This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Almost two years ago I wrote an item for Jonathan's Coffeeblog about online social networking, which I called cyberschmoozing. Later I blogged about photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, and about "Web 2.0", a somewhat controversial catchall term for websites which enhance networking of people by enabling tagging and social relationship technology. In Flickr, for example, each member can designate contacts, who may or may not be friends or family members.
Having joined Flickr about two years ago, I have noticed a recent trend which has me a little baffled and a little concerned. I am getting more and more invitations to become contacts of Flickr members who have thousands of contacts and are aggressively seeking many more. In my opinion, this behavior runs contrary to the purpose of social networking, especially the kind I call cyberschmoozing. As this dictionary definition indicates, the core idea of schmoozing, cyber or otherwise, is casual conversation. With thousands of "contacts"? No way. In fact, for whatever their reason, Yahoo, who now owns Flickr, has set a limit of 3000 contacts for Flickr members. Although there was some gnashing of members' teeth when this happened, I applauded the limit, except that I still think that 3000 contacts is about 2600 too many.
One reason for the extreme contact collection which I am discovering is a kind of spamming, where Flickr members collect an audience to which they can pitch their wares through websites exernal to Flickr. However, I think that contact collecting is for many is just a kind of compulsive nut-gathering (I'm thinking squirrel here), where quantity and not quality is what counts. This thinking led me to consider the fact that for all their focus and refinement on tagging and its many splendors, Web 2.0 site creators have not paid much attention to the quality of the social networks they are creating. There is, of course, one big exception: XFN. XF who? XFN is a technology which enables web publishers to identify the kind of relationship he or she has with a specific identified person. The "FN" stands for "friends network," and the X for XHTML, a more highly refined and standardized code language for publishing web content and other stuff, than the rude, crude HTML, which stands for "hypertext markup language." (Mom, email me if you don't understand this.) Using XFN, for example I could (and did) identify Tantek Çelik, (this is his blog) a pioneer of XFN and similar technologies, as somebody I met (once). He probably doesn't remember me, but's it's there in the code for this post, should anybody care to look. What are some of the seventeen other XFN categories as of this writing? Let's see, there's
colleague neighbor spouse sweetheart acquaintance
and of course, me. Cool? I think so. However, don't expect to be able to use XFN for your Flickr contacts right now. You have to be able to write code to use it. Yahoo, are you listening?
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