For the last few weeks I have been painting a picture of the social interactions we generate online and the somewhat hollow representations we are forced to use while representing ourselves and our personal connections. Stewart Butterfield has a very interesting post on some issues he’s spotted with the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) format.

For anyone that is not aware, the FOAF format is designed as a semi-universal modeling syntax for relationships. It accomplishes this with a number of xml constructs that can be indexed and consumed by a variety of services to visualize and mobilize your personal network. For sure, there are some issues with this as anyone that has a friend can easily identify.

Stewart’s point goes at the forces that led some to develop the specification at all and the potential pitfalls of computer geeks with expansive imaginations. I would tend to agree with him here. The entire privacy issue rears its ugly head again as FOAF potentially serves as a platform for exploitation. My favorite point in the discussion (taken from the comments is this):

Mostly (and I will finish this other post soon) I think that the FOAF people completely miss the point. Friendster didn’t get big because models of social networks outside of any application have intrinsic value. It got big because it was the first taste a few million people had of representing their identity online.

Source: Sylloge

This leaves an interesting set of ideas open for discussion. In my view, SNS has gotten a little bit ahead of itself (as I’ve noted before). I will re-iterate a bit of what Dave Pollard points out, and summarize that there are four key systems required for managing our social lives more effectively, from bottom to top:

1. Personal Content Management
2. Personal Identity Management
3. Personal Network Management
4. Social Network Management

I’ll try to expand on these over the next few days.