When we stopped talking about “blogging” and started talking about “social networks” the only real innovation was that Myspace and then Facebook and others exposed your contact list to your contacts. That’s it, that’s all, that’s the catalyst for the social media revolution – sharing contacts.

My first step in leaving Facebook is collecting all of my friend’s contact information. I couldn’t send most of them a letter if I wanted to. I haven’t maintained a proper address book for a long time; now my contact information is spread across a wide variety of apps where my data is owned by some third party that provides me the service.

I couldn’t find a piece of open source software that did what I wanted, so I wrote my own address book software and shared it on Github. At the time of this blog post, I’ve only had a couple of weeks to work on it. There are enough bugs that wouldn’t recommend anyone other than a Laravel developer to try to use it.

Currently, the app allows your friends to create a contact card with an email address. Once verified by email, your friend can share their contact details with you such as their address, email, birthday, websites, and social media accounts. They will also be able to see your contact details. Future features will provide tagging so than you can group your contacts and restrict what contact details you share with which groups. This will allow you to share your home address with you friends and your business address with your colleagues. On top of this platform I also hope to build a google map integration so you can see all of you contacts on a map at once, a list of upcoming birthdays, the ability to merge accounts should you accidentally create two, proper admin tools to modify shared data, and some other stuff I’m not thinking of.

Most excitingly, I want to make this app federated. If one of my friends decides to run a copy of this app, I will be able to have my copy of the app sync their contact card with fresh data served by their copy of the app’s api. Boom, really simple federation.

Apparently, step 2 of leaving Facebook is coming back to this poor forgotten blog and writing some posts. Or perhaps that’s just part of step 1. Either way, I expect to continue to blog about the process of removing Facebook from my online experience. Truth be told, I’d like to take as many of you with me as I can.

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Meanwhile, I use Facebook on a daily basis. Sometimes I keep tabs on my mobile. My problem with Facebook has recently become what my problem on MySpace used to be. I don’t like the software. I want something very different. I stay for two reasons. First, I know a lot of people who are active on Facebook. Second, I haven’t found an alternative I would want to encourage my friends to join.

The recent closure of Internet connectivity in Egypt during the revolution sends a strong message about ownership of the Internet. Ownership should be distributed. The tool that replaces Facebook should be distributed. Diaspora perhaps?

It’s really pretty simple. If we the people can hang on to the Internet – even if it means building our own – then we stand a chance. Otherwise, nothing changes from the way things have been for thousands of years. This is about to become very important.

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In 2007, I was hired by a big name health and fitness company to develop an online community. The effort began well, but was quickly derailed by many of the most common mistakes that big companies seem to make. I departed the venture in 2008 and moved on to social media centric projects. I went back to check on their progress and found that the entire community, one that used to be hundreds of thousands of users strong, was wiped from the face of the Internet entirely.

I started sifting through my mental database of experience. I also had a couple of high level conversations about community building. Some of my contacts from the 2007 project have moved on to viable community and social media projects elsewhere. While thinking about the viability of these projects, I was suddenly struck with just how much the atmosphere has changed in the 15+ years since I first fell into the game.

One of my contacts, in particular, hit the nail on the head pretty hard when he mentioned sites like Facebook. Community development changed social networking came onto the scene in force. Now, successful community development plans need to include social media and networking giants. Furthermore, a highly successful community development project can exist entirely on top of the technology platforms provided by these giants.

The entire game is different now. It’s as if the open spaces of the Internet have all been industrialized. Now, instead of building in an open field, you have to find space in a high rise complex. Technology paths are seemingly locked down and users are settled into routines and assumptions that will be extremely difficult to crack. The major game players have establisehd themselves. Some are more stable than others, but the top dogs aren’t going away any time soon.

Is the world a better place now? No. We’ve shaken the world of copyrights and intellectual property. We’ve create new ways to create and share information and media. We’ve empowered people with new technologies. We’ve done a lot of good things. However, if you look at the big picture, the revolution of the Internet has had precious little impact. Propaganda and misinformation are still rampant. Our online experience is still heavily controlled by large corporations. Our connectivity is grossly overpriced. The entire system is laden heavily with scammers, liars, cheaters, and manipulators.

Not only are citizens around the world being heavily fined for violating the intellectual property rights of major corpporations, but major corporations are making profits by respinning the intellectual property the masses are freely creating for them. We don’t own our data, sites like Facebook and Youtube own our data. It is nice that more and more people are beginning to question how and why the system is what it is. Still, there’s precious little momentum for change and what momentum that exists is on the decline.

We’re still mostly a world of consumers. One has but to compare the number of people passionate about the Free Culture movement to the number of people passioante about the iPad to clearly see just how far we are from evolving. We humans spread out from Africa. We constantly discovered new wonderful places to explore and develop. We took rich natural wonders and turned them into poluted cities full of crime and noise. We slashed, burned, dug, and paved our way into our modern metropolis while precious few wrote utopian stories of how things could be. When we finally got the the digital open spaces of the Internet, we treated it the same way.

