@Marcus Your story seems to both champion and villify social networks. Which is cool. Because I’d certainly share such mixed feeling myself. I experience existing online SNs as amazingly useful and often creepy and icky. I think we all do. The thing is a lot of people seem to believe that that you can’t have one without the other. Its my view that the same fundamental blueprint underlying all the social networks we have today gives rise to the good and bad we see in todays experience of social networking.

For me this means that the way forward is to rethink the underlying architecture. Design again from bottom up using even a slightly better understanding of sociologic. This is not such a big deal as the existing blueprint was put otgether in a matter of days and was such a success that it has stuck in a ‘if it ain’t borke don’t fix it way’. We can make a good first step by going beyond the flawed metaphor of the social “network” and start using the more realisitic metaphor of the social “cloud”.

@PaulWalsh Firstly my apologies. That sentence fragment you pulled out was horrible. The grammar was so mangled as to make me ashamed of myself! Thanks for highlighting it and giving me the chance to correct it.

And my apologies again. My mangled grammar seems to have had a contagious quality and warped my mind because I now can’t make sense of this part of your comment.

“I just see the need in the context of whatever posts you’ve happened to read :)”

“Hi Marcus

I have totally lost track of all these facespacelinklaxo things and stopped them all. They’re snakeoil, they just wanna own our lives.

Drop me a mail any time, hope all is great with you.”

:)