Bill Joy is the man who brought us Ethernet. He also formulated a law: the value of a network is directly proportional to the square of its nodes. One fax machine is worthless. Two fax machines can talk to each other. Two hundred fax machines are universally useful.<\/p>\n
I think about this because in the last couple of months, two different people I know have set up their own alternatives to Facebook. I fully expect that one or the other will win out, for the sake of eliminating redundancy. Slightly different approaches, too – one is a social-networking Facebook-workalike while the other is a bog-standard bulletin board type system.<\/p>\n
The problem is that this covers one social circle. Am I really prepared to have one social networking service for my crazy internet friends, another one for people I know locally, another one for the high school crew, one for the extended family…you see how this becomes crazy in a hurry. This is why Facebook won – everyone is there – but also why it’s vulnerable, because it still offers very poor controls for handling the interaction of your various circles. I firmly believe that something like Diaspora is going to be a game-changer; somebody who can come up with a standard for social network interoperability other than Facebook Connect will make out like a bandit….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bill Joy is the man who brought us Ethernet. He also formulated a law: the value of a network is directly proportional to the square of its nodes. One fax machine is worthless. Two fax machines can talk to each other. Two hundred fax machines are universally useful. I think about this because in the … <\/p>\n