I figure… if we haven’t figured this out before we leave this planet, we’re going to do the same thing to the Moon, to Mars, and where whatever else we manage to touch.

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Pirates

The file sharing rant has raged on for years. While the media industries claim that file sharing has hurt their market share, the movie industry is seeing record sales. For many, it’s obvious what is going on. With the advent of new media, we saw a shift in how things work in our world. Once upon a time, you had to have a lot of money to record media and distribute it. This need gave rise to a collection of media industries, music and movies in particular. Now, recording and sharing media is very cheap and very easy. The MPAA and RIAA are no longer important. However, with their size and power, they will do anything and everything they can to keep the status quo.

Some would argue that we have to protect copyrights and the artists. Tell that to Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead. The RIAA and MPAA monopolized distribution channels and decided what media we consumed for decades. They took huge margins and left the original artists, most of them, with a small fraction of the green. This has all been discussed, at length, many times before.

What we have going on is a rebellion. It’s also a large scale rebellion. Before I discuss that point, I want to say something a bit harder to grasp. Intellectual property rights are dumb. I have many an artist friend from musicians to writers who do not like it when I say this. They feel their livelihood depends on these laws. Meanwhile, we have the AP going after their own members for content they, themselves, posted online for sharing. We also have the most significant figurehead against the file sharing movement, Metallica, admitting openly to downloading copyrighted content. Patents themselves don’t really protect the little guy. Who can afford to enforce them? No, patents are there as a tool in the battlefield between giants like Apple vs Palm or Microsoft vs TomTom. Empires like Walt Disney were built not from using copyright laws to protect original works, but from using them to copyright public domain works.

That isn’t to say that artists don’t deserve credit for their works. However, there’s a long running misunderstanding of the intent behind US intellectual property law. We almost had none. However, we decided to grant very short term monopolies on IP to stimulate invention. There was a clause allowing congress to extend the length of these copyrights. This power has been used and abused to the extent that there are people alive today living off of royalties for works they had nothing to do with. This is not stimulating invention, this is milking a broken system. This is hacking. This is black hat hacking. This is, also, somehow socially acceptable?

So back to the topic at hand, the Pirate Bay and the revolution. I’m overwhelmed with where to begin. It’s amazing what you can find on the Bay. It’s like the Wikipedia of the commercial media industry. It’s loaded with out of circulation media and wonderful rare finds. It’s one of the treasures of the Internet. Today, four people involved in the existence of the Pirate Bay were sentenced to jail time for copyright law violations in Sweden. Story and video can be found on the BBC and the Telegraph.

When we first started file sharing, we blatantly broke the law with applications like Napster. We were a bit surprised to find out that we did not own the music we thought we owned. Turns out, we have a limited use license. So, along comes a revolutionary technology called bit torrent. By breaking a file down into small chunks and spreading it around, bit torrent allows groups with limited resources to distribute large chunks of media without having to suffer the bandwidth charges of serving the full files to users. As a wonderful side effect, it also negates laws related to file sharing as no one is guilty of giving the file away.

And this is the game that played out over the last many years as The Pirate Bay kept changing how they did things to remain legal. The Pirate Bay contains no copyrighted materials. The copyright infringement is occurring only because of the involvement of thousands (millions?) of people working together to make it happen. There in lies a truth that needs to be seen. If IP law is right and true, why are so many people both eager and willing to violate IP law? If the majority of world citizens do not want a law, do not want to respect a law, then why does the law exist? This is absolutely crucial to examine. Knowingly or not, everyone who downloads a file is part of the revolution.

No one wants to tell an artist, of any kind, that he or she does not deserve to be acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions. This does not mean that copyrights and patents are inherently good. At best, they’re a broken system. I tend to believe their an irrelevant system. Michelangelo seemed to do just fine without IP law. However, now that we have IP law, someone scarffed up the rights to that dead artist’s work. How is this not sick and twisted?

The four “so called” founders of the Pirate Bay will now spend a year in prison for leading a revolution against the corporate giants that have monopolized our media channels. Four men will lose a year of their lives for what they believed in. How will the media portray them? As criminals who rightly deserved what they got? Wait, isn’t that the same “media” that put them there? Go figure.

I would enjoy sitting down and spending hours talking about this with anyone who’s truly curious enough to discuss it with an open mind. I would enjoy sharing this message with the world. If I were a multinational media conglomerate, I could just use my overwhelming power to quietly push my message into the minds of millions. Unfortunately, I’m not. I’m just a guy who turned off the television and picked up a mouse in the early 90’s. I spends my hours programming games that I gave away for free while listening to music that other people gave away for free. (Special thanks to Skaven, Purple Motion, and the rest of the scene btw.)

