Social networks have been one of the boom areas of the net in the last few years. I've been quite glad to see people making use of the internet as a publishing medium rather than just consuming what others produce. I know it results in a lot of junk, but then you don't have to read it all. It used to be that you would have to set up your own site to do this, but the social networks have lowered the bar so that anyone can do it. It still seems that many are not that interested in doing so. I started using the Multiply network a few years ago as it seemed to offer some nice facilities. I managed to get a few friends and family to join, but few of them have ever posted anything. One of the most attractive features was that you can say exactly which people or group can see any item. This is essential when posting family pictures. Multiply keeps plodding on, but shows no sign of becoming better known. I assume they have enough members to keep them going from their Google ads.

Of course Facebook is the big name of the moment. It offers lots of useless 'toys' for people to play with. I joined to see what is going on, but mostly just use it to keep up with what my friends are doing. It doesn't really seem aimed at those who want to write longer pieces like this. I see that they are offering more control over privacy in a similar way to Multiply, but I wonder if people will bother. There must be some who get to regret posting certain items that get seen by employers or others who might not appreciate them.

The problem with all these systems is that you cannot easily change to another unless you can persuade all your friends to do likewise. Transferring your content is likely to be tricky as well. This is why I would prefer to use this site where I have full control. I just have to persuade my less technical friends that they should get into things like RSS so that they can get notified when I update. There's also the issue of privacy. At the moment everything here is public and so I have to be careful what I post. Implementing any sort of access control requires more technology. What I would like to have would be something like OpenID for logging in with access restricted to those I have added to my FOAF profile (they have a new wiki). I doubt I could do this using Pyblosxom, but am reluctant to move to anything more complex for now. So the family stuff will stay on Multiply for now. It's too much work to get them all to migrate to anything else.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye on the more open technologies. Don Park's XFN spidering tool is coming along nicely. The output you can see for my site is still fairly basic, but the power of using this data is revealed by making use of the OPML file it creates. If you load this into something like Google Reader you automatically get a full set of feeds for my sites and those of my friends. This is just from adding a few tags into the HTML code. Enough sites are doing that to make it useful. There are plenty of people working on these technologies, but it probably doesn't have the commercial potential to attract the big money. How can you force advertising on people if they don't come to one central site? I still wonder if that is a viable source of income to justify the huge sums that are being paid to buy up sites like Bebo. But what do I know?

So have I achieved anything by this post? I'm not sure, but I quite enjoy writing it. I probably need to plan what I write more.