A couple of months back I write a couple of posts trying to express what I thought about some of the social networks out there. As I am likely to keep using some of them for a while I thought I would write up how I was using them.

Facebook seems to be the hot place these days, but I still don't like it much. It's tricky to link into from the rest of the web and does a poor job of telling you what has been updated on the groups you are in. I have 26 contacts there. All are people I know well. I don't post much there directly. It comes from feeds on other sites. I do play around with some of the applications such as Blog Networks and Visual Bookshelf.

My preferred site for sharing with friends is still Multiply. As most of the family on there I can share pictures with them safely. Most of them rarely post anything. I post stuff several times each month. I've got 23 contacts there, all friends and family.

Several people at work were on LinkedIn, so I joined that. It has my career details, but I'm not seeing any benefit for now. It has groups and Q&A sections that I don't really use. Perhaps it will be useful the next time I'm looking for a job. I have 50 contacts. Almost all are with my current employer.

One of the phenomena of the last year or so has been microblogging. Basically it's about posting short messages about what you are currently doing, but has been expanded to allow for sending replies and direct messages to people. I played with Twitter and gained a few friends as contacts. I also followed a few of the on-line celebrities. I've since trimmed my list to 10, but am followed by 45. Some of those are bots or people just trying to boost their numbers. Putting the word 'guitar' in my profile seemed to attract several in that area. I've blocked some of the more extreme marketeers.

Fairly soon after joining Twitter I heard about Identi.ca that was doing similar things, but in a much more open form with open-source software and open protocols. I've met lots of interesting people there and had some good discussions. I subscribe to 35 and have 46 subscribers. They have just introduced the ability to block, but I've had a lot less marketeers there than on Twitter.

For music I love last.fm for recommending me bands and supplying great streaming in whatever genre suits my mood. I've got 11 friends there that include a couple I have never met. There's not much communication going on there. There used to be a way to see when friends had posted, but I can't find an equivalent in the latest version.

For a few years I've been logging sites I'm interested in on del.icio.us (I don't approve in the change of URL). I keep an eye on what my contacts are bookmarking and that often leads to interesting stuff. I follow 9 and have 11 'fans'. 5 fall into both camps. I'm up to well over 3000 links now.

I've looked at various sites for aggregating feeds to allow me to track what friends are up to on sites I don't use. Friendfeed is pretty good and allows for commenting, but I don't get many of those. I follow 5 and have 7 subscribers (2 mutual). whoisi is an alternative for those who don't like having to create accounts. I use it to follow 9 people, but can't see how many subscribe to my stuff. There is some duplication from Friendfeed, so I may drop some to keep things manageable.

There are a few other social sites I use where I have a few contacts, but don't gain much from doing so including Slashdot and Youtube.

I don't have massed of friends to connect with on-line and a lot of my friends are not interested in doing so. I also am not into mass-friending strangers just to get the numbers up. I use these sites to get some real benefits in keeping up with friends and gaining useful news and information. The most useful sites are Multiply, Identi.ca, last.fm and del.icio.us.

Perhaps my last post didn't get across what I really think about the social network sites. I want to keep control of what I write rather than relying on some corporation to keep all the old stuff and not surround it with ads that I have no interest in. That's why I maintain this blog as my primary means of expression.

Blogs used to be a bigger part of the web, but have been drowned out by the big networks. This has been a hot topic this week on Wired that drew responses on other sites.

It's actually never been easier to find and follow blogs with services like Google Reader. You can see immediately when a new post comes in. The danger is getting overwhelmed. I have to keep cutting back on feeds. There are still issues with comments. You don't see them in Reader unless you click through to the original article and even then most people will not plough through hundreds of comments. If there are more than a couple of screens' worth I expect most people will just move on after reading the article. Even if they want to comment they will fear being lost in the flood. Not a problem on this site.

Perhaps more people would run a blog if they knew that there are some fairly easy to use ways to do it, e.g. on Wordpress or Blogger. Those sites may offer some social features, but only within their own systems. What's needed are open standards for cross-blog communication. I think that some exist already. There are certainly ways to link to friends such as FOAF and XFN that I have tried to use. It seems that Google is now reading these.

The other thing that is missing from blogs is a standard way to restrict access to certain items. I don't want to put photos of my kids on my site for the world to see. That's why they go on Multiply. Perhaps something could be done using OpenID. I like the idea of linking that in with people I have in my FOAF file to automatically allocate access rights, but don't know how to implement it.

I need to do yet more reading to work out what is possible and backed up by standards to make my site more useful. Suggestions welcome.

