I'm largely of the opinion that Facebook is the epitome of all evil and is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse, a foreshadow of the dark days to come and a tool design by the minions of the devil to suck up time.

Of course, I have an account. I got it to test a Facebook App and then suddenly I had like 6 friends already. And then more people added me and suddenly I was compulsively approving people and adding others because Debrett's don't have a chapter on whether or not it's rude to not friend someone back merely because you want to stop using the blasted service.

It's genius.

Seriously, through accident or design it's the most genius bit of self sustainment since Pokemon (which wore its heart on its sleeve with "Gotta buy^W catch 'em all") or Beanie Babies (limited edition teddy bears - nigh Machiavellian!). And the idea of Facebook apps is inspired - why compete with everything else, make them come to us.

And then suddenly it snowballs and people start organising stuff via Facebook, sharing things via Facebook or only getting in contact with you via Facebook - sometimes it's ex girlfriends. Two of them. From like a decade ago. On the same day. That's just creepy. It's not like they know each other or anything so it can't have been a coordinated attack. I hope. Anyway, I digress.

I had a friend who complained that a sibling attempted to transmit medical records via the medium and it suddenly made me realise - I suspect one fo the reasons why it's so popular is that it's how most normal people expect "The Internet" to work. You know the type of people - use Outlook at work and Hotmail at home and jeopardy quote everything. Who don't know what the difference between "The Web" and "The Internet" is. Who naively expect everything to just work.

And I don't blame them - to them the internet is a commodity, an means to an end, not a joy in and of itself. Like cars there are some people to whom the tinkering with the car is the main thing and some to whom the driving is where it's all at and some people just want a way to getting to work that isn't the bus.

This is how they want their email (for want of another word) to work. They don't need threads or whatnot, they just want one place to go to get everything. No spam, no quoting, everything easy to use and infinitely extendable.

Want to send an invitation to an event with details to the location and photos for before and after? No problem. Want to tag people in the photos and then be told whenever you or your friends are highlighted - it's right there in your feed. It just works and moreover, it just works as expected. "Hell," you say, "Outlook's been doing meeting requests for years" yeah but can Outlook send you an invitation to join a Scrabble game or take a Movie quiz or recruit you into a zombie pirate vampire army ? No. Sure you can send links but it's not the same thing by a long way - it's not tightly integrated and seamless in a way that makes Apple strangely horny and mournful and jealous all at the same time.

I've been pondering if the surprisingly flexible RFC822 format could be moulded into a system that would allow this kind of interaction through smarter email clients but over traditional SMTP and without being tied to one website. Outlook seems to have a good start and multipart/mime messages seem like a good start. Authentication of the remote apps might be a problem but with OAuth and some agreed standard it's not undoable.

Or maybe the answer lies in XMPP or something - I don't think anybody disagrees that whilst SMTP was genius it was never designed with the modern email ecosystem in mind. Without wanting to become a Anti-spam kook it's possible that, without some sort of change, the masses may migrate away from open email standards towards a bright and shiny closed system because for them it's a much better deal and hang the idea of interoperability that we (possibly naively) cherish so dearly.

Oh dear, I've come over all doom and gloom end-is-nigh. And on a nice sunny Friday too. Shame on me.

So, time to 'fess up. Flume does not exists. Which might explain why it's so bad.

About a week or so ago I caught wind of people talking about Flume. There was a "Got Flume?" website and various bloggers posted Delicious links or Twitters and Flickr Photos.

But something seemed wrong. I'm not sure what tipped me off but after a bit of discreet investigation I was almost 100% sure that it was fake and that it was a mildly elaborate joke. A sort of riff on Hype2.0 and the endless beta and invite only culture which, whilst useful to allow gradual ramping up of users to gradually test systems, also serves to artificially inflate the buzz surrounding new sites.

But the invite systems and invite only events such as Foo Camp and various other meetups and lists and forums are inherently elitist. Don't get me wrong - whilst it might seem unfair to people not in the loop, elitist and nepotistic even, a sort of modern old boys network - it's the way of the world and I actually don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. If it makes any difference I'm not in the loop either - I've never been invited to Foo Camp for example. Apparently I'm not nearly hip enough :)

Also, to some extent, it's not a closed system. As long as you're hard working enough, loud enough and self promoting enough it's not too hard to become one of the inner circle (or one of the inner circles) if you so wish. Ok, so that's a vast over simplification but I think it's largely true.

That said it doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with them. Sacred cows make the best steaks, as the say.

So I decided that since Flume didn't exist I could write reviews of it. Bad reviews. Practically unbelievable reviews. And all the facts we're indisputable. They're as true as any other fact about Flume. I tried to put in clues that these were fake reviews - "effluvia" was a big one

Effluvium \Ef*flu"vi*um\, n.; pl. Effluvia.
[L., a flowing out, fr. effluere to flow out. See Effluent, a.]
Subtle or invisible emanation; exhalation perceived by the sense of smell; especially, noisome or noxious exhalation; as, the effluvium from diseased or putrefying bodies, or from ill drainage.
[1913 Webster]

Plus the fact that my user names were principe - a reference to Machiavelli's "Il Principe", and cirving - a reference to Clifford Irving who attempted to hoax the world by claiming he had an authorised biography of Howard Hughes.

I also though Sass as some sort of karma system would be a dead give away but I've heard word that someone else thinks that it's a great name and that they might use it. Which is scary.

What was cool was that only a few of people knew what I was doing but gwire picked up on what I was doing and joined in and a couple of other people started to put up Delicious links and Twitters linking to me and warning people off Flume. The Spool even attempted to start a disinformation campaign to counter my own disinformation campaign. This, to me, was all kinds of awesome.

