I've mentioned in the past how I felt Facebook is truly the social network positioned the best. Let's go ahead and make that a "was."

I wasn't going to hop on the hate bandwagon. In fact, I actually thought their new stalker features were fairly clever, if nothing else, original. Seeing how poorly their user community reacted to the change makes me wonder if they really bothered to run it by anyone though. Say it with me guys, Usability Tests. Not only would their users give them interesting feedback on their thoughts regarding features, they'd probably help them further improve things like the navigation (which I personally think could be better.. just my opinion, of course...).

Anyway, now they're allowing any creepy internet predator guy to create an account and "poke" sorority girls at colleges.? The charm behind Facebook is the exclusivity. The technology, as many have noted, isn't anything special and quite easily re-creatable. How is this going to pane out? I'm not sure, but I'm no longer going to emphatically preach that their going to win the war.

Unless they know something that we don't. I mean, when Netscape made the switch, we knew damn well we were going to piss off anywhere from 20-40% of the user base. It wasn't a profitable enough user base though. So... Here we are.

Somehow I doubt thats the case, and they're really just trying to scale this thing to extremely large numbers. It's not wasn't about the numbers though, it was about the penetration rate amongst college students. And that demographic should be a valuable one, more importantly, college alumni should be a valuable one. Wait 10-15 years when these kids are using Facebook to keep up with old college classmates and find future business partners, and you've got an indispensable tool that can write its own ticket. Killing that off to raise your user count, really just makes you another social network.

Anyway.. I hope they know more than everyone seems to think, and they do now seem to be reaching out to their community. Facebook was the first (and other than LinkedIn, the only) social network to actually impress me. We'll just have to wait and see what moves they make I guess.

Kind of ranty, but, it's been awhile...

Tagging: What most people call tags are really just keywords or categories. Tagging is bottom up, the former are top down. If I write a post (as I'm doing now), it doesn't make sense to me to say that I'm "tagging" it as Blogsmith implies (yeah, I know, I share responsibility for that...) I'm really adding relevant keywords. Tags would be if you, the reader, entered in your own keywords. Author Tags, in my mind, are an oxymoron.
Overall feeling: A misunderstood concept. Buzzword-phobia is bound to kick in.

Clouds: Clouds are cool. Not so much in the "OMG Tags!!1!" sort of way, but more in the "OMG Density!!1!" sort of way. It's a great way to conceptualize relevancy in a storm of mixed data. Trendy, sure, but there is some use there. The alternative way to present such data would be to list and rank, and well.. It's all about the quick glance, ya know?
Overall feeling: Cloudtastic.

Voting: The Wisdom of the Crowds, right? Well, kinda. In a purely theoretical environment where every niche, focus, and person has equal access and say, then sure, wisdom, nay, brilliance of the crowd. Unfortunately in 2.0 land, crowd means clique. When dealing with something like Digg or Netscape, here's how it really works; People sign up, people add friends. People subscribe to a feed of things that their friends are doing. All the sudden, information access is limited -- People aren't viewing all the data in the mix, they're viewing a subset of the data posted by their friends. That data gets votes and makes it way to the top of the page. Unless you have friends who have friends, you have very little voice. That's the reason 10% of digg controls the majority of the content -- the other stuff isn't even necessarily being seen. Digg goes as far as to put a nice green ribbon on each item that a friend as had their hands on, which really only adds to the issue. Doesn't seem like the crowd has a chance, does it? Either way, voting is another form of feedback, and that's *always* a good thing.
Overall feeling: OMG user feedback! It's going to transform media! OMG ...

Hive Mind: A natural, sometimes unfortunate, by-product of poor implementation. It's means to me that we need better interfaces and presentation of concepts. Find ways to wrestle control out of the selected few and into the hands of a larger pool of people. On Netscape, the idea is to, counter intuitively, pay people to help perform this task (anchors). The real curiosity behind paying the bookmarkers (navigators) is that it seems like its sanctioning a clique. The flip side is that it might solve the problem on how to drive participation without content. Anyway... We'll see.
Overall feeling: It's human nature. A "solution" would have to start with acknowledgment and then take it into account.

Social: Social is cool, social is fun, but the vast majority of people will always be at least a tad bit selfish. MySpace helped people find new music, Friendster didn't. Social networks are the platform, not the product. Tons of promise, but over-hyped and not yet applied well in most cases.
Overall feeling: Over used, under applied. Ack! BRB, another friend request...

