Facebook in many ways is pretty open for a ’social networking’ site. It gives extension apps a good amount of access to both data and UI. But the closed world language employed in their UI betrays the immodest assumption “Facebook knows all”.
- Eric Childress and Stuart Weibel are now friends with Charles McCathienevile.
- John Doe is now in a relationship.
- You have 210 friends.
To state the obvious: maybe Eric, Stu and Chaals were already friends. Maybe Facebook was the last to know about John’s relationship; maybe friendship isn’t countable. As the walls between social networking sites slowly melt (I put Jabber/XMPP first here, with OpenID, FOAF, SPARQL and XFN as helper apps), me and my 210 closest friends will share fragments of our lives with a wide variety of sites. If we choose to make those descriptions linkable, the linked sites will increasingly need to refine their UI text to be a little more modest: even the biggest site doesn’t get the full story.
Facebook are far from alone in this (see this Xbox screenshot too, “You do not have any friends!”); but even with 35M users, the mistake is jarring, and not just to Semantic Web geeks of the missing isn’t broken school. It’s simply a mistake to fail to distinguish the world from its description, or the territory from the map.
A description of me and my friends hosted by a big Web site isn’t “my social network”. Those sites are just a database containing claims made by different people, some verified, some not. And with, inevitably, lots missing. My “social network” is an abstractification of a set of interlinked real-world histories. You could make the case that there has only ever been one “social network” since the distant beginnings of human society; certainly those who try to do geneology with Web data formats run into this in a weaker form, including the need to balance competing and partial information. We can do better than categorised “buddylists” when describing people, their inter-connections and relationships. And in many ways Facebook is doing just great here. Aside from the Pirates-vs-Ninjas noise, many extension applications on Facebook allow arbitrary events from elsewhere in the Web to bubble up through their service and be seen (or filtered) by others who are linked to me in their database. For example:
Facebook is good at reporting events, generally. Especially those sourced outside the system. Where it isn’t so great is when reporting internal-events, eg. someone telling it about a relationship. Event descriptions are nice things to syndicate btw since they never go out of date. Syndicating descriptions of the changeable properties of the world, on the other hand, is more slippery since you need to have all other relevant facts to be able to say how the world is right now (or implicitly, how it used to be, before). “Dan has painted his car red” versus “Dan’s car is now red”. “Dan has bookmarked the Jabber user profile spec” versus “Dan now has 1621 bookmarks”. “Dan has added Charles to his Facebook profile” versus “Dan is now friends with Charles”.
We need better UI that reflects what’s really going on. There will be users who choose to live much of their lives in public view, spread across sites, sharing enough information for these accounts to be linked. Hopefully they’ll be as privacy-smart and selective as Pew suggests. Personas and ‘characters’ can be spread across sites without either site necessarily revealing a real-world identity; secrets are keepable, at least in theory. But we will see people’s behaviour and claims from one site leak into another, and with approval. I don’t think this will be just through some giant “social graph” of strictly enumerated relationships, but through a haze of vaguer data.
What we’re most missing is a style of end-user UI here that educates users about this world that spans websites, couching things in terms of claims hosted in sites, rather than in absolutist terms. I suppose I probably don’t have 210 “friends” (whatever that means) in real life, although I know a lot of great people and am happy to be linked to them online. But I have 210 entries in a Facebook-hosted database. My email whitelist file has 8785 email addresses in it currently; email accounts that I’m prepared to assume aren’t sending me spam. I’m sure I can’t have 8785 friends. My Google Mail (and hence GTalk Jabber) account claims 682 contacts, and has some mysterious relationship to my Orkut account where I have 200+ (more randomly selected) friends. And now the OpenID roster on my blog gives another list (as of today, 19 OpenIDs that made it past the Wordpress spam filter). Modern social websites shouldn’t try to tell me how many friends I have; that’s just silly. And they shouldn’t assume their database knows it all. What they can do is try to tell me things that are interesting to me, with some emphasis on things that touch my immediate world and the extended world of those I’m variously connected to.
So what am I getting at here? I guess it’s just that we need these big social sites to move away from making teen-talk claims about how the world is - “Sally (now) loves John” - and instead become reflectors for the things people are saying, “Sally announces that she’s in love with John”; “John says that he used to work for Microsoft” versus “John worked for Microsoft 2004-2006″; “Stanford University says Sally was awarded a PhD in 2008″. Today’s young internet users are growing up fast, and the Web around them needs also to mature.
One of the most puzzling criticisms you’ll often hear about the Semantic Web initiative is that is requires a single universal truth, a monolithic ontology to model all of human knowledge. Those of us in the SW community know that this isn’t so; we’ve been saying for a long time that our (meta)data architecture is designed to allow people to publish claims “in which
statements can draw upon multiple vocabularies that are managed in a decentralised fashion by various communities of expertise.” As the SemWeb technology stack now has a much better approach to representing data provenance (SPARQL named graphs replacing RDF’99 statement reification) I believe we should now be putting more emphasis on a related theme: Semantic Web data can represent disputes, competing claims, and contradictions. And we can query it in an SQL-like language (SPARQL) that allows us to ask questions not just of some all-knowing database, but about what different databases are telling us.
The closed world approach to data gives us a lot, don’t get me wrong. I’m not the only one with a love-hate relationship with SQL. There are many optimisations we can do in a traditional SQL or XML Schema environment which become hard in an RDF context. In particular, going “open world” makes for a harder job when hosting and managing data rather than merely aggregating and integrating it. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a modern Web data environment for aggregating claims of the “Stanford University says Sally was awarded a PhD in 1995″ form, SPARQL has a lot to offer.
When we’re querying a single, all-knowing, all-trusted database, SQL will do the job (eg. see Facebook’s FQL for example). When we need to take a bit more care with “who said what” and “according to whom?” aspects, coupled with schema extensibility and frequently missing data, SQL starts to hurt. If we’re aggregating (and building UI for) ’social web’ claims about the world rather than simple buddylists (which XMPP/Jabber gives us out of the box), I suspect aggregators will get burned unless they take care to keep careful track of who said what, whether using SPARQL or some home-grown database system in the same spirit. And I think they’ll find that doing so will be peculiarly rewarding, giving us a foundation for applications that do substantially more than merely listing your buddies…
