CC Photo by heartbeaz on Flickr

The idea of “social networking” exploded in the second half of this past decade, with MySpace becoming a household name, and everyone and their mother (quite literally) having a Facebook profile. It was extremely appealing: never stay out of touch with all of your friends, because they’re sharing their whole life with you, even if you can’t be there in person. I got caught up in the craze like all of us, but I soon discovered that, to me, at least, full-blown social networking was a passing fad. Perhaps I overestimated just how much I cared about every mundane detail of my friends’ lives. And considering all of the initial skepticism about Twitter, I’m probably not the only one.

Let me tell you my story, and how I came to this conclusion:

Ever since I actually started talking to people I met on deviantART, I too was enthralled by the ability to stay in touch with people I knew and cared about (especially because, in my case, most of my close friends at the time weren’t people I’d met away-from-keyboard). When I came out of my adolescent basement-dwelling phase and got some actual flesh and blood friends, this tendency translated seamlessly. Most of them were on Livejournal, and I subscribed to all of their blogs on my Friends Page; soon enough, I began to start writing posts of my own every once in a while.

It became a daily, or sometimes quad-hourly, ritual to read through my Friends Page — basically a blog which aggregated all of my friends’ posts in reverse chronological order, except there was no way of marking individual posts as “read”, so it was often a difficult experience — and each read-through gave me journal entries of varying length showcasing what was going on in my friends’ lives, what they were thinking about, or whatever ridiculous quiz or meme they’d stumbled upon that day. My journal was about the same, running the gamut from stories about school and work to my thoughts on the latest video games to “bawwww he doesn’t love me so I’m gonna paint my nails black and listen to Fall Out Boy” embarrassments. Writing those and reading my friends’ was one of the things I enjoyed greatly.

When Facebook became popular, I tried to get into it, but never really did. Perhaps it was because it was mostly populated by people from my school, whom I wasn’t extremely close with, and the members of my big dysfunctional family of geeks and furries were all sticking with Teh El Jay. The fact of the matter was that all the people on Facebook just weren’t involved with my life enough that I really cared about the mundane details of their lives.

(As an aside, the time much of my closer friends began to start using Facebook was about the time my mom did too, and no offense mom, but that’s not exactly an encouragement to start posting more of my personal information and thoughts there)

In January 2009, I rebuilt Plankhead.com (before that it was a Google Sites-built abomination that was so horrible, not even The Internet Archive gave a shit about it) as a place to talk about my filmmaking and futile attempts at projecting a professional persona. As I began to blog here, I started to get more heavily involved in blogger culture, and finally got around to making a serious effort at scrounging up a good RSS reading list. Feedly did wonders for me in this regard — it recommended a ton of sources that I’d never have found on my own, no matter how loudly Robert Scoble screams about the 2010 Web, or how egregiously MG Siegler misuses intermediate punctuation in a failed attempt to sound sophisticated. Lo and behold, there was a whole breadth of information about what was actually happening in the world! This was interesting! Stories about what shiny gadgets are coming out next year, articles doing the kind of artistic critique of video games I’d only dreamed of in the past, headlines about important news going on all over the world, and proclamations that we will all be immortals who have sex with robots in the future and how awesome that will be.

To be honest, it started to make hearing about how incredibly uggggh my friends’ midterms were for them a bit less appealing. I still wanted to keep in touch, but in lieu of slogging through the Friends Page every day, I simply went through the convoluted process of adding all of them to my RSS reader. One. By. One. You’d think it would be simple, but Livejournal has really user-unfriendly RSS feeds.

Now, I don’t get the chance to read every single article that shows up in my RSS reader. So, needless to say, some of my friends’ journal entries fell by the wayside. And I didn’t miss a thing. I saw them in person, and not having kept track of every detail of their lives didn’t inhibit our interactions one bit. In fact, dare I say they enhanced them, because we had so many more potential avenues of conversation.

Perhaps this is why I couldn’t get particularly enthralled by Facebook in its early days, before it started to turn into the Twitter-clone-meets-America-Online that it is today. Nice photos of you at a party. Do I care? No. No, not really. I mean no offense, it’s just not that interesting.

Now, if you post a link to that photo with a tiny bit of description attached to it, then maybe I’ll take a look, if the description is interesting. This is why Twitter appeals to me: it’s simple, distilled, and to the point. If I’m not interested in what you have to say or show me, it’s only 140 characters (although would it kill them to give us 200?). In general, instead of an in-depth analysis of what college classes they’d like to take, I would much prefer my friends share with me a link to a great article they found somewhere; it’s probably much more interesting and better written.

It’s funny, just as I finished that paragraph, one of the people I’m following on Twitter just said this:

• @Astolpho: what’s awesome about twitter is nobody can post a big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text rant with it. #
• @Astolpho: I don’t think I’ve ever once seen anybody preface their tweets with WARNING: RANT MODE ENGAGED and thank god #

The irony of including that in this very big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text is not lost on me, by the way. But if you’ve read this far, you’re at least enjoying it.

