Re: Draft Final Report - first half ready for XG review

Hi Harry,

please find my 2 cents below. 

Overview, members' conclusion:
- I'd leave out hints on /how/ to solve things ("build identity and portability into the browser"). Better stay neutral to solutions for now
- I'd add a point here that notes that there is also a commercial reason hindering the Social Web (and its standards and adoption) from taking off

Overview, recommendations:
- 5 seems to be a far too concrete recommendation compared to 1 and 2. Also, 3 and 4 are more concrete than 1 and 2. 5 could be softened to collaborative workspaces on the Social Web in general, for instance.

 State of the Social Web in 2010:
- "The "list of friends", that is ubiquitous on the Social Web": that's meant to be social networks, I guess? (Referring to Boyd's definition of SNS)
- "social networking sites" remains unintroduced until paragraph 4 ("While the world remained..."). Also, an explanation is missing of what a SNS is compared to the Social Web
- I would remove the whole paragraph 4 since it confuses the reader more than that it helps. E.g., "overall a tendency towards both moving social networks profiles": that is an emergent side effect which is caused by users needing to flock with their friends. Much more important to explain here is to draw a SOTA of how and why people are using SNSs, and the issue with data silos (as done in the subsequent paragraph). 
- "However, in 2009 there seemed to be little concern about issues of privacy and portability except amongst those deeply immersed in designing social networking platforms, with only 20 percent of users listing privacy as a primary concern motivating their choice in Social Web platforms." Not true. See Sören's and my (21.07.) emails about this issue (Privacy Paradox)
- In general, I'd add a providers' point of view to this section since it causes many of the issues we are facing. E.g., the provider's data-drivenness (cf. O'Reilly's definition of Web2.0 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/ tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html) aiming at gaining a DB that's hard to reproduce by competitors. A felt opening up of data silos is not caused by any altruism: FB introducing social features like a Like button is in the first line a company aiming to reach out to the Web passing its platform's borders.

The Problem of Walled Gardens: fine!

The Social Web Vision:
- the itemization switches focus between online and offline world
- first 3 paragraphs are about privacy only. Surely it's a major issue to enable users with control over their privacies, but independence of providers and the meta-sns architecture are equivalent aspects.
- I think that the vision is not yet sufficiently outlined. Some aspects are touched too briefly and then sketched by examples. I am not sure if a novice reader will get the point. I like the social features scenario of the last but 2 paragraph ("Additionally, traditional web sites and services can utilize the same features"). Maybe we should put more effort in explaining that. How about the last but one graphic I made for my article at RWW (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_of_identities_making_machine-accessible_people_data.php). It illustrates a separation of IDPs and social features. (The last figure shows an interlinkage between several IDPs via social graphs.) However, the vision should tell the story that is very well illustrated in the following section.

The Terminology:
- the icon for Social Applications looks like the delicious logo which is pretty confusing.
- the rest (Social Web User and Profiles etc) is very well done and illustrated!

Use-Cases and Frameworks for the Social Web: stopped reading here for now.

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
Alexander Korth
www.twitter.com/alexkorth

Received on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 10:02:42 UTC