September 4th, 2007 |
Published in
Community, Emerging Technology, Friends, Social Networks
Steve Rubel had an interesting post a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been holding onto to consider. He postulates that the Web Changes How We Define Friendships. Steve makes some compelling points about the drive towards quantity versus quality when you start participating in social networks.
I have a different theory. I believe that social networks are not changing the way we define friends. Our close friends are the ones for whom we never needed social networking tools in the first place. Our friends are the ones who know who we are, have been to our homes, and who have refrigerator privileges*.
What social networks see to be able to do is help us better track our acquaintances. I think there is a stigma attached to the word acquaintance. We think of acquaintances as cool relationships. Distant relationships that mean little. In fact, they mean a lot.
I have acquaintances who I greet warmly whenever I see them or correspond with them. I don’t know them intimately, but I know them well enough to want to know how they are doing and what they are up to.
Perhaps social networks will change our definition of friendship, but if they do, it will because we were never comfortable with the word acquaintance and because word acquaintance is too long to fit nicely into our common language and UI designs.
* Refrigerator privileges is an idea I read about in Never Eat Alone defining the friendships that you have where the person feels free to raid your refrigerator. The idea in the book is that we need more friends with refrigerator privileges. I couldn’t agree more.
September 4th, 2007 |
Published in
Bookmarks
-
37Signals Book on development. I didn’t realize it was all available online now without buying it.
-
Judo development
-
Portland group that helps entrepreneurs and statups
-
Mobile payment services
-
PayPal’s alternative method for mobile playment
-
Good list of attributes someone needs to facilitate community.
-
“Yahoo executives there were saying that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail both have the rudiments of a profound social network. Each has hundreds of millions of members, and each company has access to information that could be used to construct the kindof “social g
-
All of the reasons to not do a startup
-
More details on the Google Phone. Linux, web browser like iPhone, etc.
-
-
-
Public relations tracking
-
-
Good way of encouraging visitors to subscribe
-
Very interesting new ecommerce product. Very polished, but still beta
-
Wow. I had read all of the press, but hadn’t watched the video yet. They really are making a iPhone-like clone.
-
Wow! That’s brilliant image resizing techniques.
-
Nice date picker
-
SSOs would benefit from this.
-
“Many of today’s web users have connections with asymmetrical bandwidth, having download speeds 2 to 5 times faster than their upload speeds. This means that in some cases, HTTP request size is a more important factor than the size of the server’s re
-
September 3rd, 2007 |
Published in
Business, Emerging Technology, Standards
Despite all of my reservations about OpenID, I finally found a compelling use for the technology today.
I signed up for Highrise by 37Signals today. I’m going to use it for personal contact management which I have a deeper interest in after reading Never Eat Alone.
The challenge is that I already have an account for Basecamp (another 37Signals product) and wasn’t looking forward to managing multiple accounts. OpenID to the rescue.
37Signals allows you to link multiple accounts—personal and business—to the same OpenID login. After a quick registration at MyOpenID.com, I was ready to sign up for Highrise and link my current Basecamp account. It was painless and has been a real boon.
The major benefit is the way that 37Signals has implemented their OpenID support. The OpenBar interface makes it worth the time to sign up with an OpenID provider. This is another example of where 37Signals should be an example for other developers.
At the end of the day, selecting the OpenID vendor turned out to be very simple. MyOpenID.com is a product of JanRain a Portland-based company whose founders were involved in the development of OpenID.
Local? Developed the technology? It was a no brainer.