DigitalLife 2007: Friendster Announces Fan Profiles
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Taking a page from MySpace, Friendster announced that it was launching Fan Profiles, a feature that allows artists and celebrities to connect with their fans through a variety of methods.
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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Blog: The social networking company plans to launch an API to connect to other services.
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By Anick Jesdanun  Operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of its users and even threats of a boycott.
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Plus: File sharing growing like a Weed. [News.com Extra]
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Bill Thompson loooks at how the social web is transforming friendships and the way we view the world.
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Keep tabs on all of your online buddies, discover how you spend each day, and create presentations on the Web.
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Friendster Inc. said on Monday it  received $10 million in new funding to expand abroad and help  its pioneering social-networking site survive in a market  dominated by younger successors who stole its thunder.
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Hoping to finally become profitable, online social-networking pioneer Friendster Inc. is joining the crowd of Web sites that rely on Internet search leader Google Inc. for a large piece of their advertising.
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David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.    It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.   Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.    He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.
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MySpace, which we recently wrote about due to its partnership with Google, has shut down hundreds of user profiles as a precaution to a worm which is infecting user computers via MySpace &#038; Apple&#8217;s QuickTime media player. The worm seems to change user profiles and add malicious links and content when the video is played. Joris [...]
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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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MySpace takes personal profile-advertising matchmaking program for a walk.
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Here's another cool feature I love about Rojo  - Inline social comments!  When I logged in right now my recent stories showed all my new posts.  Chris had already commented on one and as soon as it displayed the page it showed me his comment (since I'm in his social network).  Of course I can click on the permalink and view all social comments or I can click on his tags and view articles related to this tag.
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New laptops, games and even Google applications share the spotlight at DigitalLife2004, a show designed to tempt consumers to pry open their wallets. Michael Myser reports from New York.
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Someday soon, you might be &quot;Mashed&quot; by your friends. Yahoo has leaked information about an alpha version of a new social-networking site it is creating, called Mash, where users can customize each other&#39;s profiles.
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For business or pleasure? Reg Technology Panel Over the past two or three years, zanily named social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter seem to have come from nowhere to wheedle their way into just about every aspect of online life, both in business and pleasure. Such facilities share a handful of simple, but powerful core features: each will enable information sharing of some form, will have some kind of community orientation and will be constructed in a way that several of the blighters can be merged (or should I say, âmashed upâ) into clever, multifaceted concoctions of collaborative capability.â¦