[Infowarrior] - Social networking: it's new but it isn't News

[Richard Forno]

Social networking: it's new but it isn't News

By Liam Proven: Saturday 30 June 2007, 12:20

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40693

THERE'S ANOTHER NEW social networking site around, from the guy behind Digg.
It's called Pownce, it's still invitation-only and if they're offering
anything genuinely new and different they aren't shouting about it. In
particular, nobody's talking about the feature I want to see.

Get connected
There are myriads of social networking-type sites these days; Wikipedia
lists more than ninety. Some of the big ones are MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and
Orkut. Then there are "microblogging" sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Then of
course there are all the tired old pure-play blogging sites like LiveJournal
and Blogger. I have accounts on a handful of them - in some cases, just so I
can comment, because OpenID isn't as well-supported as it deserves to be.

They all do much the same sort of thing. You get an account for free, you
put up a profile, maybe upload some photos, tunes, video clips or a blog,
then you can look up your mates and "add" them as "friends". Mainly, this
allows you to get a summary list of what your mates are up to; secondarily,
you can restrict who can see what that you're putting up.

Doesn't sound like much, but these are some of the biggest and most popular
websites on the Internet. That means money: News International paid $580
million for MySpace and its founders are asking for $12.5 million a year
each to stay on for another couple of years.

The purely social sites, like Myspace, sometimes serve as training wheels
for Internet newbies. You don't need to understand email and all that sort
of thing - you can talk to your mates entirely within the friendly confines
of one big website. After all, there's no phonebook for the Internet - it's
hard for friends to find one another, especially if they're not all that
Net-literate.

A lot of the sites try to keep you in their confines. MySpace offers its
own, closed instant-messenging service, for example - so long as you use
Windows. Another way is that when someone sends you a message or comment on
MySpace or Facebook, the site informs you by email - but the email doesn't
tell you what the actual message was. You have to go to the site and sign in
to read it.

Buzzword alert
Some sites aren't so closed - for example, the email notifications from
Livejournal tell you what was said and let you respond from within your
email client, and its profiles offer basic integration of external IM
services. On the other hand, Facebook offers trendy Web 2.0 features, like
"applications" that can run within your profile and can be rearranged by
simple drag&drop, whereas LJ or Facebook owners who want unique
customisations must fiddle with CSS and HTML or use a third-party
application.

As well as aggregating your mates' blogs, many social networking sites let
you syndicate "web feeds" from other sites. A "feed" - there are several
standards to choose from, including Atom and various versions of RSS -
supplies a constantly-updated stream of new stories or posts from one site
into another. For instance, as I write, fifteen people on LiveJournal read
The Inquirer through its LJ feed.

(If you fancy this aggregation idea but don't want to join a networking
site, you can also do this using an "feed reader" on your own computer.
There are a growing number of these: as well as standalone applications such
as FeedReader or NetNewsWire, many modern browsers and email clients can
handle RSS feeds - for example, IE7, Firefox, Outlook and Safari.)

But even with feeds, the social networking sites are still a walled garden.
If you read a story or a post syndicated from another site, you'll probably
get a space to enter comments - but you won't see the comments from users on
the original site and they won't see yours. The same goes for users anywhere
else reading a syndicated feed - only the stories themselves get passed
through, not the comments.

A lot of the point of sites like Digg and Del.icio.us is the recently
popular concept of "wisdom of crowds". If lots of people "tag" something as
being interesting and the site presents a list of the most-tagged pages,
then the reader is presented with an instantaneous "what's hot" list - say,
what the majority of the users of the site are currently viewing.

There are sites doing lots of clever stuff with feeds, such as Yahoo Pipes,
which lets you visually put together "programs" to combine the information
from multiple feeds - what the trendy Web 2.0 types call a "mashup". What
you don't get through a feed, though, is what people are saying.

Similarly, the social networking sites are, in a way, parasitic on email:
you get more messages than before, but for the most part they have almost no
informational content, and in order to communicate with other users, they
encourage you to use the sites' own internal mechanisms rather than email or
IM. Outside a site like Facebook, you can't see anything much - you must
join to participate. Indeed, inside the site, the mechanisms are often
rather primitive - for instance, Facebook and Twitter have no useful
threading. All you get is a flat list of comments; people resort to heading
messages "@alice" or "@bob" to indicate to whom they're talking. Meanwhile,
the sites' notifications to the outside world are a read-only 1-bit channel,
just signals that something's happened. You might as well just have an icon
flashing on your screen.

In other words, it's all very basic. Feeds allow for clever stuff, but the
actual mechanics of letting people communicate tend to be rather primitive,
and often it's the older sites that do a better job. The social sites are in
some ways just a mass of private web fora (it's the correct plural of
"forum), with all their limitations of poor or nonexistent threading and
inconsistent user interfaces. Which seems a bit back-asswards to me.
Threaded discussions are 1980s technology, after all.

Going back into time
Websites have limits. Email may be old-fashioned, but it's still a useful
tool, especially with good client software. Google's Gmail does some snazzy
AJAX magic to make webmail into a viable alternative to a proper email
client - its searching and threading are both excellent. An increasing
number of friends and clients of mine are giving up on standalone email
clients and just switching to Gmail. The snag with a website, though, is
that if you're not connected - or the site is down - you're a bit stuck.
When either end is offline, the whole shebang is useless.

Whereas if you download your email into a client on your own computer, you
can use it even when not connected - if it's in a portable device,
underground or on a plane or in the middle of Antarctica with no wireless
Internet coverage. You can read existing emails, sort and organize, compose
replies, whatever - and when you get back online, the device automatically
does the sending and receiving for you. What's more, when you store and
handle your own email, you have a major extra freedom - you can change your
service provider. If you use Gmail or Hotmail, you're tied to the generosity
of those noted non-profit philanthropic organizations Google and Microsoft.