I've been doing some thinking about social networks on the net and what they provide. People like to communicate and share opinions, tips, pictures, gossip and other nuggets of information. Before the internet most of us were limited in how many people we could reach, but now you have the potential to reach anyone with internet access. Inevitably this has led to a glut of junk out there, but there is gold to be found too. Professional writers are likely to be more consistent in their output, but they can't cover everything.

Those of us with the technical aptitude can host our own web site with complete control. Most people will prefer to use a hosted service that does the hard work for them so that they can concentrate on the content. The other thing these services can provide is the ability to connect to other people, but generally only those who are also registered with that service. In order to reach some of my friends I have joined some of these services with varying degrees of success.

There are lots of sites that allow people to link up, but provide limited options on communication. Slashdot lets you link to people, but only to see what comments and posts they have and with no way to know when there are updates. delicious lets you track other peoples' bookmarks, but there is no way to post other content.

Twitter offers a minimal system of short messages, with the option to follow any other member without the need for them to reciprocate, unless you decide that you only want friends to read what you like. identi.ca is a promising open source alternative that I'm finding useful.

Of the sites that provide a wide range of social options my favourite is still Multiply. From the start it has been about keeping in touch with people you know rather than building a huge network of strangers. You can post text, images, video and audio with complete control over who can access it. I use it to post pictures for friends and family with the option to restrict access. They get an email when I do so. It has worked well for me for a few years, but I find the others less enthusiastic about posting stuff themselves. The site recently announced reaching the ten million member mark.

Facebook has been getting lots of attention in the media and is growing at an incredible rate. I joined because some friends were there, but have found it disappointing. It aims to create a 'walled garden' subset of the internet. I guess it is safe in that you don't have to tell anyone your email address and can block anyone from your profile. But it is so shut down that you can't see anything there without joining. Allowing access to any aspect of your profile seems to be limited to all friends or everyone and tracking what has been updated is difficult.

Some people consider some of these sites to be evil for various reasons. I accept that they can abuse your data to feed you with advertising, but that's how they make a living and it's not much different to what various other businesses do. I accept some loss of privacy in exchange for the benefits of loyalty cards and gain from recommendations on various shopping sites based on previous purchases. Some of the methods these sites use may also be suspect, but I'm not sure if they are interesting in anything beyond making money.

Some people are trying to exploit the social sites as ways of reaching an audience for their art. They can provide a direct link between artist and fans. Steve Lawson is a good example of this. He is now passing on his experience to others.

Personally I'd like to see better ways for us all to be able to manage our own data, but still have the benefits of networking. Simple options exist such as RSS feeds to track blog updates and comment systems. I ought to investigate things like trackback that give feedback of cross-blog comments. I would like to be able to post comments on other blogs and get updates on follow-ups without having to subscribe to lots of feeds or rely on emails. Are there standards for this that I am missing out on? I realise that my blogging platform is not the most advanced, but I don't intend to change that any time soon.

For now I will deal with the frustrations of the big social networks as a way to track others and make them aware of my blog posts, which will remain my primary means of self-expression. My hope it to reach a small audience who may be able to help me to reach more people, including the non-techies, using open standards. Thanks for reading.

Slashdot can be prone to scaremongering as much as the tabloids. This article is about someone who has found a way to extract email addresses from MicroID hashes on some sites. The idea of Micro ID is that it allows you to associate a user account on a site with an email address without revealing that address. Then sites like ClaimID can verify that you own a given account, as I have done for several. The idea has been criticised, but I think it is useful in a limited way. It is vulnerable to people working out what the email address was if they know your name and can guess what domain it is on. Not too hard in my case as my email is hosted on my own site that I publish in my account profiles. I'm not too bothered about this account as my email address has been heavily spammed anyway for ages. I suspect it may have been harvested from a key server as those publish all email addresses without obfuscation. I would prefer to share my email address openly so that people can easily contact me, but it seems that is not advisable due to others abusing it. As they already do should I be worried?

It seems that others take this threat more seriously as last.fm and digg have stopped using MicroID. This is a shame. identi.ca have handled it better by giving you an option of whether to have a MicroID on your profile page. Perhaps someone can come up with a more secure protocol that does not reveal private information. This is a complex field in which I am not qualified to dabble. Security and encryption are very easy to get wrong.

Whilst looking into this I found that ClaimID was down. This could be a problem for me as I use them for OpenID on a few sites. I wouldn't use it for anything critical or financial, but it saves me having to come up with passwords for every site. As I let Firefox save my OpenID password I rarely have to enter it. This makes me slightly more secure if some site tries to redirect me to a clone of the log-in screen as that would not have my details.

