It's about time someone cracked the social networking nut.

Google is expect to announce a social networking platform later this week. Called OpenSocial, it will include tools to allow developers to create applications that utilize personal and social data contained in participating social networks. It is the first step toward putting you back in control of your online relationships.

In my last blog entry I spoke about Open Social - Google's open API. Here are more gory details:

Blogs
Documentation
FAQs

It will be fascinating to see if/how Google manages to pull people away from Facebook and Myspace.

For reasons I just don't understand, many of my conversations today have dealt with the quandry resulting from being stuck in the middle of a dispute between two loved ones.

I like to get myself in these kinds of jams, and I've often punished myself, thinking that you usually have to do something wrong to wind up in the middle. Maybe you've over promised, let confidences slip, really tried to help or simply gathered more information than was strictly proper about something that wasn't your business.

Either way, I've categorized the stuck-in-the-middle position as one you earn by doing something nefarious. True, some folks lie their way into this unenviable, if highly exploitable position.

But at a lunch meeting today, I realized that the over-caring sort of person gets stuck here as well. I arrived at the meeting with a stomach full of guilt about an argument I was trying to defuse between two loved ones without spilling any secrets. I wasn't sure how I'd fared. Then my associate told me about the complex relationship between her boyfriend, his daughter, and the girl's mother. This woman had tried to show the girl some attention and brighten her spirits, but had managed to spark an explosive argument between the two parents.

There was once a list of things you didn't talk about: someone's spouse, how much money something cost, who had a better job, etc. But today, while the number of socially unacceptable subjects is dwindling and relationships and family structures become ever more complicated, where do we draw the line?

The only answer it seems, is that we shouldn't ask questions we don't want asked of ourselves, we shouldn't ask for information that we won't want to divulge, and we shouldn't make promises we can't keep. Good luck.

On Friday a BBC report on new youth media venture Scoop08, that describes itself as "a new kind of newspaper," caught my eye. The site launched yesterday on the 4th. The BBC story provides the following lede:

With a year to go before the 2008 US presidential elections, young Americans are poised to mark their growing engagement in politics with an ambitious online news site.

Really? Young America is going to mark its engagement through a website? A website that at the time the article was written had yet to go live and as of today has almost no content? Ah, were it only so easy for a generation to take a stand and make its voice heard.

Inspired by a really powerful image on the cover of the NY Times print edition today, I went to nytimes.com to try and save a copy of the image for myself, only to realize that they don't run the same images in the online edition as they do in the print edition.

Not only that, the so called "NewsStand" electronic edition is NOT the same as the print edition I have in front of me.

Bravo!

Circoripopolo Goes Airtistique

"It's hilarious to hear all of the big wireless companies speaking about open platforms and software. Good for Google.

At first this thread starts as an exploration of a relatively simple dynamic in many massively multiplayer online games: instancing. Quickly, however, I find myself toying with the idea that we're in the midst of a big shift in the experience and idea of history -- a shift in the way that we construct and transmit new myths for an interactive media era. Bear with me...

What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different than stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in this myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the impoverishment lies, not in an alleged progress of man's mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which he might apply its unchanged and unchanging powers (p. 230).

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1977). Structural Anthropology, v. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Madrid

An interesting new form of political commentary....
[NewsGaming.com]

"You Should Know ... DJ Colette"
Documentary by Uji Films (Michael Graziano and Ernie Park)

via Chicago Magazine

A little shameless self promotion.

Also check out http://selectmediafestival.org/2007/ this weekend.

Juan Angel Chavez has built this totally kick ass giant robot. It's gorgeous!!

Manuel Lima a designer at Parsons School of Design, New York created this site as part of his MFA program. It has a ton of links to some really cool visualizations from Art to Social Networks and Transportation Systems to Computer Networks.

Check it out http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Being from Kentucky, I take a lot of crap about the stereotypical Southern food: chitlin's, casseroles and so-called "salads" that don't seem to contain vegetables. For years, I've apologized.

But after spending a few days with my Southern family over Thanksgiving, it finally dawned on me: they're delicious. And the part that appeals to the budding cook in me - they're easy.

I had a lot of fun looking over old church cookbooks, packed with recipes for things like Coca-Cola cake and strawberry sour cream salad. Not everyone is ready for those.

But try this one on for size:

Aunt Janice's Cranberry Salad
1 can whole cranberry salad
1 c. sugar
1 packet cranberry gelatin
1 c. water
1 can pineapples, diced
14 large marshmallows (thank me later)
1 c. chopped walnuts

Dissolve gelatin in water on the stove, add sugar and marshmallows. Stir vigilantly until it's all dissolved. Add pineapples, canned sauce and walnuts. Pour into a casserole dish and allow to gel. Overnight is best.

This was the best cranberry saald I'd ever had, and I'm one of those lunatics who likes the canned gel stuff.

For my part, I tried a recipe for green bean casserole, with fresh beans, beschamel sauce, sauteed mushrooms and panko-crusted onions. I got it from Alton Brown on the Food Network:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_81503,00.html.

Funny that even with the half and half in the beschamel, it still winds up being lower-calorie than the processed version, due to lack of those horrible French onion things.

The recipe calls for a cast-iron skillet, but I made do without one. I know, what kind of Southerner am I? And yes, you really need Panko bread crumbs.

From the NYT:

Facebook keeps tweaking its new Beacon advertising program, which tracks users’ actions on sites other than Facebook. The program sparked a petition from MoveOn.org Civic Action that has won the support of 50,000 Facebook users. Facebook introduced a new version of the Beacon alert box on Thursday that still lacks an easy way to avoid participating.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook has backed off its initial enthusiastic support for Beacon.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

So what's the hubub all about? Beacon tracks users' online purchases, like many other sites, but then sends an update to friends in the user's Facebook network. I see all kinds of geeky reasons why someone might find this a cool service -- keeping track of your pals' book purchases or DVD consumption. But you can already do that through other services, provided your friends have chosen to share their wish list, or movie queue, or purchase history. However, those are opt-in services while Beacon offers a per-purchase opt-out pop-up option. Annoying, to be sure. I'm sure people don't mind sharing some innocuous purchases with their social networking pals, as they see fit, but certainly not all. It seems that it would have been much easier to provide users with a preference pane that allows for permissions to be set on an opt-in basis.

However, according to Facebook vice president, Chamath Palihapitiya, the company has no plan to offer a universal opt-out service, instead sticking users with the option of having to individually approve sharing each purchase or drop the service all together. While this stance certainly will appeal to the advertisers, it caries with it the risk of driving away users needlessly.

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program.

While this may be small beans, and the Beacon program will probably continue as a Facebook feature, what I can guarantee will happen is that enterprising users will create patches, plugins, cracks, or entirely new services to disable, alter, circumvent, or abandon the Beacon program. Users will always adapt and will jump ship the moment another free social networking service pops up that offers better array of services or constellation of privacy settings. Perhaps one of the new programs that arise from the Beacon flap will be the next big thing, that is until another next big thing comes along.

Oh, an another thing that users love is being condescended to -- even if the sentiment is true.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”