Of course, perhaps this isn’t as self-indulgent a big long bullshit wall of text as it may seem, because I don’t think I’m alone in this mentality. Devoting such an extraordinary amount of attention to your friends on the Internet, for me and many people, cheapens the personal relationships you have with them away from the keyboard.

There’s a good reason Facebook wanted to be more like Twitter: it’s so much better, overall, to pay less attention to what’s happening to your friends and more to what they’re looking at and want to show you. The occasional bit of personal reflection or drunken party photo album has its place, but there’s much more to be gained from social web sites and services if your friends become footnotes; when, for example, Bob links you to an article, you’re paying more attention to the article than you are to Bob, but subconsciously you make the connection between the article and Bob. Next time you see him, you and Bob have something new to talk about. Or, of course, you can reply to Bob’s link right then and there, and engage in a text-based conversation about something that’s decidedly not self-centered.

So perhaps the title I gave this big long bullshit wall-of-text is confusing now: how is this “antisocial” networking if it’s just a more socially fulfilling use of social networks? That’s because there’s one more facet to this, and one that may be more unique to me than the other things I’ve rambled about thus far: the most interesting stuff often comes from people you barely know.

Am I friends with Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin? No, but I’m fascinated by what they share with me and the rest of the world. Do Patrick LaForge and I know each other personally? No, but I’m often interested in what he’s looking at, and sometimes he’s likewise interested in what I link to. Oh, and that Astolpho person I quoted up above? I barely have any idea who the hell he is, he’s just someone who followed me one day. In fact, I had to Google him just now to verify that he was a “he” because I didn’t remember offhand. But he says and shares interesting things, so I keep track. I’m sure many people could find joy in a similar situation to mine.

Regardless of whether you’re a seeker of interesting stuff whether you’re personally acquainted with the person sharing it or not, or someone who wants to know what his or her circle of friends thinks is amusing today, the hardcore keep-track-of-all-your-friends-blogs-and-photos-and-rants is not something I see having a wide appeal for much longer, at least outside of shy teenagers with too much time on their hands. Perhaps that’s why all of our moms are getting into Facebook now: socializing on the Internet has grown up.

But I prefer talking in person, thanks.

>From: reQall
>Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 11:53:24 +0000
>To: <Withheld so you won't spam my mom>
>Subject: Added: Look at Joe's gold in the Swiss Bank....
>
>Added to reQall:
>Look at Joe's gold in the Swiss Bank.

That’s not exactly what I said. I said ‘look at Joe’s goals in the system.’ Whatever…

The botched transcription touches on the suspicious. If you decide to hop on reQall, make sure you don’t slur your words reminding yourself to “show up at” your son’s football game. An innocent mistake by the system could cause a suicide bomber panic at Giants stadium.

My MacBook Pro died. Well, okay, it still works, except for the graphics card. So if I could figure out the keyboard shortcut to turn on the screen reader, I’m sure I could pretend to be blind. Actually, no, I would really like a monitor, so it’s unusable for me. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t quite mass-producing parts for 2007 MacBook Pros anymore, so it’s on back order. The guy at CAVA told me to expect it by “the end of February”. Loooooovely.

Fortunately, a lot of my stuff is stored on the web and external drives, and I can still pull any essentials off my Mac with a convoluted process involving holding down the “T” key for a very long time. So it’s time, for at least a little while, to free myself from being dependent on one computer. I have a 2 gigabyte USB stick on my keychain for the bare essentials; for everything else, it’s time to live in the cloud.

Every day from now until I get my laptop back, I’ll be babbling about my experiences using any computer I can find, but with as much of my own settings and stuff as I can access. Hit the jump for day one…

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Around 5 PM I got the call about my part being back ordered. I called Apple to see if maybe, possibly, could they tell me if a local Apple Store had it in stock without me needing a 4 AM Genius Bar appointment just to possibly be told that it isn’t. Nope. Well, okay then.

Fortunately, I have an Android phone (yes, it’s the G1, what other Android phones are out yet?), armed with browsers of Steel and the best mobile email app ever. What it doesn’t have, though, is an office suite (or Google Docs support), screenwriting software (or Zhura support), a decent MSN/Yahoo IM client, or battery life. While it’s likely to get Flash before the iPhone, it doesn’t have that either right now, which means I still need a computer to get any Photoshop capabilities at all. So I grabbed a USB stick which I’d gotten for Holidaynakuhmas and brought it to the Monkey Bar, which is SVA Studentese for “the student center.”

The Monkey Bar has three G5 iMacs. This would be great if they had more than 256 megabytes of RAM. Opening more than a couple tabs in Safari made them cry tears of blood. I was only using Safari to find a Mac version of Portable Firefox, which I downloaded from FreeSMUG, whoever they are. This did not help at all. Now browsing the web still ate 75% of the memory and often 90% of the CPU as a result, but at least I hadAdblock.