I've had a GPG public key for years, but have not used it for much. Very few people I know will send me encrypted emails. I keep expecting spammers to start doing that as a way around spam filters. I'm not sure it is a big enough target for them. The only site that has used my public key to verify my identity is Biglumber that deals with that topic anyway.

I'm generally interested in ways that we can publish personal information so that people can use it to contact us, but still protect our privacy. Is there an answer? Perhaps email is too broken to be of use. Closed systems like Facebook allow messages to be sent with options to block those you don't know, but are not open enough for general usage.

In my quest to learn more about the art of programming I have been listening to the Stack Overflow podcast by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. These two seem to have a lot of experience between them and are applying it to developing a new Q&A site for developers. They are both entertaining talkers as well.

The Stack Overflow site is still in closed beta, but I managed to get in on it. It's simple, but impressive. It uses cool technology like OpenID, but can be used without registering. Users can allocate ratings to all questions and answers, so the good stuff should be easy to find. There is a complex reputation system, with badges, to encourage people to participate. So far I have submitted a couple of questions about use of wiki and email to manage information and received lots of good responses. It will be interesting to see how it evolves when opened up to the world.

I'll be interested in hearing about other good podcasts on programming and other technical subjects. I enjoy listening to them when driving to work. I still need to get myself a car radio that can play from flash media. I still have to burn an audio CD, which limits the duration of what I can listen to and sometimes plays up. I don't think I can bring myself to buy anything that does not support Ogg Vorbis. I'm not as principled as some people I know when it comes to only using open formats, but I still like to support them.

Being a fan of web sites with a physical location I've felt the need for something that would tell you what sites relate to your local area. Groups Near You does this fairly well. You can add sites and match them up to an area on a Google map. There's no log-in, but it uses your email address to confirm changes and then that site is restricted to that email account. Some real potential if people add enough sites. I did a couple. It's a shame they don't make use of GeoURL to pick up the location of a site and then publish that data on their pages. Maybe I should mail them.

My other toy of the last few days was MyBlogLog. It's a Yahoo service that gives you some nice visitor tracking features for your site and lets you build a 'community' around it. The stats are nice, but I'm not totally convinced yet. I mainly joined in order to check out how their FOAF data appeared on the FOAFster visualisation tool.

identi.ca has been much improved by allowing you to see all your replies in one place. People had replied to some of my 'dents', but I had missed them. I've picked up a few followers who share my interests. These spontaneous communities are fun.

I know, horrible word, but new worlds need new language. I've been playing with Twitter for a while now. It's fun and I've made a few friends there. I even found a nice client in TwitterFox that lets me keep up with my updates from within Firefox. But there are some issues. The site is still struggling with performance issues, so sometimes it doesn't all work. The ability to post from XMPP/Jabber/GTalk has been down for weeks. I've been seeing a lot of the Fail Whale when I go to the site. Another issue with Twitter is that it is a closed source system.

This week I found out about identi.ca. It looks like a Twitter clone, but lacks a lot of the features. That should change as it is running on open source software. I've not checked it out myself, but I expect a few people will be. That means that more people could set up their own microblog sites. The problem then is that the network will be fragmented. They have an answer to that in the OpenMicroBlogging specification to allow messages to be sent between services. I'm not sure if you can actually do that yet, but it's a good sign.

Other good signs are use of OpenID for those who don't want yet another password and FOAF to make the data accessible. It also works fine from my IM clients. There is a lot of work to do there, but I have high hopes. I've even linked up with one of my Twitter contacts there. I've picked up a few followers for unknown reasons. I'm unsure of their motives. The same thing happens on Twitter as an attempt to get attention.

My other new web presence this week is at Whoisi. This appears to be similar to FriendFeed, but with some crucial differences. There is no ability to log in. Anyone can create and edit an account for anyone they choose and associate feeds with it, but they have no ownership of it. That sounds like anarchy, but we shall see. I've seen mention of them keeping history in case of vandalism. On FriendFeed I created my own feeds for friends to track their various accounts, but that was private to me. I could do the same on Whoisi and then anyone could follow them. Is that a good idea or an invasion of privacy. Some people might not want their various on-line identities to be linked. If they are not already making the connections public then I will not do so. You can still select a group of people to follow, but that setting is only stored as a cookie or as a private unique link that you need to save. As with identi.ca, some people I know are already there. The site will suit those who don't want to have to set up more accounts, but lacks conveniences like RSS.

I don't actually sign up for every service I hear about. There have been a few I have checked out and then not used, but generally I only sign up if I see a real use. I have my core of useful sites linked from the homepage of this site.

