September 4, 2007

Import Contacts… no!

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:

Queup

Many Web Applications nowadays have the option to import your contacts from you other accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, MySpace, you name it. It usually is a nice feature for both the users and the owners of the application, as the users can get quickly connected to their contacts, while the owner rapidly gets new users. But stop! Not all “import contacts” options are the same, there are the good guys and the bad boys:
  • The good guys don’t ask you immediately to import contacts and certainly don’t force you to. They give you the option later on or they let you skip it, maybe you’ll do it later. What they certainly don’t do is automatically invite every contact you import by sending them yet another stupid email, or send friend requests in the case of social networks. These are absolute nonos! Don’t ever do anything the user is not asking for.
  • Then there are the bad boys, their mentality is best summed up as “All your contacts are belong to us!“, no really they don’t give you the option to skip import or tell you that if you don’t do it right now you won’t be able later. On top of this thy will send an invitation to everyone on your list and keep hammering them with updates, possibly citing you as the sender. These people will get pissed and at least delete you from their contact list, if not worse.
I had this problem once in the last few months and I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was to find out that an invitation has been sent to all my work colleagues. So please, please, please web developers be nice and give me a moderate import contacts, even if an aggressive import can fastly grow the number of your users, it will piss off ten times more!

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August 8, 2007

Goodbye MySpace & Co., welcome Portable Social Networks

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
The most successful sites right now on the Web are social networks, no point denying it. Social Networks,such as MySpace, Facebook and Co., are huge information silos that only reluctantly share this information with other services on the Web, every time I sign up to a new Social Network, a thing many of us do regularly, I have to re-enter all my information, re-set the notifications, re-upload my images and re-search all of my contacts to this new network. But MySpace & Co are doomed, the very fact that they limit the scope of a friendship as I like to call it will soon destroy them, they are not portable.
And here comes the nice thing: I already have a profile, I have a site, a blog or anything were I can put a little information about myself can be me profile for a portable social network, and the best thing is that I decide what to disclose to who, and how it should look, without having to hack those awful Stylesheets for predesigned social networks that won’t look nice anyway, I can decide everything by myself!
With the advent of OpenID we have every tool we need to create a portable, peer-to-peer styled, social network, no central authority that will control us, no need to ever sign up to a social network ever again. A portable social network is like a super-set of all existing social networks and it is truly global.
And there’s also a pretty good standard for the most important feature in social networks: friend relations. It’s called XFN, and is a simple, yet powerful extension to XHTML. And with microformat -magic we can do a hole lot of things most social networks aren’t able to do.
So join today, the last Social Network you’ll ever have to join, simply by adding some information about youself, some pictures or whatever you want to your OpenID URL and tag links to your friends’ Profile with the XFN Attributes and you’re done :)

For more on the topic of Portable Social Networks I recommend reading some of the following posts:

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October 23, 2006

Reputation Defender

Christian Decker wrote this around lunchtime:
Digital reputation is getting ever more important these days, especially after uncovering some stories that big companies have started searching the Web for informations about their new applicants. Well the solution has arrived: Reputation Defender. They explain what they do like this:
First, we SEARCH. We scour the Internet to dig up every possible piece of information about you and present it in an interactive monthly report. You can view this report by email or by logging into our site. This information is detailed in straightforward categories, including:
  • Social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, and more);
  • Professional review websites;
  • Blogs;
  • Online news sources;
  • Photograph, video, and audio sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.); and,
  • Millions of additional sites on the “open Internet.”
Next, we DESTROY. You can select any content from your report that you don’t like. This is where we go to work for you. Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.
I’m pretty curious about how exactly they destroy information about me… If I run a website and post something about somebody and he’s decided that he doesn’t like it, what can they possibly do to take down my content? Sue me, hack me? I don’t get it… There is a simple rule in Online Reputation, just like in real live, behave well and don’t upset anybody, and nobody will ever blackmail you :D [via BasicThinking.de]

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