Open social networking & how to work around that problem now
So I spent my lunch hour distracting myself from the black hole that is my workday by reading Wired blogs as I often do. (I'm a HUGE fan of Wired.com; I read it almost every day. Although it was kind of unsettling when Strikethrough hit the Wired blogs in May.)
Today I came across this: Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks
You know, seriously? I think Brad needs to talk to fandom if he wants a demographic to test this possibility on. I mean, frankly, a lot of what he's talking about addresses our concerns about fandom fragmenting across various journaling sites. The only thing that gives me hesitation is any suggestion that crops up about 6A being involved. I have massive trust issues with them at the moment. Obviously. (Although I think it'd be funny for 6A to try to police underage fanworks on open source social networking. *snerk* Because, hi, that'd be a totally lost cause there.)
For more info on what Brad's thinking of, check out this article on his site: Thoughts on the Social Graph
I've talked to a lot of people lately who are really seriously worried about fandom fragmenting. With very good cause. This whole situation lately is more than a bit nerve-wracking. It's just...honestly, I think we'll settle into a way of keeping track of multiple flists on multiple sites much the way Brad's already envisioning, albeit perhaps a little more roughly. Y'all, we're sort of on the forefront of the Next Big Social Networking Adventure. You and me and all of fandom. 6A's kind of thrown us out there, you know? What Brad's talking about doing? It's what we have to do. By necessity, not choice.
I find that incredibly intriguing in many ways. And exciting. And liberating. I look at my two flists sometimes and you know what? The fragmentation between them doesn't destroy my love of fandom or my desire to participate or interact. In fact, it does the opposite. I'm invigorated by fandom again because it's a challenge. Because, whatever their reasons behind it may be, 6A management has effectively thrown the gauntlet down and said Fine, screw you, you want your fandom? You work for it, bitch. And my response? Hell, yeah, I will. You've just gone and given me a reason to now.
Sometimes change is good. Sometimes we need to be shaken out of our comfortable state so that we can grow more, instead of just stagnating. But that's not always easy. And it can be very tiring. Believe me, I know.
Right now I feel like an explorer. Livejournal is my home country and I love it even when it's being dickish. (I'll refrain from making any Barak as Bush parallels.) Insanejournal? It's a new frontier. A fannish colony, with all the excitement and fervor that new explorations hold. Honestly, it reminds me so very much of the early days on LJ for fandom--and I LOVE that.
But. I don't want to lose my roots and contact with the family staying here, you know? I want to tie my home country and my colony together. The thing is...with a wee bit of effort, I can.
A lot of this stuff Brad talks about we can already do in a rough form with tools that we have in place. Most of us already use chatting, whether AIM or IRC or GoogleChat or Y!M. We don't need that function in a social network. A huge majority of us uses gmail as well. More and more of us are setting up Twitter accounts, which is basically micro-journaling via text message. So we have a fairly centralized communications network. Which is awesome.
What we need is the ability to track journals and to comment between services. BUT! We've already got that with OpenID and RSS feeds. It takes some time to set them up, but using them, you could theoretically consolidate your LJ and IJ flists onto one journal service. And comment back and forth between. Using one journal service. Whichever you choose. Whichever you're more comfortable with.
If people don't know it yet, you can comment back and forth between Insanejournal and Livejournal using OpenID. You can also have icons--up to 100 on IJ, I believe--and be friended on other sites via OpenID so that you can see flocked posts. Right now OpenID doesn't work on GreatestJournal because they don't support the function, and I'm not certain about JournalFen...although they're planning upgrades, I believe.
cmshaw has a fabulous tutorial on how to use OpenID here. I highly recommend going and reading it. And passing the link around.
You can also keep track of LJs and IJs using the RSS feature. stewardess has a tutorial here on how to set up feeds between journals. You follow the same procedures on IJ, but the syndication page is here instead: http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/
To test this, I set up a feed of my insanejournal. http://syndicated.livejournal.com/femmequixoticij/profile will let someone on LJ friend a syndicated feed of my public IJ posts.
Here's a how-to on syndicating just specific tags for your journal. So if you wanted to do an RSS feed of your fic, for example, you could syndicate a "fic" tag and it would only RSS those posts tagged "fic". You'll just need to publicize the tag.
And if you use GoogleReader, here's how to pull LJ feeds into it, including flocked posts for people who've got you friended. I don't know if it works for IJ too, I suspect it doesn't, but all it would take would be someone who can code coming up with something like this that's geared towards IJ.
Note that if you use a RSS news reader like GoogleReader (web-based--a plus, especially for Macheads or people who use multiple comps--you can keep track of feeds at work, for instance) or FeedReader (Win only), you have to add a feed for each journal you want to follow as LJ and IJ don't RSS flists. Yeah. Pain in the arse if you've got a big flist. But still. Doable with a bit of setup.
GoogleReader also has a Firefox add-on that tells you how many unread feeds you have.
I'd also recommend browsing through the feeds tag over at the 07refugees community on IJ. There are some good tips there and in the comments.
We can do this, y'all. Sure it means that we have to change and morph and pull ourselves out of the status quo. And that's hard. Trust me, I know; I'm a Taurus. Status quo is me. *G* BUT. We can be the ones out there on the cusp of open social networking. We could help change the Internet. Not corporations. Not CEOs. US. The end-users.
