Re: State of Social Web Update

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Christine Perey <cperey@perey.com> wrote:
> hi Harry,
>
> I would like to put into question the second half of the first statement in
> this section of the final report. In particular my concern is with the
> reason the document attributes to a "surge" in interest in Social Web (I
> could even question if there is a surge of interest outside the academic
> community, but I will abstain from that for the moment).
>
> The sentence finishes...
> fueled largely by the discontent with existing social networking sites's
> terms-of-service as regards the privacy of data.
>
> I believe that this is over emphasizing a hot topic in the blogosphere but
> if you were to ask a dozen people on the street, you would not find them
> overly concerned.

Well, possibly. But the work by Soren et al. showed about 20 percent
of people were interested, and I'm sure this number has gone up since
Facebook's privacy settings have been in the front-pages of the NY
Times for the last few months :)

In particular, at least for me, privacy is one of the most important
reasons for committing to an open and distributed social web. In
particular, e-mail is obviously broken. It was designed for a world of
computer labs, and our most intimate and private thoughts are being
passed around in essentially clear text that any one - including some
government agencies with rather dangerous human rights records  - can
read. And government agencies and businesses are communicating their
most important data in a fundamentally unsafe manner as well.

To me, as the younger generations now communicate primarily over
social networks, social networking messaging will eventually replace
e-mail. The key would be to at least provide the option to have such
communcation encrypted from end-to-end. This would be revolutionary,
and is both an important feature for everyone.


>
> I don't want to cast doubt as to if this is somewhere on the list of
> reasons. Yes, privacy is on the list. It is ONE of many "constraints"
> imposed (or "liberties on the part of platform providers) which users
> (members of communities) could be feeling.
>
> Others, some of which you elude to later in the paragraph, could be found
> here:
> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/SocialWebFrameworks2#Social_Graph_Management_Today
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Christine
>
> Spime Wrangler
>
> cperey@perey.com
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>
> On 6/29/2010 1:26 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
>>
>> I've added this wiki-page with some notes (lots still to do!) on the
>> state of the social web in 2010.
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/wiki/StateOfSocialWeb
>>
>> Feel free to give it a read, edit, and hack away!
>>
>>
>>
>

Received on Thursday, 1 July 2010 00:03:09 UTC