A good crowd in for this month's talk by Jason of UK Free Software Network, an ISP who help fund free software projects. He was talking about Phorm, a company who provide targeted on-line advertising by using equipment at an ISP to monitor your web browsing. Everyone in advertising wants to gets the 'right' ads to people, but this is going a step too far by intercepting data they have no right to see, ethically and legally. They say that they anonymise the data, but that doesn't make it right. There are some reports that they have been up to some dirty tricks, such as replacing other peoples' ads and using cookies under other names. I've not read much on this myself, but there is plenty of information out there. It was interesting to get the perspective of someone in the industry who wants to protect his customers. He's trying to make a living, but not at the expense of selling out his customers.

My ISP, Virgin, are one of those trialling Phorm. I've not seen anything from them on it. There is supposed to be an opt-out, but can we trust them?

A lot of us already sacrifice some privacy to get some benefit. I have a few loyalty cards that get me some payback in exchange for giving away my shopping details, but it could be tracked to some extent anyway. Sites like Gmail and Facebook target ads based on your communications and habits, but you accept that when you sign up. You mean you didn't read all the terms and conditions? Phorm is different because they look at everything. There are technical options, such as working via a proxy, but these are not available to everyone. With the government wanting to track our on-line habits too, to prevent terrorism (allegedly), using encryption may just draw attention to you and cause you more grief. If too many people do it, then would they ban it? It's happened before in some European countries. France had restrictions on encryption for years. I would like to see more people using encryption for everyday communication. We could do with easy ways to encrypt traffic to mail servers, so that the spooks cannot even see who we communicate with. If anyone wants to do some keysigning I'm always interested. I did some a couple of years back, but not much recently. My key details are here.

We need to fight to protect our right to privacy or the terrorists will have won.

Nothing much to report, but here are some cool sites I have found lately:

• Page2RSS - I run most of my web browsing via Google Reader, so it can be a pain to keep up with sites that do not have feeds. This service will monitor those sites and give me a feed of the updates
• AideRSS - Provides filtered versions of RSS feeds based on various factors. Could be useful for some of the high traffic ones, but filtered too much on some I tried
• Ftrain - A literate blog. The author wrote a series of 6 word reviews for the SXSW tracks I downloaded recently
• Twitterholics - Lots of cool Twitter stuff. I'm still enjoying micro-blogging. I've had a few exchanges with strangers that would not have happened otherwise
• Spamusement - A series of cartoons inspired by spam mail subjects. Made me laugh

You can follow my bookmarks over on Del.icio.us. I'm interesting in following others who share my interests.

I seem to have adopted several of Google's products for running my on-line Activities. I have an iGoogle page where I have assembled various gadgets that let me see at a glance what is happening on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and others. I also use it to access my Gmail and Google Calendar. I find that keeping some of my data on-line is convenient when moving between home and office. It might be better on my PDA, but I haven't worked out how to synch PocketPC.

I have a couple of applications for a spreadsheet that I can access from wherever I may be, so I decided to check out Google Docs. The spreadsheet seems fairly capable, if a little slow. I've not tried the graphing options. You can export to various formats, including open ones. This has the potential to be another threat to Microsoft's monopoly, especially where people want to collaborate on documents. Office is far more than more people need anyway. It's amazing how far web applications have come in the last couple of years. I remember being amazed when I first saw Google Maps. Google are trying to get more of the market by providing the Apps platform where they will host applications written by others. There will be costs involved, but it's likely to be cheaper than rolling out your own hardware in many cases and more resilient to load spikes. I'd love to play, but need to find an itch to scratch.

I was just discussing the issues of being a non-Microsoft user with a colleague. It causes me a few issues with connecting to the office from home, but I have something that works. He considers the MS tax to be worth paying for the sake of less hassle. Ironically we were discussing this using the non-free Skype chat, but that's one of the compromises I have accepted. To get some stuff done I have to use a few non-free applications.

At HertsLUG this week Malc was educating us on the OOXML situation where MS have managed to force their 'standard' through the ISO. This seems to have been ignored by sites like the BBC. We still have a chance to make our opinions on this scandal heard by writing to the politicians, but I don't know if this will affect the outcome.

Also at the LUG I had my first hands-on with an Asus EEE. It was slightly bulkier than I expected, but is very neat. I'm not sure I would use the default Xandros GUI, but it seemed to handle the applications well. It even had Penguin Racer and Frozen Bubble installed. I gave the BBC iPlayer a quick try, but couldn't get it to do full screen. I don't really need a big, full-featured laptop, but one of these would be handy for when I'm away from home and want wireless internet and the ability to do various tasks, like photo editing or hacking.