From the same people I grabbed Portable Adium, which crashed spectacularly when I tried to run it next to Firefox. Then I remembered I have a Meebo account so why bother? I also grabbed their version of Cyberduck; haven’t touched that yet, but I don’t expect to on one of those machines.

But I had all my Firefox extensions, especially Feedly, so all was good when the computer would respond. All my passwords and cookies get saved to my USB stick, so that makes life easier. Now I just have to find a way to sync it with the Windows version.

All this isn’t very cloudly, though; I’m talking about local apps a lot, even if they are on a USB stick. Well, that’s because so far not much is new and exciting. I do all my screenwriting on Zhura and have for a while. I’ve used Google Docs before for a lot of things, and I often connected to Meebo to IM people whenever I had to boot into Windows. And I’m posting this via the web.

I expect that I’ll be uploading anything that won’t fit on my USB stick to some kind of web server…like, um, Plankhead.com. So, let’s make that my first discovery…

Discovery From The Cloud:

Replace big hard drives with a personal web server.

I’m sure there are tons of other services that let you upload stuff to a private area and share it in a public area, all for less money. But I’m paying for unlimited space and bandwith already, so why not?

I’ll try and figure out a new thing which I can do in the cloud instead of on a local machine each day. The ultimate goal is to make every computer I find nothing more than a “terminal”, a gateway to all my stuff on the web. Like Uplink but without the bank hacking and constant techno music.

I still miss my Mac, though.

Personally, I would like to brutally murder the term “Web 2.0″ with katanas and fire. It annoys me. But regardless, I sorta kinda understand that when people say “Web 2.0″ they mean the era of the web where user-generated content (read: comments threads) became an essential part of everything. Also that whole social interaction stuff. But in the back of all these Web 2.0-loving people’s minds is the question, “What is Web 3.0?” Again, I have a profound moral and biological(?) objection to putting a version number after “web,” but I’m going to humor everyone and say what is absolutely essential if we ever want to get started on whatever “Web 3.0″ is: OpenID.

But the problem with OpenID is that it just identifies you, and perhaps passes along some little bits of info like your name and email address. Every one of those individual sites, whether they take OpenID or not, still requires you to maintain friends lists on all of them. And there’s no central hub to see what friends are doing all across the web. FriendFeed does not count, you still have to friend people again there too. If I use my OpenID at a site, and a bunch of my friends have done the same, I don’t want to go around adding them as friends there again. They’re my friends no matter where I go.

Then again, some people you meet on the web might be more “clients” or “contacts” or something than “friends,” per se, so keeping these relationships intact across the web would encourage people to stop “friending” everyone they see, and simply add them to the appropriate group; now you can finally show those photos of you getting drunk and stripping only to people you really trust. So it’s more of a “relationships” system.

Now, all this user-generated social stuff (Web Two Point Freaking Oh) didn’t really take off until the basics of the web, like HTML, were finally made (mostly) compatible with everything. So in order to move on to the next big trend in the web (Web 3.0, if you REALLY must), we have to make social networking work all across the web. So, let’s figure out how this OpenID-based (or complimentary) interpersonal relationships system would work.

First, let’s give it a name. Do you have any suggestions, Helvetica Bold 10 Dark Red?

How about OpenRelationships?

Hmm, uh, no, I’m not sure that’s the best connotation. You know what, just OpenID Friends works. Here’s what it should be…

OpenID (or some other open identification system) providers will not only keep track of stuff like a person’s name, email address, and anything else another website might need, but also Friends data. This would essentially be a small text-based database thing. I’m going to write an example in YAML because YAML is the best thing ever.

OpenID Friends
---
Mom:
    -ID: examplemom28.openidexample.com
    -Groups:
        -Family
Greg:
    -ID: xxmytorturedsoulxx.openwound.emo
    -Groups:
        -Family
        -Best Friends
    -Note |
          Brother.
Tracy:
    -ID: tracy-mclean.internetcompany.biz
    -Groups:
        -Colleagues
        -Best Friends
        -Secret Lovers
    -Note |
          My secretary.

And so on. You can add friends by just clicking an “add” button on a site where you see them, or by typing their OpenID into your provider’s website. Then you give them a nickname, put them into your personal groups, and make notes about them. Perhaps there’d be an additional section at the end with people who have added you to their friends list, but you haven’t added back yet. And then every website which can take your OpenID will interpret your friends list and act accordingly. Either a website would send notifications (like, “you got a comment!”) back to your provider, who would then inform you, or just email you directly, depending on your personal preferences. And that’s it.

That’s it?

Yes, Helvetica Bold 10 Dark Red. That’s it.

So that’s all it’ll take to fix the problems with social networking?

Um, yes.

Why hasn’t this been done yet?

I was just about to ask the same thing.

UPDATE CONT’D: PortableContacts seems to have all the necessary components. It seems more complex than it is, and definitely needs someone to write a human-readable usage guide, but other than that it’s rather nice. Why the hell is it still in draft? Implement this. Now. And put it on Wikipedia, dammit, it practically doesn’t exist without an article there.