Concept
"Social Networks", as they exist today, aren't about being social. In fact, they're quite inhuman.
Here's the problem: The dominant social networking paradigm is completely point-to-point. Our real-life social networks aren’t like that at all—they’re much closer to a hub-and-spoke model. Even from a young age, we meet different people in different contexts. We form discrete groups from discrete sets of people, generally with little overlap. Before the social networking revolution, the only time everyone you know would be present in the same forum would be at major events in your life, such as perhaps the end of it. Now it’s every day on the Internet.
-- Clayton Miller (from Buzz, Facebook, and social flatland)
Being social is about community, discussion, groups. Social Networks on the other hand are little public homepages that let people send messages to each other that other people can see. As Adam Curtis noted, they're a kind of "public face", the one a public figure would have; a separate, manufactured identity that's separate from the real self that's exposed in home and private life.
The internet lacks a way of being social in the standard sense. Places where people can gather to chat, without having to worry about their boss or grandmother or children finding out what they're talking about.
Communities need walls (i.e. separation, and privacy.) This is what I'll call a Community Network.
Existing systems like IRC, IM, forums, and BBSes partially fill the community need. However, they're still very sculpted by the simple technologies we have available.
More about this general trend in the Adam Curtis interview Das Internets (MP3s: part 1 and part 2)
Ideas
- Concentric friend circles
- Some online games have interesting dynamic social models
- Cryptographic trust networks
Political Resistance
Weaponized Social Media (media which facilitates online assembly) are more powerful than free access to information via an uncensored Internet. They're also more dangerous to facist goverments, which can be seen through recent uprisings in the Philippines, Moldova, and Spain, and the political actions of Avaaz.org. Egypt has recently created mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services.
All of these factors point to the possibility of a community network being unwelcome by establishments.
XMPP Social Networks
A decentralized open XMPP protocol extension for blogging, microblogging, bookmarking, sharing pictures, etc. and also supports custom activities, with fine-grained privacy control.
Articles
Distributed Datastore
- Each client caches content it views
- Each client has a verifiable crypto identity
- A user can re-edit an entry as many times as they want
- Entries can be shared