Conscious, minimalist, neo-luddite perspectives on nonprofit technology.
7th August 2007

A goodbye to Facebook and LinkedIn?

posted in Nonprofit Tech, Open Standards, Technology Zen |

I’ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. (The content centered ones, like flickr, del.icio.us and our own Social Source Commons, are a different animal.) I’ve been playing with LinkedIn for probably a year, Facebook only for a couple of months. It has been fun, in many ways, but I’ve not figured out the utility for me in terms of my work, although others have had a better time of it. But, something has always been nagging me about them, especially Facebook. In some comments in a post of mine about Facebook, someone mentioned the article “Facebook is the new AOL” and I also mentioned an article I’d read asking how open is Facebook, really?

Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens”. Even though it is true that anyone can join either network, the data in them is limited only to those who join, and join networks and have friends.

I’ve always been an advocate of open data and open standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street. Wired says:

Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

I’ve been slowly but surely realizing that the time and energy I’m putting into Facebook is likely benefiting Facebook more than it is benefiting me. Yeah, it’s fun that there is a great mix of people that I can keep track of (and they can keep track of me) - that’s the part of the equation that’s hard to find elsewhere.

So I’ve decided to, for now, keep my accounts, but dramatically curb my time with Facebook and LinkedIn, and spend more time exploring the ways I can use truly open technologies to do some of the same things. There are some great tips in this Wired article. And I’ll also be experimenting with the XHTML Friends Network, which looks like an interesting start on an open way to connect people.

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There are currently 7 responses to “A goodbye to Facebook and LinkedIn?”

I'd love your comments on my post!

  1. 1 On August 8th, 2007, Mike T. said:

    Privacy of data especially for a business social network is very important to most of linkedin and facebooks users. That why the “walled gardens” are great to have, it protects your privacy so when someone google’s you they wont pull up any inappropriate material that you’ve posted.

  2. 2 On August 8th, 2007, admin said:

    Well, privacy from whom? I guess if you want privacy from casual observers, then a “walled garden” works. But once you put that data out there, and you have contacts who can see it, you’ve lost control of that data - any of your contacts could make that data about you public. Also, it depends on the privacy policies of the network provider.

    Truth be told, there is nothing on my LinkedIn or Facebook profiles that isn’t public knowledge, except who my contacts are. But I imagine that’s not necessarily true of everyone.

  3. 3 On August 9th, 2007, KJ said:

    Hi, I floated over from NTEN. You might want to keep your eye on The Appleseed Project. It’s supports a distributed social networking, uh, network. I haven’t had the chance to contribute, and I couldn’t get the code running (it’s still under heavy development), but I’m pretty excited about it. Even if this particular implementation doesn’t get off the ground, the idea is a good one, and something I hope will take of in the future.

  4. 4 On August 11th, 2007, Ruby Sinreich said:

    I’m too much of a junkie to give up my social networks right now, but I completely share your concerns, Michelle, especially given that I am a big proponent of openID and microformats. Are there any social networking platforms that are using open standards now?

  5. 5 On August 24th, 2007, The Better Scoial Network said:

    YUWIE…

    Come join YUWIE…

  6. 6 On August 24th, 2007, admin said:

    Um, explain to me how Yuwie is more open? It just seems mostly a pretty lame attempt at grabbing users by promising to pay them. I don’t like schemes like that (although I guess its a bit more honest - it’s clear that money is being made in the number of eyeballs - and I guess some of it is making it back to the users.

  7. 7 On September 1st, 2007, Joe said:

    It seems to me that open social networking protocols are definitely the way forward. Thanks for the clear, interesting posts - there’s not much about right now!

    I think though, that even if technical requirements (protocols etc) are met, the other big challenge is to package it in a way accessible to mainstream users. Apps like Wordpress are far more straightforward than they used to be - so perhaps we’re not so far off?

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