Justin and I have been talking a lot lately about what’s wrong with social networking. Much has been written about social network fatigue and about the lack of data portability provided by many of the major social networks. For a variety of reasons, the portability of my identity and the graph of who my friends are and my relationships to them – in other words, me and my social network – is an extremely interesting problem to me. (And as Eric says, every good piece of software starts with a developer scratching his own itch.) Perhaps I’m not so interested in data portability aspects of getting my photos out of Flickr or my bookmarks out of Delicious because it’s already so easy to do. Getting my information about myself and my social network out of Facebook isn’t easy to do…
If Facebook Worked Like Blackboard
A question Shawn asked in writing about social objects last week made me wonder… What if Facebook worked like Blackboard (or pretty much any other LMS)? Imagine if every fifteen weeks Facebook: shut down all the groups you belonged to, deleted all your forum posts, removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had … Read more