Wibking.com

Continuing a theme that’s being going on this blog, the engineers at Opera have apparently been thinking along similar lines to social networking as I’ve outlined here. As Betanews reports, Opera Unite is a piece of software that presumable will be included in the Opera browser that allows users to share files, sticky-notes, and any other imaginable peer-to-peer application sans any third parties. (In principle, this is correct; however, the unfortunate proliferation of NATs and dumb firewalls makes proxies necessary, which are convieniently provided by Opera.) The truly innovative and exciting part of this technology is that for the first time in the Web 2.0 era, users (not to mention developers!) can have control over “the cloud.” As Lawrence Eng explains at the Opera Labs blog:

Social networking is important, but who owns it — the online real estate and all the content we share on it? How much control over our words, photos, and identities are we giving up by using someone else’s site for our personal information? How dependent have we become? I imagine that many of us would lose most of our personal contacts if our favorite Web mail services shut down without warning. Also, many of us maintain extensive friend networks on sites like MySpace and Facebook, and are, therefore, subject to their corporate decisions via “Terms of Service” and click-through agreements. Furthermore, what does it mean anyway to be connected to hundreds of our “closest” friends? What about our real social networks, the people we want to interact with on a regular basis (like once a week, or even every day)? Why are online solutions to help us with our real-world social needs so few and far between?

While writing my last post, I was thinking about how to convert this blog into a ZUI.  However, the technology is still evolving and I’ve found it difficult to adjust to using ZUIs (such as this fantastic web-based one I found after writing yesterday’s post) because the flow that zooming enables is broken by the presence of other windows and having to click on links that take me out of the ZUI.

Then I realized was that what I really wanted was to eliminate the separation between the “authoring mode” and the “viewing mode” of my website.  For example, I’m typing this in a completely separate user interface than the one I use to view this blog—which shouldn’t be necessary.  There is a similar issue for visitors when commenting on blogs.  I’ve tended to think that comments are a sort of hack that isn’t really integrated into the rest of a blog.  (I’ve also tended to think that blogs themselves are sort of a hack, but that requires a separate explanation.) So I propose inline comments.  This idea obviously comes from the ZUI overlay mentioned in the previous post, but the crucial difference is that I propose allowing visitors to create them, to be displayed, like blog comments, for everyone to see.  Imagine little speech bubbles proliferating on blogs:

Example of an inline comment

This could quickly become unwieldy, however.  The point is to enable comments to appear alongside the post (and, if referring to a specific sentence, next to that sentence), and thereby more integrated and less hack-ish.  But a comment is also most relevant (usually) to the person who wrote it and may be marginally interesting to his or her friends (this applies mostly to Twitter, but Facebook and YouTube aren’t far behind).  The comments with more lasting value could be moderated up to visibility for everyone, while the more ephemeral comments (still serving an important function to someone) could be visible to the commenter’s friends, thanks to the Facebook API and similar magic, but still displayed inline with the rest of the content on the page.

I’ll try to implement this myself for this blog, but if anyone else is going to do so (or if this already exists), please comment.

I was quite surprised when my search query “social networking as invitation protocol” was transmogrified to “social networking as invitation etiquette“, not at all the sense I intended.

Google apparently has been adding synonyms to search queries for a few months now.  Google Sets seems to have found a use.  (Though it’s not any more intelligent than it was when I first tried it, judging by this query.)  Unsurprisingly, it’s still in Google Labs (after 7 years).  It will therefore spend an eternity in beta (never releasing on time), but there it has plenty of company.

Google's confused thesaurus

My website will be returning shortly.  Hopefully, I have my old websites archived somewhere and I will be able to post some of that material again.

–Ben