Rails: Rails is easy enough to help designer type folks code and they love it. It's like giving a 16 year old keys to the Chevette. Rails is a lot of fun to use, but a lot of engineers look at it and see an MVC pattern. Neat. In 1994. When I read about designers saying its the best possible programming "language" (ruby and rails are becoming synonymous), I hope they realize that's like me saying GIMP is the best possible illustration package. Both are *great* projects and can be a tool for many cool things, but let's stop short of calling either revolutionary. Then again, it's young and probably a lot further along than PHP was at its age, so, who knows.
Overall feeling: Too early to say. Trendy? It's right up there with Pog.

Bootstrapping: Maybe I'm too young to remember, but it doesn't seem to me that there was ever a time when this wasn't the way to go. Sure, in the 90s everyone took huge boat loads of cash for their startup, but everyone outside of the echo chamber questioned their super bowl spending patterns. The "new economy" existed then, and I think it still exists now. It just requires you not to be dumb. If you have the means, do it on the cheap and hold on to the pie. Take money for strategy (time to market, partnerships, etc) not false needs. The key difference between now and then are the even lower barriers to entry. Even though I tease Rails, its enabled a whole new wave of "weekend warriors". Thats a good thing, take advantage of it.
Overall Feeling: Seriously. We have a great idea, but I'm going to need tens of millions of dollars to hire 50 of my friends and throw a lot of parties. Expect a P/E of 60 in a year after we go public next month. Social vote tagging, it's going to be huge. Written in rails. Skype me.

Data Ownership: From a consumer point of view, it's my data -- let me do what I'd like, even if that means taking it with me. Right now I'd love to take all my gmail off of gmail and put it somewhere else online. I *love* their service, but I'm too dependent on a "beta" product. It goes down for hours at a time. Can I do this? Sure I can download it to my mail client, but then what? Use a real mail client? Gross. Anyway, this gives traditional players nightmares, but open data initiatives are coming no matter what. Might as well embrace it and build a business plan that keeps it in mind.
Overall feeling: If Emiliano Zapata were digirati, he'd be captain microformat. "I'd rather die on my feet, than let you keep all my data." Heh. That was so cheesy, Gavin's in the bathroom throwing up from his lactose intolerance.

Syndication: Consumers love it. Theres only one problem. Revenue on the web is largely tied to page views. D'oh!
Overall Feeling: The first person to truly figure out this puzzle will be able to buy lots and lots of Pog.

Since I read bloglines.. Thought I'd spread some links of joy.

Links

• Chris Messina says think small - Indeed. (hat tip to Shawn)
• Social Isolation Growing in the U.S. - Excellent conversation fodder.
• Ninja Excuses - More AskANinja greatness
• Senator Ted Stevens on Net Neutrality- It's like he didn't even try to understand what he was talking about. Hopefully that bridge being built in Alaska leads to a library.
  
• ReadWrite takes on Netscape's community Backlash - The thing is, we expect there to be a ton of people who hate the changes. Guesstimations of 20-40% of gosh knows of many users. What's important to remember is that the old Netscape portal was losing massive amounts of traffic and costing AOL a boat load of money. Might as well start fresh. But yes, the backlash from old users has been loud, and we're learning from it which I think is important. Hopefully we'll hit our stride soon enough.
  
• Emurse.com's first official press release - Thanks kelly!
• Social Networking Essays - Guy's links for June 30th
• Screencast Review of Emurse.com - So positive it made me blush ;) Thanks for the kind words!

I have a list I keep of a bunch of different applications for social networks (Yes, I'm incrediably lame...). I see them as insanely powerful, and yet we're left with... MySpace. Like any other internet technology, social networks have been pioneered by smut. Slowly though, it seems people are starting to deliver on the promise of the medium.

Slashdot had a post regarding a new service called Illumio (oh god... I feel some sort of harry potter joke coming on, and I'm not sure how I'll be able to include mike propst) that turns your social network into a knowledge net. Ask a question, and it will seek out an answer through your friends group. There's not much intelligence going on in that scenario, outside of keeping track of who is able to answer what, but it should work decently.

If you're thinking something like this does not have much application or utility, replace the word 'friends' with 'co-workers' and maybe it'll become clear how this kind of approach could really benefit a distributed team or company (one of decent size, at least, bigger than Weblogs, Inc.)

From a technical point of view, there's not much exciting to see. From a "big picture" view of social network applications outside of friendster-clones though, it's kinda fun.