Social-Networking

Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer. ...

For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. MyActionAid Launched about a year ago. Built on plone which let them use out of the box tricks like forums, photo sharing, RSS, plus is open source so actionaid can re-invest in community. ...

A number of people have been linking to Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation at the Web Community Forum (I think I found it via Beth Kanter). It’s a good overview of the pros, cons and options for using facebook to promote a cause, campaign or brand, and well worth some time if that’s your focus. There are two pieces from his presentation that I wanted to pull out. The first appears to be a recurring theme in his work on web strategy, centered on the acronym POST. That breaks down into: ...

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling. Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site. ...

Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment. The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails’ testing framework are introduced as they’re used. The style isn’t test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance. ...

The rumours of MySpace launching a platform or API have been floating for quite some time, but now as reported on the O’Reilly Radar they have been confirmed. Over the next two months they are going to increase third-party access to their site. First, they are going to highlight the thousands of widgets that have been on their site for years now. This should be released in the next couple of weeks. I am assuming that it will go beyond the FIM’s Spring Widget Gallery. Second, they are going to offer an API for applications to all developers. However, these applications are going to be sandboxed initially and 1-2 million users will have access to them. If the users deem the applications safe and useful they’ll be available to all users. Developers will be able to advertise in their applications. ...