Blogs as social networks

December 27th, 2007

Social networks in their current state have a problem: they are centralized and isolated from each other. Our identity is split all around the net.
From all these “profiles” that we have, blogs are the most open ones. No matter where we host our blogs, we can still build blogrolls and “follow” other people using feeds. But blogs are still in their infancy - we don’t even have a uniform way of tracking comments!
I predict that blogging will evolve in a way that will make it a good alternative distributed social network. We already have most of the ingredients - open standards such as HTTP, OpenID, Atom and OpenSocial - but we need to glue them together and build something consistent that has the chances to become a de facto standard. DiSo seems to go in that direction.
I’m waiting for the day where I can have all the Facebook’s features (and can install OpenSocial apps) inside Wordpress.

posted by Ionuţ Bizău at 2007-12-27 14:38 & filed under Ideas, Web |


2 Comments to “Blogs as social networks”

  1. March 3rd, 2008 at 7:12
    justin said:

    hi there,

    this is a short post packed full of very big ideas.

    i’m really interested in your remark that ‘blogs don’t even have a uniform way of tracking comments’.

    i’m doing some work/thinking about this at the moment and if you had some time to expand on this thought, it would be fantastic.

    my sense is that comments are themselves crucial items of information… however they are dispersed, isolated and more to the point… un-aggregated. however there is tremendous value in this aggregated data…

    you come across any solutions in this area?

    all the best….. justin

  2. March 4th, 2008 at 20:09
    Ionuţ Bizău said:

    Hi Justin, “tracking comments” is a link, click it.

    @Myself I guess I should change the way links are displayed. I’m thinking too much about usability, but not following simple principles. :-)

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