Task Force on Social Networking Software

Coming soon to the Grey Lady: application programming interface capabilities. The online rumor mill is buzzing that the NYT digital side aims to make the entire newspaper “programmable.” This feature might appear as soon as a couple of weeks. Marc Frons, NYT Chief Technical Officer, told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site. The paper plans to offer developer keys to the API, which would allow programmers to more easily mash up the paper’s structured content — reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”

We touched upon Mashups and API in Week 8 of the Web 2.0 101 CE.

In a previous post we discussed privacy issues with Facebook’s Beacon service.  This week Google has been criticized for opening up Google Reader.  Google Reader has allowed users to ’share’ items in their reading list for awhile now.  Recently Google tweaked the product so that shared items are shared with everyone in a users Google Talk list.  As a CNET article states:

But, as anyone who uses instant messaging knows, not all of your IM contacts are friends. Many are acquaintances or people you barely know and with whom you may not want to share a reading list.

This is an interesting dilemma for developers of social networking products.  I’m sure that Google is only trying to open the system up to allow for more interaction between users.  Yet at the same time users are saying,  “Whoa, not so fast, I want to choose my interactions”.   In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t represent a huge problem in privacy and in fact Google has posted directions to limit the user one shares with.  However libraries should watch these issues closely.  As OPACs, citation management software, and other services open up for library users we will all be faced with similar concerns over privacy.

The lesson here, open is good, but only as far as the user wants it to be.

Bart

Google has announced a new platform named “Knol” which is wiki like in nature.

From what we know so far, Knol is a wiki-like platform. Authors can create topics, and there are tools to interlink articles and content, but as Manber says, an article, or “knol,” is “just a Web page.” Where it differs from a wiki is its focus on the author. All knols will highlight who wrote them.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9834175-7.html?tag=nefd.only

Interesting concept here with more focus on the author there is less ‘openness’.  Is Google challenging wikipedia or the wiki as a publishing environment?

Bart

The current issue of JAMA has an interesting Research Letter examining the content of YouTube videos for information about immunizations. They identified 153 videos. Seventy-three (48%) of the videos were positive, 49 (32%) were negative and 31 (20%) were ambiguous. Compared with positive videos, negative videos were more likely to receive a rating, had a higher mean star rating and had more views. Of the negative videos, 22 (45%) conveyed content that contradicted 2006 Canadian Immunization Guide. Take home message: YouTube is a another source for health information. Not all of it is accurate. But more importantly, health professionals need to consider the potential use of YouTube as an effective way to communicate good health information.

This came across my desk today. It is an interesting report by OCLC on Social Networking. Check it out.

http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/

With Facebook’s recent highly-publicized valuation of more than $15 billion, businesses are flocking to this social utility in droves. Now we know: it’s all about the eyeballs. It will be interesting to see if this is, in fact, what Facebook users want—or will tolerate.

Today’s iHealthBeat reports on an article from the San Francisco Chronicle on the trend among online health startups to model themselves after social networking sites.

“Health care startups are modeling themselves after YouTube and social networking sites such as MySpace in an effort to connect patients with each other and help them navigate overwhelming amounts of medical information available online.”

Several new resources are highlighted, including ICYou: “the YouTube of health care” where users can upload their own health-related videos; Daily Strength: anonymous, free online support groups for a variety of health issues & life challenges; and RateMDs.com, which allows patients to rate and read about their doctors and dentists.

While it’s great to see health startups adopt 2.0 technologies to more effectively connect patients with consumer health information and health providers, it will be interesting to see which sites will have staying power in the recently emergent field of “health 2.0” and who’s just in it for the money. (Read on …)

I found this article Does Digg Want to Be Facebook? posted on TechCrunch interesting. Basically it mentions how Digg, the popular democratic social news site, is adding Facebook-like features. This is not a surprising move since it is common for companies to adopt features of their competitors to enhance their own service offerings. Remember when we taught users the differences between search engines and directories and when to use each of them? OK… maybe only SOME of us remember doing that since it was in the mid to late 90s. My point is, during that time it quickly became confusing to tell the differences between search engines and directories since they started adopting each other’s features. Pure search engines like AltaVista and Lycos added a directory structure to emulate Yahoo’s success, AskJeeves added natural language query to emulate AltaVista’s success, etc… Over ten years later it seems like one predominate search engine (Google) and one predominate directory (Yahoo) ended up trumping the others. I will be curious to see how this shakes out as social networking services start blurring the lines between each other.

It seems BioMed Central is the next content provider to jump on bandwagon 2.0 . Their current newsletter reveals they’ve added an option to post articles to social networking sites:

You can now easily post articles to sites including Cite-U-Like, Connotea and Facebook, using links conveniently placed at the foot of the new navigation box.

But before you yawn at yet another example of the inescapability of trendy social networking tools, let’s break down how this can benefit you and your library constituents.

(Read on …)

Anonymous comments, pseudononymous blogging…is anyone taking responsibility for what they post online?

Check out Walt Crawford’s column in the 2007 July/Aug issue of EContent for musings on the unintended consequences of easy econtent creation.