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“We are not really a foundation [like the Gates Foundation]. It’s a bit of a 501(c)3, a bit of a C corp, and a bit of an academic environment. I can play more of the keys on the keyboard. A 501(c)3 can’t lobby. A 501(c)3 can’t invest in a company or build an industry. [From Google we get] 1% of the equity, 1% of the profits, and 1% of the people go into Google.org. The most important asset isn’t money, it’s people. One percent of the people means 60 or 70 of the smartest people in the world trying to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.” —Larry Brilliant, Google.org, in Wired

Tagged social enterprise, venture philanthropy, entrepreneurialism, technology, challenges, creativity, genius, Google

I’ve used Plazes on and off for maybe a year. I can see their reluctance to call themselves a calendar, a market segment filled with competitors and existing notions of what calendars can and should do. Instead they focus their platform around places. Recent feature updates there, though, refocus the site around activity, not place, and thus as a calendar, but only partially. Collaborative calendars such as Eventful and collaboratively-filtered event listings such as Last.fm do a better job.

Dropping support for semantics such as activity finish seems like a bad idea. Rather than pioneer a new format for now old and time-tested expressions, why not support existing calendar standards? Plazes now provides beta iCalendar feeds for past activity tracking. Extended full compatibility support for iCalendar and its XML equivalent hCalendar, with time-tested notions of time, place, activity and activity end, with roots in vCalendar, then makes Plazes and its database more useful, flexible, and valuable. Why must Plazes reinvent the calendar?

I first learned of this via the Burning Man Webteam. Hosted at Reclaiming, a site devoted to modern witchcraft and paganism, yet subtitled “No-Magic” and originating from the short classic by Berit Lakey of the Movement for a New Society, a reform movement within the Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, this document may sound like a contradiction. Instead widespread adoption likely attests to the practical success of things that work. And what works for pagans and Quakers, and Burners and hackers, ought also work for many of us.

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Tags: facilitation, civics, consensus, meetings, agendas, social capital, Nash equilibrium, Quaker

Rather than let Myspace and Facebook create walled gardens and become killer apps in social networking, this group of developers have undertaken to solve the social network portability problem. Whether they succeed depends upon how easily folks can hook up their networks. In addition to this wiki, they also use a Ma.gnolia group to share linkmarks.

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Tags: social networking, social networks, social computing, microformats, protocols, software design, software patterns

Founded as a Berkeley-style residential cooperative and incorporated in 2006, the Ant Hill counts about half its membership as graduate and undergrad students and half as working professionals and dedicated cooperators. Elected director in May 2007 for a two year term, i now undertake our 501(c)7 filing, a neighborhood charrette, our house purchase, mortgage, finance, and challenges identified in our Vision committee.

A home away from home, a place to share hospitality and tell stories, where those who espouse the ideals and vision of Burning Man can exchange wisdom from the playa and Black Rock City, we also gather for events and to support each other’s projects.

Big business dumps billions of dollars into online social networking without understanding its true value. A recent study of an extended online network of two RIT professors reveals the way in which users derive value from their social computing activity. They explore the results.

Drs Neil Hair and Vic Perotti invite you to join them for a discussion of the business value of social networks: Faculty Scholars Series. “Their research examines the practices of over 100 social network users to try to understand what is driving the amazing growth (and investment) in these social web sites. Expect a fun, interactive and interesting conversation followed by time to relax, hang-out, and have a snack afterwards.”

Some of the most popular Facebook applications are using highly questionable tactics to spread themselves virally. Users have noticed and complained, and Facebook took action today to put stop the most egregious behavior.

There are two ways application developers are breaking the rules to get new users. The first: When a user looks at an application on his/her profile the application can show something different than when other users view the profile. So a user adds an application that looks nice to them. But everyone else sees, say, a big yellow box with an advertisement that says the user wants you to add this application, too.

The second and more devious scheme is being used by many of the largest application developers. They all involve some sort of notification fraud. Generally, you add an application. Then, every one of your contacts is notified that you’ve “written on their wall” or “have asked them a question,” even though you never did. To view the content the contact must add the application. They then find out there is no wall comment, or its a canned question like “is it ok to kiss on the first date?”

Super Wall (RockYou, 4.5 m installs), My Questions (Slide, 6.9 m installs) and FunWall (Slide, 3.6 m installs) all do this (and users complain loudly in the comments area to the apps - see here and scroll down).

Facebook Hits Back

Facebook took measures today to stop these kinds of activities. The first is dealt with in the new release (1.1) of FBML, the markup language used to build Facebook applications. Developers will no longer be able to show a different profile to friends than the one the user sees him/herself:

One of the key parts of the success of the design of the Facebook profile is that the user is always aware of exactly what their profile looks like to their friends who stop by to view their profile. This enables users to understand exactly how they are expressing themselves to others by simply deciding whether or not they like an application’s profile box and the content that the developer has decided to put into the box.

Right now, we have made a few FBML tags available that are causing users to not trust the content in the profile box. Tags such as: fb:if-user-has-added-app, and other fb-if tags. These tags are currently being used to deliver content to profile boxes which users are unaware of. Content such as big yellow boxes which say “ADD THIS APPLICATION!” or “ADD SOME OTHER APPLICATION!”.

Starting today, these tags will no longer be available for use in profile boxes. We will be migrating FBML to version 1.1, and adding a new set of tags called fb:visible-to-. They are:

fb:visible-to-owner
fb:visible-to-friends
fb:visiible-to-user
fb:visible-to-added-app-users
fb:visible-to-app-users

Facebook also notified developers today that they will be blocked from sending misleading notifications to users. This will stop Slide, RockYou and others from mass spamming users with false notifications:

Over the last few weeks we have noticed several developers misleading our users into clicking on links, adding applications and taking actions. While the majority of developers are doing the right thing and playing by the rules, a few aren’t – and are creating spam as a result. Going forward, if you are deceptively notifying users or tricking them into taking actions that they wouldn’t have otherwise taken, we will start blocking these notifications. The bottom line is that if the notifications you send are the result of a genuine action by a Facebook user and that action is truthfully reported to the recipient so they can make an informed decision, you should have no problems. If you do find some notifications blocked, it was probably because this wasn’t the case and we will be happy to inform you of some best practices by other developers that have prevented this issue.

Facebook has done a great job in managing their platform since opening it up to developers of applications. They have had to accommodate application developers while at the same time protect users interests and the general security of the site. The changes that Facebook have made today, while they may inconvenience some application developers, have clearly been done to protect users from spammy tactics that some applications have employed.

A directory of OpenID-enabled sites, searchable by category.

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Tags: directory, OpenID, websites, social computing

Direc.tor loads as a browser scriptlet (without GreaseMonkey), then in manner akin to Del.icio.us’ Firefox extension, Direc.tor loads the linkmark collection as XML for manipulation on the browser.

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Tags: linkmarking, scriptlets, tags, search, Javascript, browser, social computing, applet, del.icio.us, Web 2.0, webapp