Goin' to IIW 2009a

I'll be at the Internet Identity Workshop May 18-20 and will be conversing about social identity and presence on the 'net... or whatever hot topics arise during the conference, which is an unconference, so you can decide what it's about in real time.  And, if you sign up by tomorrow, there's even an early bird special.  Go for it!http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/?page_id=3

Being stalked by companies on Twitter

Great!  I'm now being followed (stalked?) by companies:

Hi, John Panzer (jpanzer).

AL (TonyAlba_Pizza) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out AL's profile here:

 http://twitter.com/TonyAlba_Pizza

You may follow AL as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,

Twitter

URLs are People Too, Even on Facebook

s/vanity/friendly/.  Though actually getting a friendly profile URL seems to require some mojo at the moment.

Exploring Drafty

1. Jason Shellen: Putting an exclusive, first 100 people only invite code into a tweet is awesome marketing.
2. Uses OAuth to access my Blogger data; yes!.  I probably would have trusted Jason with my password anyhow, but it's really good not to have to.
3. Thirty second impression: Looks like a way to generate and disseminate conversations.  I think it needs a social network component for exploration (yes, everyone is twittering about NCAA -- I just don't care).

The Awesome Turbo Plane Car

...which my son threw together this weekend. I am given to understand that it has a turbofan engine.

What is the Social Internetwork?

Way back when, before the Internet, there were a bunch of different computer networks that didn't talk to each other.  The situation:

"For each of these three terminals, I had three different sets of user commands. So if I was talking online with someone at S.D.C. and I wanted to talk to someone I knew at Berkeley or M.I.T. about this, I had to get up from the S.D.C. terminal, go over and log into the other terminal and get in touch with them. [...] I said, it's obvious what to do (But I don't want to do it): If you have these three terminals, there ought to be one terminal that goes anywhere you want to go where you have interactive computing. That idea is the ARPAnet."

—Robert W. Taylor, co-writer with Licklider of "The Computer as a Communications Device", in an interview with the New York Times, via Wikipedia.

(And ARPAnet begat the Internet, which begat the World Wide Web, which begat Web 2.0.)

We're in a parallel situation today in online social networks. There are a bunch of them, they don't really interoperate, and it's obvious what to do -- there ought to be one network, yours, that goes with you anywhere you have an online social context.

OpenSocial and Google Friend Connect provide an equivalent of the routers and gateways that connected disparate digital networks in the seventies, creating a network of networks -- the Social Internetwork.

The Social Bar on Blogger

I've just added the Google Friend Connect Social Bar to the bottom of Abstractioneer; as with the Demo gadget, this involved copying and pasting GFC code and substituting the Abstractioneer site ID so it hooks up correctly. Try it out!