You are who we say you are… and that’s good
October 27th, 2004
On the subject of what sorts of parts of the rest of the net might be useful to wikis, Corny, or both: social networking systems.
Not the ones we know and loathe today, mind you. Systems like Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tribe.net and on and on all have inflated opinions of their own utility, and most are closed to outside use anyway. They don’t even make good use of the rest of the net themselves; they’re walled gardens.
No, the social networking systems I’m interested in 1) haven’t been built yet, and 2) will have, in true small-pieces-loosely-joined fashion, deliberately low utility by themselves. (In fact, the ones that are trying to have even a little bit more usefulness are only drawing fire for it.)
I’m thinking that external semantic social networks could help wikis form a kind of “firm security” as an alternative to hard security, keeping some of hard security’s strengths over soft, while eliminating some of its weaknesses. See, social networks are useful at validating a self-asserted identity. How do I know you’re you? Because all the people you know say that you are.
That concept alone is far from perfect, but it’s also far from as bad as you might think. Have a look at LOAF, which describes itself as an “extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message[s] without compromising your privacy,” so that “[c]orrespondents can use this information to prioritize their mail.” Random email sent from someone who knows a friend of yours, as evidenced by that friend’s presence in their address book, might be more trustable than random email from someone unknown. There are holes in LOAF as currently implemented, but the general idea is pretty intriguing. Merge it with cell phones, and the Bluetooth capability thereof, and it might get hot in here indeed.
Building such a system as part of a given wiki engine would be missing the point, in my view; the point is small pieces, loosely joined. Let someone else build a general-purpose system of some sort, then don’t be so much of a not-invented-here Wiki snob that you don’t take advantage. That’s the future.