Tribe drop FOAF
Julian Bond
http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/34fb1a79-351d-4251-8318-829623c1c9cb
Tribe was one of the early SNs to support and produce FOAF. The founders
left. An aggregator appeared that read that data and republished it.
Tribe members got upset about their data appearing elsewhere on the web.
The Tribe developers decided to deal with the storm by simply removing
the code.
There are similarities here with Facebook. FB introduce the Activity
Feed. They put in RSS. The RSS gets read, aggregated and republished. FB
members kick up a storm about the perceived loss of privacy. FB kill the
RSS.
My view on all this.
- It's hard to explain to members what exactly is happening. They're
just beginning to understand RSS, but FOAF is confusing.
- If it's visible publicly in HTML, then it ought to be visible publicly
in a more structured form.
- If it's not visible publicly in HTML you have to be very careful about
what is exposed in structured form.
- You need to give members an opt out, some times at field level from
having their data visible.
- Private data used by the individual concerned can leak out and become
public. See here Private RSS feeds ending up being globally searchable
in public readers.
- Getting the licenses right and enforcing them is hard. What does
"re-publish" mean? We're happy with Google to index our pages and show
abstracts and cached versions. But apparently we're not happy for an
unknown site to index our contacts and profiles and show abstracts.
There's a polarisation here between Privacy denyers and Privacy
Fanatics. One group relishes the exposure and actively uses the lack of
privacy for personal branding and reputation development. The other
wants to be able to participate in internet based services but remain
effectively anonymous. Obviously there's shades of grey in the middle.
But it's sad to see the second group forcing decisions that ultimately
reduce the value of those services largely because they don't understand
what's happening and had a mistaken view of how much privacy they had in
the first place.
--
Julian Bond E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
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Your Mileage May Vary
Steven Greenberg
Sorry to be dense, but I looked through the thread and didn't see any
mention of Tribe dropping FOAF. Was there a press release?
On Mar 24, 2008, at 5:15 AM, Julian Bond wrote:
>
> See here
> http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/
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Julian Bond
09:45:44
>Sorry to be dense, but I looked through the thread and didn't see any
>mention of Tribe dropping FOAF. Was there a press release?
Sorry, here's the other thread.
http://brainstorm.tribe.net/thread/b21159ad-f181-4e34-852f-10c46fe3cc1d
http://people.tribe.net/tjcrowley says
FOAF is gone. I removed it entirely. as a result, though, I am
investigating implementing iCal or vCal for events, and vCard for
people.
--
Julian Bond E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ skype:julian.bond?chat
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