First of all, what I propose will not 'kill' either Myspace, or Facebook. It isn't a 'Planet buster' or 'feed aggregator killer' either in the sense that doing this will eliminate the functionality or usefulness of any of these.

There's been talk lately (see Scobelizer's feeds) regarding Google's new social network tools. Considering that Google is one of the companies that's been in the business longer than either Facebook or Myspace, I think it could go either way. If you consider that they can easily hook in all of their gMail, Picaseweb, Blogger, iGoogle (and so on) users into the new interface, as easily as they made iGoogle become a simple extension to Google, I suspect that they have a ready supply of users to either test, or start off using their new social network. and, I think that's OK.

But I don't think it will 'kill' any of the other social networks. I hear someone saying 'What you don't think there will be a mad dash to a new platform? One with easy to develop enhancements?' Sure there will be. Just as there was for Flikr. And Myspace, and so on. No, not all of them have had 'all' of what Google will offer, but they have all had new features that attracted a lot of users. All of them have had some sort of support for Twitter, or Jaiku, etc. Actually what they have had has been support for the types of feeds that those platforms supply. Be it RSS, Atom, or something else like Jabber or even IRC.

The basic 'problem' all of these have is that they rely upon a central server platform. Oh, it may be multiple servers providing the actual service, but it all relies upon an account system that is centralized, and has a single point of being broken. Someone doesn't like you today? Perhaps you broke up with someone, or reported on some random drug user, who knows. Almost any excuse will do, and that person sends a message to a few friends saying that they should report you to the support people for some violation of terms of service, or another. Pop! There goes your account.

That's not to say that there isn't an advantage to this. But even so I know too many people who've been friends, who's account has been purged for no apparent reason.

There's even talk about "Plaxo" as relationship management system. Sorry, what all of these systems have wrong is that the individual needs to have control over their social groupings and peers.

What happens when you start a business relationship, or perhaps you meet someone in real life? you exchange contact information. Somewhere along the line you define some relationships are business, some are personal, and perhaps a few are both, some you are interested in, or think write good stories. Perhaps you tell some or all of your friends how to get ahold of this person in case they need something. Or perhaps you tell them that this person is great at doing this, or that. You might tell a friend that someone they appear to think highly of has caused problems for you in the past. Lots of other possibilities as well.

In any case, 'you' manage those relationships. Sure you may use some centralized management system, such as the phone company to keep track of how to reach someone, but most of us have used, or carried phone books at one point or another. If you decide that someone is no longer going to be part of your life, you 'disconnect' them from your lists. (line them out on the Christmas list, erase their name from the address book, block their calls in hour cell phone, etc.)

My vision is that you can set up your own 'social' page on your hosted account. Nearly every ISP that provides an e-mail account for you also has some sort of a web hosting system that you can host your own content on. Sort of like http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty is one of mine. Additionally places like Google will allow you to set up a Googlepages page, though I'm not as sure how this would work with their platform. Really what you are looking for is a web host that supports you putting up and designing your own layout. It might be handy if they supported php 4.1, but I would like this to be somewhat implementation independent as far as what the back end runs in. You could build a page that loads a flash player to simply play music, or be the UI for the interface. It could be in Java, or c#, or something else entirely.

My own preference is that the platform not require the web browser to provide all that much capability, but you may have a different vision. I would like you to be able to decide what ads may or may not be served from your site, and at the same time allow the end user to decide if oen or another of those ad servers is a problem and won't be collected from.

Personally I think the stupidest thing that happens on many web pages these days is the page is delayed from displaying because of some ad server or another not sending out the ad. If the ad server doesn't post a response within 2 seconds of the syn packet, the connection to it should be dropped and the ad server be blocked. At the very worst a "Some Ad was supposed to show up Here" link can be included in the layout, that includes the full link that should have been pulled down as the target. Ok, I'm done with that rant...

The standard layout for the page would be something like:

My contact info                | My blog
Friend me                      | My Photo Album
Block Me                       |
-------------------------------+
Upcoming Events                |
===============================+======================
List of Friends                | Comments from friends
Full List Link                 |
-------------------------------+
Bulletins                      |
My Tweets                      |
-------------------------------+
People I think are Interesting |
(n) stories I found interesting|
top 5 most recent tweets/jaikus|

The vertical and horizontal separators would be flexible, and you could re-arrange them to suit your liking.

The 'zones' could be separate tabs on a page, or hover expanding lists on a menu.

I would like to make it so that anyone could build 'plug-ins' that are either scripts, or links that you could put in any of the fields.

