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July 04, 2011

Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora

Google+ opened to the small public some days ago, I'm not really going to comment anything about it for now.

The purpose of my post is actually reminding people of another interesting project, Diaspora, which actually fits several of my views over social networking.

I really hope that when Google will release API for its G+, there will be some chance for Diaspora to integrate with it and, most important, an opening for G+ to operate with Diaspora.

Most of us use(d) Facebook, now almost any geek I know is joining G+, some of them rejoicing its advent as an opportunity to leave Facebook for good.
That's not really my intention and I don't think it's the point of the whole social thing.

What about, instead, allowing the whole social sites to inter-communicate, exchanging information and letting users being able to see each other independently of the platform used?

That's clearly not possible so far :-), but it is the reason for which years and years ago (Internet-time rules apply) I got interested in FOAF, last year I crossed my fingers with Diaspora and now I'm doing the same about Google receiving some enlightenment bit and getting the right path about profile sharing.

I'm aware that Google point is to re-factor the whole Google experience around Google Accounts and the profiles associated with them, and the major point of it is making G+ a bigger part of G profiles (if you are a Google Profile user, you'll probably noticed that your profile is now your public view of G+, with your public posts for instance).

My point is: Google is aware that not everyone agrees with Google wanting to extract information from your profile, your habits, etc and some of us is not really using Google 100% for this reason.
Also, Google started the Data Liberation front, so why not taking the next step and allowing people to inter-operate with other open [1] social sites?

The big part of the work is not helping Diaspora evolving and gaining power, IMHO, but pretty much the other way round: helping the idea of inter-communication to be a central point of the social experience: this idea getting stuck in some important and enlightened mind so that a bridge will be offered.

But I'm just a noob in the subject: it's just a foolish idea that has been in my mind for long enough and I needed to express :-D

2 comments:

  1. > now almost any geek I know is joining G+

    I'm proud not to be in that set :-P

    -- Zack
    ReplyDelete
  2. The 2nd Generation Social Media Platform I'm creating, will give you what you want. Be patient, its coming ... #startup #stealth Startup -- abigdreamer on twitter.
    ReplyDelete


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