DerekMorrison

On software engineering, .NET, and technology

How do you view your friends' info?

While I was browsing through some blog entries in my feed reader this evening, I was thinking about processing my backlog of personal pictures dumped from my camera and sitting on my desktop. I began to think of how I upload them to Flickr and set the more risque of them to be viewable only by my friends, when something struck me that's been brewing in the back of my mind. I practically live in my feed reader for consuming content - that coupled with email, podcasts (itself a type of feed), and Google aggregated news is how I drink from the firehouse of information overload these days. I have accounts at a few social networks, but don't regularly visit them, instead, for example, choosing to subscribe to friends' MySpace or FaceBook blogs with my feed reader. So, how am I handling semi-private bits of information (such as Flickr photos only visible to friends)? I'm not.

This seems to be done in many ways by a lot of services (viewing private pictures and blog entries from friends on social networks or shared pictures), but I don't have a universal, ideal way of consuming non-public information from friends. If you use a feed reader then you're notified of all public information that a source emits. But, what if I publish a new set on Flickr with some pictures marked as only for "Friends" (in this case, friends would mean everyone on Flickr who I have marked as a friend). The feed reader would need to be aware of this, and pull in my Friend's pictures.

Constrained to this example, there seems to be a few general pieces to this:

  • There would need to be a universal authentication service and a universal social network, relationship mechanism. For the former, maybe OpenID (barring security concerns) or large, consolidated corporation accounts like those from Google, Passport Windows Live, or Yahoo could be used. For the latter, maybe Open Social.
  • Sources like Flickr would need to support the social network standard.
  • The feed reader should be able to tell that I'm this account on Flickr and be able to signal to Flickr that I am me and hand display my friends' photos.

I'm sure the purely technical mechanisms exist today to do this, but at least I don't feel like I'm there yet practically. It's just exciting for me realizing what potential applications of such technologies lie ahead and how thinks might be (of course things are already amazing).

And I'm probably making too much of it anyway. After all, you can just go to individual sites and view whatever you want after logging in, but that doesn't seem very scaleable in the long run, and I don't sense that the flow of information will slow anytime soon either. And it can be at least a little confusing wrapping your head around social networking. Like my Twitter friend Shey said, we need more social media interpreters.

How do you handle this?

Comments (5) Apr 3, 2008

Comments

April 3. 2008 03:55

Sergey

Maan, this is one boring geeky blog! And I still have to monitor it, cause I'm waiting for your Nietzsche post! Frown Write about something non-computer related! Even MotoGP will do ) Or how you hate Christians and eat babies...

As for your idealistic posted idea: the keyword is "universal". Nobody likes to lose the full control and share: remember format wars or Kosovo. I guess, the best, that could be done right now - to create something like mint for blogs. In Russia they worked on such project called blogistan.ru, but I didn't hear from them for quite some time (hell, maybe it's working already )).

As for the private pics question: Private galleries with passwords worked fine for me in the past. The downside, of course, you must remember all people you want to show it to and provide them with the link and password, but I think it's still better, than make all of them to create Flikr accounts.

Cheers,

Sergey

April 3. 2008 05:09

Derek

Thanks for the constructive(?) criticism. ) I'm trying to think what a Mint for blogs would look like. Since Mint aggregates financial transactions, wouldn't this be equivalent to a feed reader?

Derek

April 4. 2008 12:41

Sergey

Hey! I was going to answer your question yesterday, but you obviously didn't come )
It's not like RSS reader, cause it understands all the different functionality every blog has and knows how to work with it from one place (e.g., groups of friends).

Sergey

April 4. 2008 20:11

Derek

This makes sense to me now, but perhaps is a bit clunky. With Mint, you must give separate logins and passwords for each financial service that you wish for it to consume data from. In my experience, it's worked pretty well (although sometimes I have to re-enter my credentials because it might have a problem contacting a bank or my password might expire), but the authentication mechanism is not universal and if Mint is compromised, then you have a lot of other account information that is stolen too (however, if universal authentication is used e.g. OpenID, then the consequences of it being compromised would be drastic also).

Derek

April 6. 2008 07:32

Derek

Are the social network equivalents of Mint services such as http://socialthing.com/, http://spokeo.com/, and http://friendfeed.com/? Sort of, but could be better? http://aaronmentele.com/2008/04/03/aggregated-you/

Derek

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October 11. 2008 06:24