Something like adding this widget from my Google Reader page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher-en.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/user/17446620859175102548/state/com.google/broadcast?n=5&callback=GRC_p(%7Bc%3A%22blue%22%2Ct%3A%22Rusty's%20shared%20items%22%2Cs%3A%22true%22%2Cb%3A%22false%22%7D)%3Bnew%20GRC"></script>

I don't think any of this is particularly difficult, but that's just 'layout' and isn't really going very far into the Social aspect of things. For that I would like it if 'friends' in the 'list of friends' and under the 'full list link' would only work if you and your friend both agreed to the link. I.e. if I build a friendship with you, and ad that to my page, that doesn't mean that you, or for that matter anyone else, gets to see that link, unless you build a similar link on your page. A short cut for people who are building band sites, or model pages, would be a meta-tag that says that anyone can add you as a friend, though you can explicitly block that person later on if you would like.

Similarly you get to decide if this friend is only going to be shared with friends, family, business relationships, etc. Likewise the person on the far end can set that up either as an individual element of your friendship, or as a global. You can't require that my friends see that we are friends, or for that matter decide that a casual browser on my page gets to see that I happen to like you, if I have set up a restriction on what variety of friend gets to see my friendship with you.

Oh, there's a lot of other features I would like to add, or at least discuss. How about automatically integrating your personal address book, calendar, jabber, aim, tweet friendships. Build in some sort of 'authentication system' perhaps OpenID, perhaps something else. One of the requirements is that the authentication system pre-screens certain relationships. If I have children under 18, and their pages say that I can't share their information with someone over 18, or I set that policy, then you won't see links to them from my page unless they add you from my friends links. If You are not logged into an authentication system, you don't get to see any friendships that have any restrictions upon who can see them, from any direction.

Unfortunately, a lot of this sort of relationship management requires some sort of server side screening. It doesn't work to set up a client side script to check the destination of the various links to see if they are approved on the far side. By doing that it's built the link already.

Ok, it's mostly just an idea. There's a lot that still needs to be worked out, and I'm probably not the person to do it. That would be a dictatorship, and dictatorships are not what I want out of a social relationship.

How smart am I?

I would say I'm middling smart. I don't quite think I am a genius, and really think I am far from being the smartest man around. That said, the question might come up of Who I do think the smartest man was? Niels Bohr? Maxwel Plank? Albert Einstine? Well, Maybe one of them, but I have a candidate who I like a bit better, if only because I think he demonstrated something about intelegence that is a bit unusual.

My personal favorite is Richard Feynman. As a child, he reports that he asked his father "What makes a bird alive?" to which his father reportedly said "No one really knows." We still don't know.

Oh, you'll hear all sorts of platitudes about how God knows, or how we blame it on evolution, or something. The truth is that while we know a lot about the mechanics of life, we still don't really understand how something becomes alive. For that matter about the best we can say about why living things die is that they suffer so much damage, either through accident, disease, or what has been called 'Aging', that what life depends upon is no longer available.

I think it leaves a few things unexplained, such as why is it that some people seem to die so quickly after they give up hope, yet others who have the same sort of a condition struggle and seem to hang on, living for seemingly ages beyond any predictions? Why is it that some degenerative diseases such as ALS take some people quite quickly, yet Stephen Hawking has survied with it for 40 years. Does the fact that he can still move at all suggest that the condition may be reversable at some level?

I don't know. But the simple question of 'what makes a bird alive?' while he never ended up with an answer, is one of many he asked, and some he found answers to.

As he was going through HS, he got ahead of the class in mathematics, and started trying to figure out questions that were not even propsed yet. Since he hadn't yet been given the tols to solve those problems in the classroom, he ended up developing his own set of tools. He developed a form of calculus that for him made many problems his peers ran into later on seem easy. However he realized when showing some of these people how he got to the answer, that part of the process of teaching and learning mathematics is the requirement that people work with a common set of tools. So in order to work with the same set of tools as his classmates he ended up discarding the tools he had developed.

I know too many people who have a Not Invented Here (NIH) mindset that goes I invented this, and that makes it the very best solution for me to use. I'm willing to bet you know a few yourself.

He was able to demonstrate that people have different ways of representing numbers, and how you represent them affects what you can do whil working with numbers. Some people can speak or talk about various things whil working with numbers, while others can write, or read while working with numbers. His method of demonstrating this was to have you count at a constant speed and then either read or write, or speak. His obsssservation was that if you mentally 'heard' the numbers going by, 'One, two, three...' you could read and write, because the function of hearing happens at a different point in your mind than speaking and hearing. Some people mentally see the numbers going by as if they were on a number line, or tape measure. "1..!..2..!..3..!..4.." And these people can speak and listen at the same time as they are counting.

Many people know he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. He ran int oproblems because one of the things he and his family did to challenge him was to create custom 'codes' that he had to break. At the time all mail was sent through censors who themselves were having problems reading the messages to know what should be sent back and forth. Part of Feynman's challenge was to send a response in the same code as he figured out was used in the first place. So now the censors have these coded messages going both ways. Ultimately he had to ask his family to send the key to the message with the message for the censors, and got the censors to agree not to send the key along with the message to him. They would also be able to read his responses this way.

