chrischen2

People are just angry that the experiment didn't go the way they had hoped.

Just wanted to point out that this doesn't seem to be his first post (maybe he forgot): http://hackerne.ws/item?id=823325. If it means anything, I still personally think he's legit.

Oh and I'm guessing it's a porn site.

Sorry, what was my analogy? I'm saying distributed social networking should work like email and you just described it. However what I don't think it should be is decentrAlizing down to the user level. Another problem with standardizing the system is that new or special features will not be cross compatible, however that's another issue for another thread.

Well one benefit of increasing population is that we increase the chances of geniuses being born, and increase the diversity of the population.

Of course it is, I'm not saying you're wrong. Although usually one company has access to all your email. As far as the user is concerned it's still centralized. That is, our data is still stored in a centralized place. The protocols for these open social networks however call for decentralizing all the way to the user level, and that's not how email is (though it could be).

Wave's stuff isn't part of the standard right? So if I were using some other mail service/client I could only use the intersection of both services. Please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't had much exposure to wave (except a brief stint in the private beta where I realized nobody is using it, and therefore it was useless).

I meant in practice. You could, but do you? Does anyone? What happens when your computer shuts down for the night?

Email is centralized in that individuals usually register with a provider, rather than use their own machines. I think social networking can adopt a similar model so all we really need is an easy way to pick up our social data and go to a new provider. I mean who I consider to be my friends is my data, so why not have a systematic definition of it that can be carried with me to every site, instead of recreating those connections using whatever interface is on each of the social sites I use.

Email is also pretty featureless. An open standard will always innovate slower than a proprietary site.

I think all this decentralized social networking is unnecessary. All we really need is an easy way to switch social networks. Something like a list of UUIDs as your friends list which can be imported into your social network of choice, and exported when you want to leave.

Even email is centralized.

The only problem would be getting the current industry leader, facebook, to willing adopt such a thing. They probably won't so this would be more of a consideration for the next generation of social networks.

It only takes one person to do that to expose it to everyone.

I thought he went out of his way to emphasize that it's not necessarily big government that's the problem, since full transparency in government would serve to reduce the problem as "not buying the product" does the same in the private sector.

They could make it so that it doesn't automatically load all flash on page, and only ones you activate.