And seriously? HOW AWESOME IS THAT?
Today I came across this: Brad Fitzpatrick, The Creator Of LiveJournal, On The Long Road To Open Social Networks
You know, seriously? I think Brad needs to talk to fandom if he wants a demographic to test this possibility on. I mean, frankly, a lot of what he's talking about addresses our concerns about fandom fragmenting across various journaling sites. The only thing that gives me hesitation is any suggestion that crops up about 6A being involved. I have massive trust issues with them at the moment. Obviously. (Although I think it'd be funny for 6A to try to police underage fanworks on open source social networking. *snerk* Because, hi, that'd be a totally lost cause there.)
For more info on what Brad's thinking of, check out this article on his site: Thoughts on the Social Graph
I've talked to a lot of people lately who are really seriously worried about fandom fragmenting. With very good cause. This whole situation lately is more than a bit nerve-wracking. It's just...honestly, I think we'll settle into a way of keeping track of multiple flists on multiple sites much the way Brad's already envisioning, albeit perhaps a little more roughly. Y'all, we're sort of on the forefront of the Next Big Social Networking Adventure. You and me and all of fandom. 6A's kind of thrown us out there, you know? What Brad's talking about doing? It's what we have to do. By necessity, not choice.
I find that incredibly intriguing in many ways. And exciting. And liberating. I look at my two flists sometimes and you know what? The fragmentation between them doesn't destroy my love of fandom or my desire to participate or interact. In fact, it does the opposite. I'm invigorated by fandom again because it's a challenge. Because, whatever their reasons behind it may be, 6A management has effectively thrown the gauntlet down and said Fine, screw you, you want your fandom? You work for it, bitch. And my response? Hell, yeah, I will. You've just gone and given me a reason to now.
Sometimes change is good. Sometimes we need to be shaken out of our comfortable state so that we can grow more, instead of just stagnating. But that's not always easy. And it can be very tiring. Believe me, I know.
Right now I feel like an explorer. Livejournal is my home country and I love it even when it's being dickish. (I'll refrain from making any Barak as Bush parallels.) Insanejournal? It's a new frontier. A fannish colony, with all the excitement and fervor that new explorations hold. Honestly, it reminds me so very much of the early days on LJ for fandom--and I LOVE that.
But. I don't want to lose my roots and contact with the family staying here, you know? I want to tie my home country and my colony together. The thing is...with a wee bit of effort, I can.
A lot of this stuff Brad talks about we can already do in a rough form with tools that we have in place. Most of us already use chatting, whether AIM or IRC or GoogleChat or Y!M. We don't need that function in a social network. A huge majority of us uses gmail as well. More and more of us are setting up Twitter accounts, which is basically micro-journaling via text message. So we have a fairly centralized communications network. Which is awesome.
What we need is the ability to track journals and to comment between services. BUT! We've already got that with OpenID and RSS feeds. It takes some time to set them up, but using them, you could theoretically consolidate your LJ and IJ flists onto one journal service. And comment back and forth between. Using one journal service. Whichever you choose. Whichever you're more comfortable with.
If people don't know it yet, you can comment back and forth between Insanejournal and Livejournal using OpenID. You can also have icons--up to 100 on IJ, I believe--and be friended on other sites via OpenID so that you can see flocked posts. Right now OpenID doesn't work on GreatestJournal because they don't support the function, and I'm not certain about JournalFen...although they're planning upgrades, I believe.
cmshaw has a fabulous tutorial on how to use OpenID here. I highly recommend going and reading it. And passing the link around.
You can also keep track of LJs and IJs using the RSS feature. stewardess has a tutorial here on how to set up feeds between journals. You follow the same procedures on IJ, but the syndication page is here instead: http://www.insanejournal.com/syn/
To test this, I set up a feed of my insanejournal. http://syndicated.livejournal.com/femmequixoticij/profile will let someone on LJ friend a syndicated feed of my public IJ posts.
Here's a how-to on syndicating just specific tags for your journal. So if you wanted to do an RSS feed of your fic, for example, you could syndicate a "fic" tag and it would only RSS those posts tagged "fic". You'll just need to publicize the tag.
And if you use GoogleReader, here's how to pull LJ feeds into it, including flocked posts for people who've got you friended. I don't know if it works for IJ too, I suspect it doesn't, but all it would take would be someone who can code coming up with something like this that's geared towards IJ.
Note that if you use a RSS news reader like GoogleReader (web-based--a plus, especially for Macheads or people who use multiple comps--you can keep track of feeds at work, for instance) or FeedReader (Win only), you have to add a feed for each journal you want to follow as LJ and IJ don't RSS flists. Yeah. Pain in the arse if you've got a big flist. But still. Doable with a bit of setup.
GoogleReader also has a Firefox add-on that tells you how many unread feeds you have.
I'd also recommend browsing through the feeds tag over at the 07refugees community on IJ. There are some good tips there and in the comments.
We can do this, y'all. Sure it means that we have to change and morph and pull ourselves out of the status quo. And that's hard. Trust me, I know; I'm a Taurus. Status quo is me. *G* BUT. We can be the ones out there on the cusp of open social networking. We could help change the Internet. Not corporations. Not CEOs. US. The end-users.
And seriously? HOW AWESOME IS THAT?