Today I received a threat from Facebook about an old F8 app of mine called “The Wall” because it was designed to look identical to the Facebook wall (back when that was a separate area of one’s profile) but actually tie data back to a datastore on one’s own website. (Only Chris Shiels ever used it).
They claim to have a trademark on the word “wall”. I wonder what the superwall people (or anyone with the Unix command “wall” installed, which is where Facebook got the name from in the first place) are going to do.
The email is below:
To the developer of The Wall (6506538869):
During an automated check, our system found that your application name contains a variation on the disallowed term “wall.” Application names may not contain Facebook trademarks without the express prior written permission of Facebook.
Please change your application name within two weeks of receiving this email. Failure to comply will result in our system automatically changing your application name to “Unnamed Application #6506538869”
I first experienced the beginnings of the “social web” in highscool. My friends all had Xanga sites, which were basically blogs about nothing. One practise of theirs, which annoyed me and seemed not to be present on the rest of the blogs I found, was that they abused comments horribly. Comments were never about the content of the post. Rather, to contact someone, you would comment on their most recent post. To reply to someone’s comment, you would comment on the most recent post on their site.
This is exactly how Myspace profile comments and the Facebook “wall” are intended to work. Facebook even built the “wall-to-wall” feature to show conversations back and forth across this odd system.
Now think of microblogging. Think of how you use it. Yes, there’s a publication aspect to it for sure (I say what I want people to hear). There is also, however, this element of public conversation people seem so interested in. Back-and-forth between two or more people, on their own pages, archived publicly.
What’s even better about this realization? I hated the Xanga comments, I hate the Facebook wall (and their new “comment on status” feature), but I love @replies. So it wasn’t the concept of public conversations I wasn’t getting, but merely an implementation detail. @replies are piped through a good notification system (which for Twitter these days involved scraping a feed and re-posting it to a fake identi.ca account so that I can get them via IM) so that they can be near-real-time when I have time, and are still there for me if I don’t.
Pempeth is the result of my work based on my previous private messaging TEP. The protocol draft has matured and there are now implementations! (see the page). Most notable is a WordPress plugin, active on this site.
The development of that plugin also sparked an XRDS plugin, which I have also released (despite its somewhat cryptic interface).
Those looking at the main page may also have noticed changes. Yes, that’s a mini-feed based on my online activity. Yes, it’s a plugin. The interface, however, only allows for adding sources (not editing or removing) and is somewhat cryptic, so I have not released it yet.
You can also now log into my blog with your Facebook account (see link in header)! This uses the API, so I don’t got your Facebook password or anything like that. Also an as-yet-unreleased plugin.
Fun days! I’m going to be working at AideRSS as a co-op in the coming months, should be fun and more freeing than school!
It’s so true! Many times when using Facebook I find that there’s no way to properly describe my relationship to a person with their options! TechCrunch (and Dave Winer) has some great ideas on what they could do to add some more. I hope they do it!
Also known as Portable Social Networking, this is the concept of decentralising the social networking functionality of sites like Facebook so that one does not have to use every service to connect with everyone (previously covered here).
Videntity is a wonderful service for this movement, and one that I have been using as the hub of much of my efforts. Explode seems promising, but they’re down for upgrade.
XFN Friends lists : For Blogger I have a wizard. This wizard will actually work on any web page or on any service where you can post (X)HTML (including MySpace or Xanga!) For WordPress there is a nice plugin, although a widget version would be a bonus. Videntity supports this by default.As far as finding/adding friends goes I have a bookmarklet for Videntity that allows one to add hCards, Facebook results, or Wink.com people results as friends/contacts. Bookmarklets for other services would not be hard. For Blogger we would need an actual blogroll-producing service beyond just a wizard to make this work.
Public/private profiles : Again, Videntity has this built right in (as long as you have the URL that the contact uses for OpenID on the friend list, it does not follow rel=me). I am working on a solution for WordPress. Would people be interested in a solution for Blogger/other websites?
Messaging : not sure where I stand on this. Lots of nice contact options, and creating a ‘wall’-like interface on WordPress would be easy. The question is : what is the goal of this? If it is just the address book features then a way to integrate social networking contact lists with email clients / Gmail might be better. If it is being able to communicate without revealing your email address a protocol/system for that might be easy enough.My brother (and avid Facebooker) says that it is about visibility. The benefit of Facebook messaging, for him, is the unified notifications area that he KNOWS his friends all check. He KNOWS that they will see his message. He is not sure they check their email.
I still promote the idea of supporting rel=tag on hCards. We need a better hCard search engine, one that takes Pingerati pings, crawls regularly (some of my pings from months ago were never indexed by the Technorati Kitchen hCard search), outputs results as hCards (to facilitate things like my bookmarklet), and recognizes rel=tag.
Perhaps a tagspace could do a rev=tag for members. If an hCard URL has rel=tag to a page that has rev=tag to it that would give credibility to the category.
Notifications (think Facebook mini-feed) need to fit into this idea somehow. Events are hCalendar. Notes/posts/shares are hAtom/xFolk. Status is something I’ve blogged about recently too. Services like Twitter are heading in the right direction.