The biggest reason email works so well is that it's open: it's all based on
free, open standards. Anyone with Internet email can send messages to anyone
with an Internet email address. Even someone on one proprietary system, say
Outlook and Exchange, can send mail to a user on another, say Lotus Notes.
Both systems talk the common protocols: primarily, SMTP, the Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol. Outside the proprietary world, most email clients use
POP3 or IMAP to receive messages from servers - and again, SMTP to send.

Now here's a thought. Wouldn't it be handy if there was an open standard for
moving messages between online fora? (It's the correct plural of "forum",
not "forums".) So that if you were reading a friend's blog through a feed
into your preferred social networking site, you could read all the comments,
too, and participate in the discussion? If it worked both ways, on a
peer-to-peer basis, the people discussing a story on Facebook could also
discuss it with the users on Livejournal. If it was syndicated in from
Slashdot, they could talk to all the Slashdot users, too.

Now there is a killer feature for a new, up and coming social networking
site. Syndication of group discussions, not just stories. It would be a good
basis for competitive features, too - like good threading, management of
conversations and so on.

The sting in the tail
The kicker is, there already is such a protocol. It's called NNTP: the
Network News Transfer Protocol.

The worldwide system for handling threaded public discussions has been
around for 26 years now. It's called Usenet and since a decade before the
Web was invented it's been carrying some 20,000 active discussion groups,
called "newsgroups", all around the world. It's a bit passé these days -
spam originated on Usenet long before it came to email, and although Usenet
still sees a massive amount of traffic, 99% of it is encoded binaries - many
people now only use it for file sharing.

You may never have heard of it, but there's a good chance that your email
system supports Usenet. Microsofties can read newsgroups in Outlook Express,
Windows Mail and Entourage, or in Outlook via various addons; open
sourcerers can use Mozilla's Thunderbird on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
Google offers GoogleGroups, which has the largest and oldest Usenet archive
in the world. There are also lots of dedicated newsreaders - on Windows,
Forté's Agent is one of the most popular.

Usenet is a decentralised network: users download messages from news
servers, but the servers pass them around amongst themselves - there's no
top-down hierarchy. Companies can run private newsgroups if they wish and
block these from being distributed. All the problems of working out unique
message identifiers and so on were sorted out a quarter of a century ago.
Messages can be sent to multiple newsgroups at once, and like discussion
forum posts, they always have a subject line. Traditionally, they are in
plain text, but you can use HTML as well - though the old-timers hate it.

There are things Usenet doesn't do well. There's no way to look up posters'
profiles, for example - but that's exactly the sort of thing that social
networking sites are good at. Every message shows its sender's email address
- but then, the social networking sites all give you your own personal ID
anyway.

Big jobs, little jobs
It would be a massive task to convert the software driving all the different
online discussion sites to speaking NNTP, though. It isn't even remotely
what they were intended for.

But there's another way. A similar problem already exists if you use a
webmail service like Hotmail but want to download your messages into your
own email client. Hotmail used to offer POP3 downloads as a free service,
but it became a paid-for extra years ago. Yahoo and Gmail offer it for free,
but lots of webmail providers don't.

Happily, though, there's an answer.

If you use Thunderbird, there's an extension called Webmail which can
download from Hotmail as well as Yahoo, Gmail and other sites. Like all
Mozilla extensions, it runs on any platform that Thunderbird supports.

But better still, there's a standalone program. It's called MrPostman and
because it's written in Java it runs on almost anything - I've used it on
Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It's modular, using small scripts to support
about a dozen webmail providers, including Microsoft Exchange's Outlook Web
Access; it can even read RSS feeds. Its developers cautiously say that
"Adding a new webmail provider might be as simple as writing a script of 50
lines."

And it's GPL open source, so it won't cost you anything. It's a fairly small
program, too - it will just about fit on a floppy disk.

MrPostman shows that it's possible to convert a web-based email service into
standard POP3 - and for this to be done by a third party with no no access
to the source code of the server. Surely it can be done for a forum, too?
And if it's done right, for lots of fora? It doesn't need the help or
cooperation of the source sites, though that would surely help. More to the
point, if it was done online, the servers offering the NNTP feeds can be
separate from those hosting the sites.

What's more, there's a precedent. For users of the British conferencing
service CIX, there's a little Perl program called Clink, which takes CoSy
conferences and topics and presents them as an NNTP feed, so that you can
read - and post to - CIX through your newsreader.

It sounds to me like the sort of task that would be ideal for the Perl and
Python wizards who design Web 2.0 sites, and it would be a killer feature
for any site that acts as a feed aggregator.

Rather than reading contentless emails and going off to multiple different
sites to read the comments and post replies, navigating dozens of different
user interfaces and coping with crappy non-threaded web for a, you could do
it all in one place - as the idea spread, whichever site you preferred.

And, of course, the same applies to aggregator software as well. When you
download this stuff to your own machine, you can read it at your leisure,
without paying extortionate bills for mobile connectivity. Download the bulk
of the new messages on a fast free connection, then just post replies on the
move when you're paying for every kilobyte over a slow mobile link.

What's more, in my experience of many different email systems, it's the
offline ones that are the fastest and offer the best threading and message
management. It could bring a whole new life to discussions on the Web.

All this, and all I ask for the idea is a commission of 1 penny per message
to anyone who implements it. It's a bargain. µ