Within an hour of the launch of Orkut, Google's new YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service), I had written a mail filter that silently discarded invitations to join (it's the same filter that tosses out mail from Ryze, Friendster and all those other services, which drive me completely bonkers, since I already know who my friends are, am not actively trying to get laid, and don't need the "service" of having to risk offending near-strangers who want me to confirm some notional "friendship" between us a dozen times a day and I certainly can't think of a good reason to entrust some commercial outfit with my personal relationship data).
Do these things have to suck? Damnifiknow. I know that there's a bunch of stuff I'd like from a social network analysis of my own inbox, voicecalls, and so forth. Today, I have an iTunes playlist ("Old friends") that just plays highly rated songs that haven't been played in the past 30 days. Why not a smart to-do list that reminds me to email old friends that I haven't called or written in the last season (credit: Alice)? Hell, how about something that gives me a distinctive ringtone for calls from out-of-touch old pals and the option to define attention-grabbing behavior (a chime, a prioritization, coloring) when they email?
Foe Romeo talks about how Google could have launched a YASNS that actually provided a useful service that end-users could still control but that Google could add a lot of value to: a FOAF explorer:
Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches,
so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary
search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content
about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)Perhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)
