Brad Fitzpatrick (of LiveJournal
and memcached
fame) is starting an intriguing attempt at freeing your social life from the clutches of MySpace and Facebook. White paper:
He wants to take your network of friendships that you've defined on the web, and instead of tying that in to a particular website, make it open for any website to use. If you signed up to MyCoolNewSite.com (for example), and plugged in your access token or whatever, it would tell you which of your friends from other sites are on this new one, and you could instantly get going.
Instead of being tied to just the huge social sites, you could participate in a world of targeted, rich, local and interest sites. Estrip would know about your friends (if you let it), and you could always count on not missing anyone or having to reenter all your info everywhere, or bugging your friends to sign up for every new thing.
It would all just happen, decentralized and under your control.
I love Flickr
but I hate that my photography network of contacts is bound up in it and I can't spill that over to other places. I love Estrip, but feel like it's maybe tucked away from the rest of my online life instead of being the center of my personal presence on the web.
Facebook (Flickr, MySpace, etc) right now is a walled off corner of the Internet, like AOL used to be. It's nice and clean and usable - but who wants to be living inside AOL 2.0? It is pulling everything in like a black hole.
The internet is meant to be messy and glorious. Why shouldn't you or I set the boundaries as we see fit?
