{"id":2418,"date":"2014-07-14T08:30:03","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T12:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antipaucity.com\/?p=2418"},"modified":"2014-07-14T08:30:03","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T12:30:03","slug":"apps-on-the-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/?p=2418","title":{"rendered":"apps on the network"},"content":{"rendered":"

{This started as a Disqus reply to Eric’s post<\/a>. Then I realized blog comments shouldn’t be longer than the original post \ud83d\ude42 }<\/p>\n

The app-on-network concept is fascinating: and one I think I’ve thought about previously, too.<\/p>\n

Hypothetically, all “social networks” should have the same connections: yet there’s dozens upon dozens (I use at least 4 – probably more, but I don’t realize it). And some folks push the same content to all of them<\/a>, while others (including, generally, myself) try to target our shares and such to specific locations (perhaps driving some items to multiple places with tools like IFTTT<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Google’s mistake with Google+ was thinking they needed to “beat” Facebook: that’s not going to happen. As Paul Graham notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I’ve discussed, don’t make a direct frontal attack on it. Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations…Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong…the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s where folks who get called things like The Idea Guy\u2122<\/em> go awry: instead of asking questions<\/a>, you try to come up with ideas – like these 999<\/a>. And if you can’t\/don’t, you think you’ve failed.<\/p>\n

Social networks should be places where our actual social interactions can be modeled effectively. Yet they turn into popularity contests. And bitch fests. And rant centers. Since they tend<\/em> towards the asymmetric end of communication<\/a>, they become fire-and-forget locales, or places where we feel the incessant need to be right<\/a>. All the time. (Add services like Klout and Kred, and it gets even worse.)<\/p>\n

I would love to see a universal, portable, open network like the one Eric\u00a0describes. All the applications we think run on social networks (like Farmville) don’t. They run on top of another app which runs on “the network”.<\/p>\n

Layers on layers leads to the age-old problem of too many standards<\/a>, and crazy<\/a> amounts of abstraction<\/a>. Peeling-back the layers of the apps atop the network could instead give us the chance to have a singular network<\/em> where types<\/em> of connections could be tagged (work, fun, school, family, etc, etc – the aspect of G+ that everyone likes most: “circles”). Then the app takes you to the right subset of your network.<\/p>\n

Of course – this all leads to a massive problem: security.<\/p>\n

If there is only One True Social Network<\/strong>, we all end up entrusting\u00a0everything<\/em><\/strong> we put there to be “safe”. And while some of still follow the old internet mantra, “if you wouldn’t put it on a billboard, don’t put it on a website,” the vast majority of people – seemingly especially those raised coincident to technology’s ubiquitization – think that if they put it somewhere “safe” (like Facebook), that it should be “private”.<\/p>\n

After all, the\u00a0One True Social Network<\/strong> would also be a social engineer’s or identity thief’s Holy Grail<\/a>\u00a0– the subversive access to\u00a0all<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em> of someone’s personal information would be their nirvana<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And that, I think, is the crux of the matter: regardless of what network (or, to use Eric’s terminology, what app-atop-the-network) we use, privacy, safety, and security are all forefront problems.<\/p>\n

Solve\u00a0THAT<\/strong><\/em>, and you solve everything.<\/p>\n

Or maybe you just decide privacy\/security doesn’t matter, and make it\u00a0all<\/em> public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{This started as a Disqus reply to Eric’s post. Then I realized blog comments shouldn’t be longer than the original post \ud83d\ude42 } The app-on-network concept is fascinating: and one I think I’ve thought about previously, too. Hypothetically, all “social networks” should have the same connections: yet there’s dozens upon dozens (I use at least …
Continue reading apps on the network<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,19,22,23,41],"tags":[511,593,668,689,690],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-2418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-hmmm","category-ideas","category-insights","category-technical","tag-networking","tag-privacy","tag-security","tag-social","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2418"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merikebi.warrenmyers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fkeyring_services&post=2418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}