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One of my concerns about FOAF discussions on Tribe, in whitepapers and blogs, and on discussion boards is that very little time is spent discussing goals of usability for the average person. I think there is a reason why there are significantly higher usage levels of SN sites by those under thirty. Thus, I wonder if some comments could be made on Phil's post from the other thread, which reads:
"It sounds like you'd have separate criteria for how I route messages through my node, versus which messages I personally choose to look at.
But if this is the case, in what sense does the routing represent me and my interests? If the viewing criteria is just message type eg. I'm interested in job offers, how important is it that the message was routed through my friend Bob?
Put another way, why will Bob invest any effort programming his routing node to deal intelligently with job offers, if he himself isn't looking at any?"
Assuming our filtering methods for what messages we read and what messages we allow to pass through our node to our friends are different, how could the UI be laid out intuitively to handle this? What if I want content headed downstream to my friends to be filtered on a per topic/category and a per user basis, then how does this change? What if there is proximity centric data (birthday party for Marc at "Freebirds" restaurant)? What about private/sensitive content? Will SN users from the general populous be able to manage access control lists or another permissions model? Regardless of if this is built into PA or in a third party service, how will this be useable for the average web surfer?
"It sounds like you'd have separate criteria for how I route messages through my node, versus which messages I personally choose to look at.
But if this is the case, in what sense does the routing represent me and my interests? If the viewing criteria is just message type eg. I'm interested in job offers, how important is it that the message was routed through my friend Bob?
Put another way, why will Bob invest any effort programming his routing node to deal intelligently with job offers, if he himself isn't looking at any?"
Assuming our filtering methods for what messages we read and what messages we allow to pass through our node to our friends are different, how could the UI be laid out intuitively to handle this? What if I want content headed downstream to my friends to be filtered on a per topic/category and a per user basis, then how does this change? What if there is proximity centric data (birthday party for Marc at "Freebirds" restaurant)? What about private/sensitive content? Will SN users from the general populous be able to manage access control lists or another permissions model? Regardless of if this is built into PA or in a third party service, how will this be useable for the average web surfer?
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Re: Ease of Use
Wed, October 29, 2003 - 1:25 PMYou raise good points.
My understanding of FOAF is that it makes website(data) machine readable. What does this mean? It means I can build logic('IF,Then') off of web site components. There are two major interaction classes: interactions within a community and interactions coming from outside a community. Through FOAF 'aggregation' I can control internal interactions. Outside interactions are a separate all together. In this case, a server, (program) on a different machine, is sending a request. Within our client-server model(and that is what the internet is) I either honor that request or pass it to another machine(server). If my underlying java logic which I assume is handling the decision mechanism says pass it to someone here, then I believe FOAF can handle it. If not, then 'socket' that baby somewhere else. So to get back to Phil's case about routing and viewing. It seems to me that routing is really logic. If your logic includes the preferences of those 1,2,..degrees of separation from you, and they are within your community, then you can shot it them them without viewing it. If this something for you and your friend, you look at it, and a copy goes to your friend. If you don't want it, it goes by and you are not aware of it. And this brings up another important question: what is an input stream? We are not packet sniffing here, are we? There is an XML 'header' on it I suppose. Some kind of 'identifier' upon which to base our logic. The beauty of XML is that we can build any header we like. XML is self-referential. And another question: what is the target of the input stream? Is it directed at 'me', at my community, or just out there and we snatch it out of the sky?We really need to establish a dictionary of common terms so we all know what we are talking about. And I am finding out, at least according to Sam Ruby, that content has a secondary, second class citizen stature within the RDF specification. The guy who built Blogger observes that we haven't really had a real discussion on what is really 'content'. I think these confusions are coming up here. My two cents.
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Re: Ease of Use
Thu, October 30, 2003 - 11:43 PMNow you know what I mean by "adding your own stuff".
You can sssume you won't be doing that sort of filtering, routing, etc. - so feel free to 'go for it!'
