Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Facebook - The blockbuster seqel to all the geeky prequels! To paraphrase Tim Bray, I've seen this movie before. Only it's different this time. Unlike UUCP email, profs email, Nortel's Cocos, BBSes, Usenet, The Source, Compuserve, The Well, etc non geeky people of all ages are using Facebook to privately and semi-privately blog, share interests and email each other. Which I think is great! And I love that Facebook is becoming a platform.

But until you can get all your stuff (your status messages, your private messages, your wall posts, your events, your profile information, etc) out like you can get all your photos and all the associated metadata out of flickr using its APIs, I would be careful.

Just like everything else on the Internet, if it's not on a domain you own or control then it could be shut down and removed at any time without any prior notice.

In other words have fun with facebook but recognize that's the stuff on there is ephemeral and ethereal and mostly invisible to Google; if you want something permanent that the world can see whether or not they belong to Facebook, stick it up on a website or blog or wiki or other web app with permanent public URLs on your own domain.

At shdhvan on Friday, Liz Henry (who is most excellent and knowledgeable by the way!) and I started riffing on forums and communities and came up with the following pseudo-manifesto for social software:

1. everything must be subscribable by RSS and email: i) author ii) tags iii) topics
2. google like search of all the text
3. everything must have permalinks with clean urls
4. all urls must be hackable e.g. coolwiki.com/food/restaurants/vancouver/dona-cata - I should be able to remove 'dona-cata' and get a list of all Vancouver restaurants

Surprise, surprise, most wikis and most content management systems and blog systems like Socialtext, Drupal and Wordpress do most of the above things; most forums don't. Which is why forums make me uncomfortable; lots of forums have great content but they are impossible to follow, ugly and have really bad 1990s style URLs replete with question marks and ampersands which are not hackable.

Sorry, I won't use any tag cloud including ZoomClouds that doesn't link to my tags on my own site i.e. ZoomClouds should link to rolandtanglao.com/tag/tagname not zoomclouds.com/tag/roland-tanglao/tagname unless ZoomClouds pays me for the links :P

Time for me to install the drupal tagcloud module! Eines Tages/Some day!

From ZoomClouds.:

QUOTE

Tag clouds are cool, informative, appealing representations abot what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else.

With ZoomClouds you can put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site, based on whichever RSS feed you like.

UNQUOTE