Looks like it is still appealing to those who are in their 20′s, just like MySpace is appealing to the teens. I can’t even join a university network without having a current university email address. D’oh, I should have kept my alumni email account. I guess for 30+ oldies like me, a LinkedIn profile would be much more useful. Sorry, I don’t have time socialising, but please help when I am looking for a new job :)

Developers for Facebook, however, looks quite interesting. It provides a RESTy API and HTML-like markup language to build applications inside the Facebook platform. There are various client libraries, and even a Python module. It is a bit too late for me looking into all the details, but from a list of functions provided, they provide a great basis to create some interesting mashup apps.

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, folksonomy produces results that reflect more accurately the population’s conceptual model of the information.

The idea is, everyone tags a piece of information with his/her own keywords, and collaboratively, with big enough population contributing to the system, you can organise and classify a much bigger dataset when each user’s “tag-space” emerges.

I have just started testing out this concept in a blog network context. What is everybody writing about? Or, can I see what everyone is writing about against a specific keyword?

The blog network here is our FOCUSer.net recent updates, a blog aggregator that fetches the latest entries from each blog, and tag new entries with their corresponding “categories” exported in their feeds. For example, I can check what everyone writes about “life” – you’ll see a list of blog entries from different blogs where their authors classified them under the keyword “life”. It works very much like technorati, except it only classifies for a small Christian blog network in FOCUS.

So far it has not worked well, yet. I blamed on,

• Relatively small contributors. Only 26 blogs at the moment.
• Too small the data set. It has only been running for 6 weeks, with less than 500 entries in the database.
• Too large the relative categories. Almost 100 “tags” against 500 entries – that makes your keyword->data selection very sparse.
• People don’t tag/categorise. There are many entries under uncategorized (WordPress’ default category). Folksonomy would only work if individual contributors classify their own data first.

You too can help (if you are in FOCUS), by submitting your blog into the aggregator, and be part of this social network experiment.

Access control on blog is fantastic, especially when your blog is used mainly as a personal journal/diary whose writing might not be suitable for public consumption. Want only your close friends to know what you have been doing last weekend? Want to blog about your thoughts on certain complicated issues, but do not wish to share with everyone? Easy. And Yahoo! 360 does all the authentication and user management for you.

Moreover, when the privacy level is set to only your first degree friends, you can further restrict the visibility of your blog by your friend “Categories”. You can allocate your friends to one or more categories, or default to “Uncategorised”. Now let’s see. Shall I start a personal blog there that actually blocks everyone who knows me personally from reading it?

Hmmm…

Anyone wants an invite? Leave a comment with your email in it.

Update: Actually, I found the “invitation ticket” works a bit different from GMail. After sending out a few invitations this morning, I still have 100 of them left! It appears that you can only have 100 invitations pending, but right after the invited person signed up, you’ll get the ticket back…

Update: Alex has kindly set up a site for people who want to offer or people who want Yahoo! 360 invites. So if you are interested in getting an invite for yourself, and do not personally know me, please head to 360invites.com instead. From now one I’ll not give out invites to those who I have not met personally in life.

Update: Please head to 360invites.com linked above if you want invites! I am now only giving out invites to those I know. All other comments posted here will go straight to /dev/null.

• Public or private tags – I know the whole idea of social bookmarking is to share your bookmark with everyone else. However, it would be impossible to switch 100% to a public on-line bookmark system without some privacy. No, I don’t want you to see some of my links. Being able to set some links/tags to be “private” is very useful.
• Nice looking user interface – looks much better than Del.icio.us. Actually, anything looks better than Del.icio.us, even though you can argue that it is putting functionality on a higher priority.
• Snapshoots – when you bookmark a page, it makes a thumbnail snapshoot of what the page looks like. You now not only be able to recall old links with subjects and descriptions, but also images.
• Weighted tags – instead of just listing them down alphabetically, it gives each tag different weight, depending on the number of bookmark entries related to that tag. Heavier tag has bigger fonts, which is quite visually effective.
• “Via” field – just another field that helps you to remember where you have stolen this link from. There are tricks to achieve the same on Del.icio.us, but it is nice to have this feature natively supported.
• Import/export – easy to use import and export feature directly from the web interface, and there is no need to write a single line of code! Importing from RSS/Atom feeds, Mozilla bookmarks.html or a Del.icio.us account. It can also exports to a zipped Atom file.