At one point his younger sister was learning Chinese. Sso she sent him a message in Chinese. He spent a long time crafting a response, mostly because he wanted to get th echaraters to be beautiful as they should be. Ultimately he had the four symbols he wanted to send, he put them on a decorative cord so that they hung like flags, or one of those 'happy birthday' banners you can get at many party stores. His response was 'Elder Brother Also Speaks."

He was well known for working out the mathematics of a problem from what he called 'First Principles'. Sort of the 1+1=2 level of physics. Not always satisfied with another scientist's proof, he would occasionally take the statement, ignore the proof provided, and proove it for himself. It was not uneard of for him to go to a symposium where some scientist was presenting a proof, get a copy of the premis the night before the presentation, and come up to the scientist the next morning and say something akin to I went through the premis last night and agree with your result. The proof he worked out overnight (or the evening before) was often far more elegant than that the scientist had spent a significant portion of his career developing.

Over the years he worked in a number of different fields including quantum mechanics and music, painting, biology, and more. Often several fields at once. While he was awarded one Nobel price, it is suggested that he did the work that should have lead to two other prizes later in life. One of those prizes was awarded to people who it appears independently reproduced his work (without having seen it) some 20 years after he first documented it.

He also liked to have fun, and is widely recognized as having been a prankster. One of his pranks involved removing the door to a particularly nervous classmates room, and hiding it. After much searching the entire house sat down at dinner and the leader of the house stood and said "All right everyone, whomever stole the door, we recognize you are a master at the activity. We're going to go around the table, in your tern, stand up and either fess up, or acnoledge that someone else did it." When it got to Feynman's position he stood up and said, "I did it!" to which his housemates said "Oh sit down Richard." and they went on, no one accepting that he had been the one to do the deed.

Obviously I think pretty highly of him. I'll admit that there are a lot of other people who are bright as well, and some even brighter possibly than him. But I don't know of any with specificity.

Probably just one more of the limitations on my intellegence I suppose.

First of all, I consider myself to be reasonably bright. I test well on the online IQ tests, and I think I am relatively well read. But it just occurred to me that it's time to stop trusting what I think I know.

I think we've all been through the 'Don't believe it just because it's on the Internet' phase of realization. It's that point of realizing that not everything we have been relying upon for basing some decision is, well, reliable.

It doesn't matter whether the source of that information was the Weekly World News, or even a scientific journal article on human cloning. Some people will 'publish' made up facts, either to excite an audience, or for a perception of fame in a field they may not be doing as badly as they end up being perceived as having done.

The problem is that once you realize that some of your sources may have problems, you have to ask yourself how you can get to trust a source. We've gotten to the point that in most number systems with a base greater than 2, 1 + 1 = 2. Oh, there are elegant proofs that 1 = 0. But if you have a reasonably sound grasp of mathematics, and some of the traps that can be thrown in, such as division by 0, you can probably find the flaws in those 'proofs.' Elegant or no.

In any case, one of the basic ground rules of developing knowledge is that you need to be able to cite your sources. There are several others, such as your arguments withstanding criticism, but as good as your arguments may be, they work far better if you can show a trail of evidence that leads up to your conclusion. Peer review should be a part of any publication, but if you are the final authority, you really do need to be able to point at your sources.

The bad part of this blog entry is that I won't be citing any sources. It's not because there is no worthy sources for my statements. I strongly suspect that you can find such evidence if you want to dig around.

The reason for this lack of citation is two fold. First I have not spent a significant portion of my learning time documenting what it was that I "learned" and more importantly "where I learned it from." You may consider it lazy of me, but it's something that's begun to bother me of late.

Why does it bother me? Because I've gotten to the point that people are relying upon me to provide correct answers. Not in a problem solving situation, that I have been doing for decades. I need to provide those correct answers in a teaching forum. Oh, I'm not teaching in a formal school, or classroom at this point. I'm not sure I ever really want to again. But I do tend to mentor a lot of people in a lot of different subjects.

I can afford to be wrong when troubleshooting, because it offers me the opportunity to learn from my mistakes. And I can afford to have been wrong when teaching, as it allows me to help others learn from my mistakes rather than making those same mistakes themselves. I've heard and read it argued that people mostly don't learn, and almost never learn from others. I think the reality is a bit more complex.

I think we can learn from others. It does require what may seem to many to be a rather strange teaching technique however. Specifically for someone to learn from you, I think you have to take them down the 'simple' or 'easy' path to the point where even they can see that it's a dead end, and somewhere along the line they made a mistake. At that point you have to be able to walk them through finding that mistake, and let them learn how to identify it for themselves.

Note that the above paragraph leads off with 'I think...' I wouldn't call it even a formal hypothesis. At this point it is more like a stray thought.

If I'm going to go down the path of helping others to learn from my errors, I am going to have to develop the habit of documenting how I learn things. So for now, let's consider this a starting point.

Anything that follows that is intended to teach, can not be just statements. I can get those off of any talk radio program I choose to listen to. And probably a few I avoid.

I am going to try to put together a fairly basic course in networks. We'll see what happens.

-Rusty

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