Sadly the original Flume buzz never got going - apparently Hype2.0 does need some work after all which somewhat undermine my own joke. I did consider starting to astroturf for Flume but, you know, sometimes that's just taking things a little too far. I'm sad, but not that sad.

So there you go. That's the short lived story of Flume. Of course if someone now goes and starts up a new service called Flume people are going to get really confused.

I've been pondering the nature of social networks recently and especially the meaning of "friend".

Chances are you already have a few friends - most people do, whether they like it or not. Friendship in real life is a multi splendoured thing with infinite gradations and nuances. However, on a social network friendship comes down to a brutal 2 bit encoding - 0x0 NOT FRIENDS, 0x1 FRIEND OF, 0x2 FRIENDED BY, 0x3 MUTUAL FRIEND.

What this doesn't explain is the politics of being friends. LJ has a particularly odd one - if some one friends you it's rude not to friend back (unless you really have no idea who they are and are surrounded by swarms of fanboys) but at that point your friends list becomes too long and unwieldy to read. Of course at that point you can do the "Default View" trick but that's not entirely satisfactory.

Coincidentally, today I read Scoble blogging about this 'problem' and Twitter

3. Never follow more than 300 people. Why is this a rule? Because if you follow 5,700 people, like I do, then you’ll be tempted to answer lots of those Tweets, which will put you in danger of breaking #2. See next rule.
4. Never follow anyone who isn’t your “real” friend. This will help you keep your friends’ list down to less than 300, which will keep you from breaking rule #2.
...
8. Follow one person for every 10 who follows you. Me? I follow EVERY person who follows me, as Dave Winer points out. Why? Cause I believe that anyone who follows me is a friend and is someone I should listen to. Other people think it’s just a publishing mechanism for posting their URLs and other stuff to the world.

It's that last bit that terrifies me - does he have no work to do at all?

Anyway, I think there should be a new scale - Funerals (Weddings work as well but Funerals came to mind first). In short - how far would you go to go to that person's funeral? Would you even send a card? Would you take a day off work? Would you drive to it? Would you stay over night? Would you fly? Would you fly to another country? Would you fly to another continent? Would you cut a holiday short? Would you cut a wedding short? Would you cut your own wedding short?

It's fool proof - suitably gradiated and with no ambiguities? Would you or wouldn't you. We should all rate our friends. I can see nothing going wrong with that whatsoever.

*cough*

This hasn't been an entirely serious post.

I finally got to do a bit of hacking this evening and noodled around with Net::Social. I'm not entirely sure on the name but this module will probably go nowhere since it's mostly just satisfying my curiousity.

I currently have plugins for LJ, Vox, Flickr and Dopplr working. If the underlying CPAN modules weren't horked then I'd have Orkut and Gmail too. I'm waiting on some clarification on one of the Jabber modules and then I'll have Jabber Roster support too. And Paul Mison contributed a Twitter plugin. I think del.icio.us, MySpace and FaceBook support will probably be next.

Net::Social doesn't really do anything clever - each plugin defines what parameters it needs passing in to do its work and then exposes a friends() method that returns a list of hash refs which contain information about each of your friends. At the moment the plugins only populate a 'user' field but I can see stuff like 'real_name', 'private', 'mutual' being filled in.

Then, on top of that, I'd build a DB backed Web App which would use Net::Social to populate its tables when the user adds their credentials for each site.

It's all a bit hacky but its been a fun few hours and its exposed the rather parlous state of web API authentication.

I should clean the code up, add some docs and maybe write some coherent thoughts on what I've learnt but for now I'm going to have some hot chocolate and try and wind down in the hope of getting a decent night's sleep tonight.

Social networks. Kind of like Pokemon - gotta catch'em all, ya know.

Same people, same faces, different website. LJ, Vox, Dopplr, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut.

Wouldn't it be handy if there was some tool for managing them all?

It was supposed to rain yesterday and it was the London leg of the Tour De France, the British Grand Prix and Wimbeldon - perfect conditions for a solo hackathon.

Except it was sunny so I went and hung out round the river instead.

However, when I thought it was going to rain I started thinking about hack projects. Rather than sensibly looking at an existing project - applying outstanding patches, fixing bugs and adding new features is so passe - a conversation a few days ago prompted an idea. A site where you can input all your known aliases at various different web sites (LJ, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Jabber) etc etc and it goes off and fetches your friends from the various sites and then correlates them and then suggests which of your friends on one site is a member of another site but isn't your friend there or suggests people that you may like to befriend. For some sites it can even auto add friends for you.

To be honest, it seems a fairly easy task so it should have been easy enough to do in an afternoon. I may still work on it this week anyway. I have some questions to ask of the LJ lazyweb first though -

1. Ideas for names - unfortunately also.at, alsoknown.as, the.se (so you can be <whatever>[at]the.se) are all gone. Bonus points for TLDs that don't charge 400 USD per annum and also for domains that don't have vowels missing.


2. Ideas for features - beyond the ones mentioned above, OpenID and FOAF file generation are the obvious suggestions. Someone's already suggested XFN.


3. Probably should have put this first actually - this idea seems way too obvious. Surely there's a site out there that does this already. Please find it and force me to do the right thing and finish one of my other projects.

At first I was was going to make it possible for a person to add in other peoples' aliases without them ever signing up but, on reflection, that seemed like a bad idea.

Another issue - if you add you@twitter.com but don't want to associate that account with your more professional life as you@linkedin.com.

I think a fairly broad solution would be to sign up for multiple accounts - a professional and a personal one but I'm pondering on whether it'd be better to have a more complicated structure which allows you to have multiple personas tied to one account instead.