Duane's World Season Two Opener!

The first episode of Duane's World Season II is out. This special two-part episode covers Adobe MAX in Milan, Italy, and San Francisco (will be featured in part 2) plus interviews with RedMonk founder James Governor. Code and Tunes features a tutorial on how to use BlazeDS to build a 3-tier architecture and invoke services using AMF from a Flex front end.



The interview with James is very cool as he is very modest about RedMonk's accomplishments. RedMonk has been voted a major force in the IT industry and has re-written a lot of the rules of how the analyst industry works in IT.

Social Networking is NOT new!!!!

Many people think "social networking" is Web 2.0. They are confused. We are social by nature. What the real Web 2.0 pattern is is the ability to "declare" these social relationships. Groups like Facebook that write an "Architecture of Participation" whereby users can make these declarations. James Governor first picked up on this pattern and called it "Declarative Living". James is right - the only new thing is the declarations.

Here are some more ramblings on web 2.0:

http://www.newzmakerz.com/video/111/Duane-Nickull

Why David Recordon (Six Apart) needs an Ontology!

David Recordon and I had noticed a similar issue. At Web 2.0 we connected and talked about it. The issue is one of how in every social network you have to manually re-declare your whole social network. Rather than repeat it here, the post can be read here:
http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2007/11/cmon-web-20-get-it-together-now.html

Short version:
Why do we have to keep re-declaring our social networks for every single social network application (Facebook, Mix2r, Twitter, Plaxo, MySpace, Dopplr,
whateverthehellcomesnext.com)?

David and I had lunch in the UK with Matt (CTO, Dopplr) and James Governor (RedMonk) and all agreed that this is an issue facing the next social network. David made a great presentation of it at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin.

We seem to agree that the solution is a non-proprietary open social graphing application that can be used to suck social networks into various social sites. If we are to make an open social network provider service, there are a lot of answers that have to be figured out first. Foremost, real FOL and ontology work has to be done. The social networks of today have limited and immature binary relationships. Here is an example:

"A is a friend of B"

What does this mean? Is it asymmetrical or symmetrical (is B also a friend of A?). Does B know A exists? Can B traverse the binary relationship (see that A declares B is a friend)? If so, does B know the exact nature of the declaration on the relationship? Do either A or B survive if the relationship is dead? Does the relationship exist if either A or B cease to exist?

There are simply far too many of these types of questions that are not really answered by existing social networks. This sort of ontology work is sadly needed. Perhaps a group like the Ontolog Forum can become involved to help sort some of this out.

Davd is a smart guy - I cannot wait to see what he comes up with!

Thoughts? Comments?

BTW - I am on vacation for two weeks and will not respond after tonight CET.