Somethings that I consider Del.icio.us better than BlogMarks:

• Speed – Del.icio.us is super light weight and fast, even when it has many more concurrent users. Probably due to its slim interface, but I suspect that it is also equiped a much optimised internal design.
• Popularity – you can easily have hundreds or even thousands of people linking to a popular site on Del.icio.us. del.icio.us/popular has significantly more meaningful content than BlogMarks’ equivalent page. At the end, more people involved, better a social network will be.
• API – besides a flexible URL for tags, Del.icio.us also provides its REST-styled API documentation for developers who want to hack/automate tasks involving their bookmarks. BlogMarks API also exists, but not public available yet.

I’ll switch to BlogMarks just for its public/private entries and tags. But since it is relatively young, I think I’ll still post my links to both services for a while.

One particular thing that I really to achieve is stop procrastinating, and it turns out 500+ others also desire the same. However, the very fact that I was still mingling with 43 Things site in the middle of night, while “trying” to work on the MBFri seminar that I need to present today, shows that it would be quite a while before I can confidently click on that “I’ve reached this goal” button.

• Go and bother with other Orkut users! Go to Feedster (the blog search engine I usually use) and search for “orkut”, you will probably find plenty of bloggers talking on this subject. Maybe one of them will be generous…
• Try eBay, because there are always people there willing to make friends with you! At a price of course :) If you search for “orkut” there, there are people willing to invite you for merely $0.99!
• There are also free Orkut invites there, posted everywhere on the Internet by “friend-loving” individuals. Google would be your friend to find these friends.
• Or maybe try to be my friend first so that when you ask I would be able to invite :)

On a related note, I have created a FOCUS community on Orkut so people can join. I know the ESF people have a big community on Friendster, except that Friendster does not really have a concept of “community”.

Updated 25 Apr 2005: Here is another suggestion in getting the Orkut invites: 360invites.com. You can ask for Orbut, Yahoo 360 or Gmail invites there.

First of all, two cousins. I have two cousins living in the states, whom I have not seen for many years, but occasionally kept in touch via MSN messenger. My father’s older brother’s son, who is 3 years seniorer than me, lives in North Carolina, and my father’s younger sister’s daughter, who is one year younger than me, lives in the New York city. Both of them are Christians and serve actively in the church. And I am inviting them to join my social group on Orkut! Well, grandma was a bit worried as her grand kids grew older but were still single, so commissioned the whole family into this match making business. I am getting them into Orkut to as my part of “helping them out” :) Now I just need to invite my other Christian friends from the church…

Orkut has idea of “communities” that you can join to meet other people with similar interests. There are discussion forums within the community that idea can be shared between community members. Some communities I’ve joined (and tried to join) so far: Christian, Biblical Christians, Jabber, Python, Vim, Movabletype, Ricebowl Journals, Firebird, and Satch n Vai. There are quite a few Christian communities on Orkut, but from the discussion messages that main Christian community has already been overtaken by the liberals. There are, however, some other fundamentalists/conservativists Bible believing Christians struggling in their own communities there, and the messages are much more refreshing.

Any other FOCUSer on Orkut?

• Apparently it is written in C# and ASP.NET. What?! I thought it is done in the spare time from someone works for Google, who has one of the biggest Linux deployment.
• There are some client side Javascript that uses XMLHTTP which only works on Mozilla and Internet Explorer, but not Safari. It does make the interface easier to use though.
• Speed is excellence – very different from Friendster.
• The fields for your profile are quite extensive. From basic personal information, to your style of humour, to your interests, etc. Some fields also have privacy control, which can restrict access to these fields to only yourself, your friends, or your friends’ friends.
• You can give rating to your friends. Anyone wants to be my fan? :)
• You can easily build communities and put them into their DMOZ like directory.
• Adding new friends is quite easy, even if they are not already on the network. It would automatically send out an email, waiting for your friend to register, and then connect two individuals together.

However, there appears to be some security problem wrt user-to-user messages, that a member can broadcast a message to all the users in the network. I did get quite a few messages when I logged back in later tonight, and found most of them complaining about this security issue. Someone has already blogged about this hole, as it is quite a shame for such an insecure site to bear Google affiliated sign. It might also have XSS vulnerability – so I need to make sure that I don’t click on any link I see…

Overall it is quite a nice implementation of on-line social network/community – at least it feels slick comparing to the competition out there. How would it survive, and what would Google do with it is yet to be seen.