« Buddhism and Violence | Main | Magic » September 11, 2007Social network entities and headcasesWe usually think of social networks as collections of people that are linked - each person is a node in the network, and some nodes are hubs, or nodes that have many links. A couple of years ago when I was thinking and talking about group relationship management, I realized that, in the context of a social network, a group could be seen as an entity similar to a person, in that it can also be a node, generally perceived as a hub (because it has many connections, defined for a group as memberships). So you could define an entity called "node" that could be an individual or a group. This is something Silona Bonewald wanted to include in the technology for the League of Technical Voters. I was just talking to Skip Baney about this concept and how it might relate to "identity 2.0". Identity thinkers and doers are trying to create a framework for identity management to facilitate data storage in one place and to allow an individual greater ownership and control of her personal data - similar to the W3C's P3P approach. An "entity-based social network," as Silona called it, could facilitate the creation of individual and group bundles of network-relevant data that could live outside any particular social network system, but could plug into any, if the standards were acknowledged and incorporated. I think this would have value, and probably should have been part of the Internet's architecture earlier on. It's harder to overcome legacy fragmentation at this point. One interesting related project: Headcase Manufacturing, where my former FringeWare partner, genius coder Paco Nathan, is working with my pal Mark Meadows to create autonomous avatars. As I understand it, the idea is to create a single avatar that can operate in multiple virtual worlds. If you're interested, it looks like they'll be beta testing soon... jon posted this at 1:25 PM |
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