I am not sure how I ended up seeing the post on Facebook, rather than her blog, but Susan Skrupski gave me a great ‘aha’ moment yesterday, helping me to understand some of the awesome simplicity, and community power of Facebook as a primary interface for blogs and other content. Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people.
Check out the sidebar:
The trackback meets Facebook- would we call these “Facebacks”? Certainly I think its really nice to see the people associated with the story.
Stephen and I have long agreed on that it would be great if blogging systems could autocomplete on the blogs that we regularly point to. Tags moves into the same problem space. Some time ago Stephen said:
The question in my mind is this: is it worthwhile to try and establish some form of centralized identity repository, such that an individual on your local machine becomes not simply another meaningless string of text but a meaningful namespace? Something that other applications – be they blog, IM, email, office productivity, or otherwise could access via a standardized API much as they might access spellcheck? The basic topology might look something like the Evolution Data Server in GNOME, but with more robust capabilities and an API that applications could ask not to check spelling, but to perform a lookup against a library of known identity namespaces.
Seems like Facebook is beginning to play those kinds of roles.
And in answer to my – not sure how in the first line… it was obviously Facebook that notified me I was in the piece. Thanks for the Faceback Susan. I better return the favour.
Zoli Erdos says:
October 25, 2007 at 10:24 pm
James, check out the Jiglu widget on my blog. Auto-created tags, people, links.
Infovore » links for 2007-10-25 says:
October 25, 2007 at 11:24 pm
[…] James Governor’s Monkchips » The Notes application, Do you Faceback yet? “Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people.” (tags: facebook tags socialsoftware ia) […]
Boris Anthony says:
October 25, 2007 at 11:56 pm
This kind of thing is generally only possible if you have either:
a) a walled-garden community (like FaceBook) where everything (code, content, etc) is standardized and centrally controlled and deployed.
b) widely adopted standards (still waiting to see who will win the RDF vs Microformats vs hey let’s all be friends deathmatch)
c) 3 words: regex from hell.
😀
(c u next week)
Richard Schwartz says:
October 26, 2007 at 1:00 am
The link to the ‘post on Facebook’ gives me “Sorry, you do not have permission to see this note.”
Luke Razzell says:
October 26, 2007 at 7:07 am
We’re hoping the new version of Blog Friends, due out within a couple of weeks, will satisfy your requirements and then some, James.
Do let me know if you would like to join the private beta, which goes live imminently.
: )
Stephen Collins says:
October 30, 2007 at 4:02 am
James, I like this power in Notes, but I’m also a (fairly committed) BlogFriends user, so I’m stoked to see Luke letting us know that this feature is coming. Hopefully he’ll let me in on that beta too.
I still hope for an open and standards-based platform that I can get data into and out of that I can use as my all-encompassing place to keep track of all my continuous partial attention material – Twitter, Flickr, blogs, etc. Perhaps it’s time for a community effort to build this out?