I don’t expect to change the world to my way of thinking. I don’t even expect this blog post to be read by more than maybe a few people. Chances are, most folks will scan it and utter TL;DR. I do wish that I could somehow share with the world, even for just an instant, the utter insanity I see in all of this. If I’m wrong, show me – because I’m tired of being frustrated by the idiocy and, more so, the wide acceptance and support of the idiocy.

Note: Photo taken entirely without permission from the Times Online who credit Bob Strong from Reuters but w/out link or information.

P.S. One aspect of this entire debate I failed to mention relates to the videogame industry. I’ve been active in the industry for more than a decade and have noticed that it does not operate, at all, like other media industries. While the music and movie industries are slow to change and use the law to hold their ground, the videogame industry more frequently looks to technological solutions. The game industry is largely self regulating. While the movie industry adopted a ratings system because it was legally forced to, the gaming industry developed their own rating system. Publishers all jumped on board and the system tends to work as well, if not better than the movie industry. The game industry is also constantly exploring distribution models to see what works. While I can’t cite the game industry as a positive role model, I can say that they’re doing much better than other media industries. At least they’re trying to grow and evolve. I may write a post specifically about this some time in the future – provided I’m inspired – and less upset. Enough for today.

Edit 4/21/09: Additional reference link – Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music.

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Apparently, group think settled on the title of “Social Media Expert” recently. Meanwhile, the title is being mocked in a few places. Here’s what I know about social media – it’s not likely, perhaps not even possible, to be a social media expert. If you knew everything about social media this morning (even though you didn’t), by this evening it will have changed and evolved so much you’ll have already fallen behind.

In fact, I would go so far to say that anyone who is willing to call themselves a Social Media Expert immediate brands themselves as a fake – a seller of snake oil in a roadside freak show. That’s not to say you’re not wonderfully gifted in understanding the ebb and flow of social media dynamics – but an expert you are not.

So here’s an alternative, call youself a Social Media Specialist. Face it, you’re not an authority on social media. Social media is greater than any one of us. However, if it is your passion, if you are dedicating a significant part of your energy to understanding it and being involved in it – then call yourself a specialist.

Hey, that’s just my $0.02.

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Only time will tell if such an oddball nitch for a community will work out. We’re having our first get-together this Thursday. If nothing else, I’m glad to meet more local snowboard enthusiasts.

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What I would like to see happen next wouldn’t be as “easy” as our current batch of social networks. Because it’s not easy, I don’t expect the idea to ever take off. Still, I would like to see it happen just as much.

I would like to abstract the friends list concept entirely. This would also require abstracting the identity concept entirely (see OpenID and Sxip). Anyway, the concept is such that you manage a mast friends list somewhere. This would contain considerably more complex information than what most social networks offer now. It would allow for grouping, would show number of hops between you and another person, and would allow for public/private view management. Above all else, it would be build such that you are not locked into any one platform. If you build a personal home page, you could write an app that enables your social network. If you installed a piece of popular web software for content management on your personal site, it would include plugins to activate your social network.

Basically, what I’m getting at, is removing the social network from the walled garden of a service provider. Now instead of having a profile on a service, you have your own website that you can develop as you see fit.

I think that this concept will eventually happen in one form or another. It’s taking a while for the identity management stuff to catch on so I’m sure it will be a long time. I’ve thought about the problem in a few different ways and I’m not sure what the best method of solving the problem would be. Maybe it’s built on something as simple as defining relationships in your anchor tags.

Just thinking out loud about this one. If anyone knows of projects of this nature, please let me know.

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Here’s our banner:

As I said, there’s not much unique about it. We used PHPBB as our forum software with a few extra mods for a photo album, calendar, and ability to post video. We stacked WordPress up front for a very basic content management system. We didn’t take the time to integrate the authentication databases so we turned comments off. We’d rather keep user interaction inside the forums right now anyway.

An important topic came up while working on the site… WordPress and PHPBB are almost exactly the same concepts in software with a slightly different delivery. What PHPBB would consider to be a thread, WordPress would call a blog entry. Someone posts a topic, other people reply. The differences are slight, but have a heavy impact. On the blog, posts are always ordered by the date of the original post, not replies. On a forum, threads are bumped to the top when new replies appear. Blogs are usually setup with only one or just a few people making new posts. Forums usually allow anyone to start a new thread.

Given that the data management for both pieces of software are so close to the same… We talked a long time about building one piece of software that did both. It would be very easy to use PHPBB as backend software for a blog. Create a forum where only select users can start new threads, write some new scripts to display the content in a blog style format, and you’ve got a blog. Once you get this setup, you can create unique forums for every user that wants a personal blog.

I’m curious if this is a good way to create two conceptual interfaces for the same data.

Anyway, I digress. DallasSnowboarders.com is one of the first communities I’ve been involved in launching in a while. The last time I checked, we were up to 14 users. We announced the site 4 days ago. I hope it catches on, I’m eager to meet local boarders.

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