Why do I need to tell each and every web service who my friends are? Why can’t last.fm, flickr and twitter just get this information from Facebook? Likewise, why I do have to tell them all where I live, how old I am, what my website is, etc.?
Scott James Remnant
Because centralising around facebook is a REALLY good idea
Many people are working on the problem, I expect this to be mostly solved in the next year or so – Probably with some kind of openID 2.0 slant for authentication/identification/resolving.
Social graph sharing… google it. Will require you have an ‘common/shared’ identity first (such as openid).
That’s a good point..
one potential solution would be facebook allowing third party services to have an option “sign up with linked facebook account” and then the user can pick which information that site has access to.
not that facebook needs to be the central platform here, but i dont see why not.
OpenID is one part of the puzzle here. Provided that you’ve given this information to your OP, the Attribute Exchange extension provides a way for these sites to ask you for the info. It even has facility to push updates to relying sites when that info changes (e.g. if you move).
Of course, no one implements enough of this yet for it to be truly useful. Maybe that’ll come in service pack 2.
I think there are more services like facebook. There are a lot of people out there, who are not using facebook.
A good solution could be OpenID-support. You can store your data in your OpenID-Account. There you have the possibility to configure which service see which date.
I would prefer to see more websites using OpenID….
Bernd
“Why do I need to tell each and every web service who my friends are? Why can’t last.fm, flickr and twitter just get this information from Facebook?”
Because they too wants to own you personal information.
“Likewise, why I do have to tell them all where I live, how old I am, what my website is, etc.?”
Because they don’t support openid (more precisely, the attribute exchange part of openid).
HTH. HAND.
You really don’t need to teach each service, there are quite a few tools for importing address books from places like Google or Yahoo Mail and then inviting those friends. That largely takes the hassle or fun out of it depending on your point of view.
I barely trust Facebook with my information at all, why would I want other products accessing my information? I’m on the verge of deleting my account. Orkut FTW
The solution would be OpenID 2.0 + Google OpenSocial (well, if Facebook joins all the others that already sign for it)
We’ll see in 2008 how it ends
Because the web is like anyplace else: Everybody wants there to be a universal standard, as long as *their* standard is it…
Facebook, last.fm, flickr, twitter etc. are all communities with their own vocabularies. Likewise for openid, they all are vocabularies to denote a piece of information for a particular purpose. The fact that these vocabularies partly overlap is, however, only apparent to humans who using these services. The objective of the semanticweb initiative is to address exactly this problem; develop a framework that allows communities to interchange information. Unfortunately the logic to make such a framework work can be rather complex sometimes (not always).
There’s OpenSocial, which is spear-headed by Google and has everybody *but* Facebook behind them, and is suppsed to do exactly that.
I don’t think OpenID is really about identity. It’s more about authorisation as far as I understand. The sort of details you want to be available to all sites seem to be better covered by something like FOAF, but I don’t know of many sites that will read a FOAF file in that way. The thing I like about FOAF is that I can decide what information I want to share, but it does have the issue of not being able to limit access to certain people or services.
One solution whic has recently gained some adoption is XFN [1], which is based on microformats [2]. For instance, your twitter page lists your contacts’ information encoded in vCards…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network
[2] http://microformats.org/
On related note, why do I need to tell the NHS, DVLA, Inland Revenue, all my details? Why can’t they centralise them all? Short answer: the privacy advocates won’t let them. It’s the same in any country.
I doubt any centralised information system for identity will ever exist. OpenID is a good attempt at kick-starting it, but if it ever takes off, it’ll hit a massive privacy wall from people too paranoid to embrace technology for what it is: a valuable tool, as opposed to the instrument of our destruction.
That said, they might well have a point. In any centralised system someone is in control of all that data. Who would it be? How could it be guaranteed that our information never falls in to the wrong hands, either illegally or via a legitimate business deal. Regardless of the security of such systems, there will always be doubt enough to completely undermine them.
Only privacy-hating jerks would register to so many so-called social networks. But go ahead, give Facebook your sensitive information.
Of course you’re making a good point but centralizing in Facebook isn’t the solution. Facebook just isn’t open enough and not everybody use (or want to use) facebook. A OpenID account is a better way to approach part of this issue.
One reason: Those locked-down services are run by businesses. Facebook can handle images, so they don’t want to make it easy for their users to use the rival Flickr service (and vice versa). Twitter could be seen as a rival to Facebook’s “wall” things, and thus is in the same situation. Last.fm? Well, why should Facebook restrict their future growth in the music area by giving that up to last.fm?
You may as well ask why MSN messenger won’t share buddies with Yahoo messenger: They’re proprietary (the code is closed of to its users). (Hence why I don’t use them. Well, I use last.fm’s recommendations within my media players, but I don’t visit their bloated website-trying-to-be-an-application-which-doesn’t-belong-in-a-browser thing)
Because Microsoft showed that a monopoly will be allowed by our governments if you can achieve it, and 95% of tech business people want to earn billions like Microsoft (so most will earn nothing) instead of settling for earning millions by making customers happy.
It’s called control.
The solution is called free software. Wait, free server-side software.
Hence, the agpl.
I don’t want the decision to be able to export or import or connect services to come down to some company’s corporate interest..
Because Internet is free. There is no “central” main database of people (well at least it’s not public if there is ….) which can be used by other services, it would be even serious to have one. The price of freedom is the lack of control and vice versa. However it would be good to have OPTIONAL possibility to fetch information via xml-rpc, soap or something similar from other site if you’d like to do: there’s such an aggregation functionalities, like mugshot and others (limited scope, however).