melanie mcbride online

Marc Canter knows a lot about digital lifestyle aggregation (DLA). As far as I know, he coined the term. Naturally, when I joined Facebook, I was curious to find out what Canter and other early adopter social networking types were saying. Though I may be late to the party, I’ve discovered that my misgivings about FB are consistent with the early adopters. Namely, the need for more granular, user friendly, open standards. Granularity in this context is simply the ability to specifically define the nature of our social relationships according to self-selected meta-data or tags. And that’s precisely what’s missing from FB. Says Canter:

“Dave (Winer) is pissed off at Facebook for treating him like a college student. He wants to insert in his OWN way of defining a relationship. To me - that’s just another open standard. Lets ask Facebook for the ability to change that”

For example, if FB currently provides a blank template for self-defined profile tags (i.e., activities, favourite music, etc) then we should also be able to tag our relationships according to equally specialised tags. I’m not a “friend” of Marc Canter, though I enjoy his work. If Marc had a category of “supporter” or “ally” I would like to join that network.

There are a great number of people I know from my online life, people I have known for many years - and trust, yes trust - but whom I’ve never met in real life. Does that make the relationship less valid than one in meatspace? I don’t think so but Facebook does. It characterizes that relationship according to a negative: “I’ve never met this person.” This is a negative statement because it defines the relationship according to what it is NOT. A more positive statement might be (Name) “is an ONLINE connection.” This lack of specificity is especially galling to those whose professional activities and networks are almost entirely online.

If Facebook and other emerging DLAs are really interested in smart demographics they need to make way more of an effort to respect their end users. According to Canter, the benefits of end user granularity are simple:

“(when) we allow any network operator to CHANGE those labels, putting in their own relationship titles: homeboy or Esse. But Dave wants to go beyond just labels. He wants to change the very nature of what the relationship stands for, triggers in terms of code and how its stored for posterities sake (remember - the web doesn’t forget!) At least I think that’s what he thinks.

Then the trick here is what do you do WITH this added relationship info? You could display a different set of content to your friends - then to strangers. You could also display messages and special content as well to just your friends or family.

Jon Udell complains about not being able to define a relationship as ‘through the web’. (…) Well then just use a label and change what the relationship is called! Adding ‘through the web’ would take :10 seconds in PeopleAggregator. Yet these are the kind of decisions vendors make, not end-users.

That’s why we need to create systems that are under end-user control, rather than put control of relationship labels exclusively into the hands of vendors. Dave seems to hate the very notion of vendors and think that they all will do the wrong thing. I try to be optimistic and charge vendors for me to tell them to open up.”

Hear, hear.