europe to absolute power, perhaps the last time in Britain's history any politician will have such power, has Blair able to stop these things? No, because those who deal in these things benefit indirectly the rich and those in power. The money trickles up. Not only that but the presence of armed gangs of drug dealers indirectly reinforces the need for the centre. A wife only puts up with an abusive husband as long as she fears the world outside more. Given independent resources and opportunities, she is off and will never look back.
The only countries without such problems have been tin-pot dictatorships where the leader has absolute power and has no need of these indirect cash flows, and many of these dictators take direct control of some of these levers anyway.
Who will win the next general election? Cameron or Brown, my hunch at the moment is the former but what difference will it make anyway? Absolutely nothing. The centre is neutered, controlled by the pipers and lost. We have to learn to make it on our own.
This is completely now off the topic of Facebook, but hey, this is the comments section after all! It is free speech here!
Posted at 1:22 p.m. on May 24, 2007
4 Ian Monroe says...
I've seen that conspiracy thing before, its pretty stupid. Its a very tenuous connection to the NSA. Like just some guy who was on two investment boards, and related to Facebook and the other to NSA.
It is true that people being more open is going to probably help law enforcement, Facebook was already used to find those Church arsonists. But I think thats fine.
I'm a college student in the US, so the nice thing about Facebook is that everyone I know is on Facebook. So its a handy way to look someone up. One problem is, seems to be more pronounced with folks who started facebooking in highschool, people often don't put up their even must basic contact information, even the stuff available already from the Universities contact search. Due to misplaced paranoia I suppose.
Since everyone I know is on Facebook, its a great way to do things like organize events. Rather then calling a bunch of folks, you just setup a party event. And everyone can see who else is coming to the event or was invited.
Facebook relationships are interesting in how important they are... people joke about them being stupid, but to pubically say (in front of people who your currently otherwise out of contact) that your going out with someone is actually pretty significant. And facebook drama ensues. ;)
And gmail importing everyone was certainly a mistake! Facebook isn't like MySpace where people seem to enjoy adding people they don't know in real life.
Posted at 4:13 p.m. on May 24, 2007
5 sander85 says...
it pretty much sounds like orkut.com that is supported by google and ise probably a lot more popular than any other such networks.. the only problem is that orkut has too many brazilians :P thou i'm already connected with 100 friends and for me it's more than useful..
Posted at 7:15 p.m. on May 24, 2007
6 Ian Monroe says...
sander, in reality we don't get to pick what social networking site we use. We just have to use whatever our friends use.
MySpace is by far the most popular social networking site, Facebook is number 2 in the US anyways.
Posted at 1:31 a.m. on May 25, 2007
7 sander85 says...
yes, probably tru, i'm not quite sure what MySpace really is as i don't use much of M$ products.. i have no idea how many users you may have there.. i know that orkut has probably around 60,000,000+ users at the moment and by the latest stats 18.92% of them are from US.. it's first time i hear anything about Facebook :)
but yeah, that must be something US-only probably?
Posted at 8:25 a.m. on May 25, 2007