Matt wrote on January 31st, 2008 7:03 pm :

I don’t contend the idea at all. I don’t know why that keeps popping up as an issue- I’ve used the Semantic Web myself and have been blown away by what’s possible. For instance, I queried a SW front-end to Wiki data to give me all the cities in the US that have populations over 2 million. I got back a list in RDF, and that’s f’in rad.

So the idea, as far as I understand it, is to mine a user’s disparate social data that’s already out there, consolidate it in one place and spit it back out in RDF or format X. Hosting that RDF or FOAF in one place and allowing users to take ownership of their data is incredibly important in the evolution of the Web. Just the other day I wanted to post a video I recorded with Facebook’s “video” application, to myspace, but I can’t do that (does Facebook own my video?). I want to take ownership of my content, and be able to share that with other people and have it in one spot.

From the looks of it, people are bored with social networking. What a surprise- but people aren’t necessarily bored with “social networking” they’re bored with the way things are done right now. Decentralization, a more free Web, will win out every time because people yearn for connectivity and freedom of expression.

So what am I contending? I guess I’m contending the method of implementation. I’m like every other asshole programmer out there who wants to spend a week making something that does one little thing that’s cool. I wrote a program that logs in to myspace and grabs the large versions of all your friend’s default pictures, then spits them back out. That is f’in rad to me.

That’s much more interesting to me than spitting back RDF data on my friends. You might contend… well, in a FOAF file there is room for a default picture of that person. You’re right, there is, but your vision isn’t to collect just profile pictures. Your vision is much grander than that and involves supplying the SW with much more data from many more sources. Only THEN will the SW become really useful.

My vision isn’t to just collect profile pictures either, but if I were developing something for the SW, I would much rather be seeing the results in the form of the next step. Not just data spitting out, but actually doing something with that data. I might be able to query a SW front-end to Wikipedia on how many doorknobs are produced in Korea every month, but that’s not very interesting to me. What would be interesting is if I took all the doorknob data from around the world, then represented it on a map and rendered countries bigger if they produced more doorknobs, smaller if they produced less. Or whatever. The point is that the data is visualized, perhaps interactive.

The SIMILE project at MIT is doing stuff that is on the level with what I’m talking about. I understand that MIT can only do that because of a common structure for all their data (I think they use RDF but I’m not sure), but the fact is they took the egg (data) of the SW and turned it into a flying chicken. I want to see a flying chicken.

Andrew A. Peterson wrote on February 1st, 2008 1:21 am :

OK. Good.

I think the main place where our points of view differ is this:
I think an application that allows users to mine their social network data, by aiding in the user’s ability to find redundancies in their social network (recurring people appearing as users on different services), and by providing a UI for filtering and querying the information from various networking services once it’s been aggregated is a cool application that ‘actually does something with the data.‘

This of course would be something that is more useful to those of us that are not only people, but also marketers. Business-owners, activists, artists, musicians, filmmakers, models and authors are some examples of people who are likely to have a lot of ‘friends’ on sites like MySpace or FaceBook mainly because of the promotional potential there.

These ad-driven networking sites fall short of offering us tools for analyzing our social nets.

I believe that once data-mining tools (or mine-ready data) for our social lives become available, more average users will find uses for them as well as marketers.

Also, and more importantly, once users of social networking services can back up their networks and republish them in Standard formats (whether it’s FOAF/RDF APML XFN or whatever), there will be data in the Web for new social applications to be built on the back of. This is what really excites me –the idea of distributed social networking and the kinds of applications that will be developed once the data is available.