I think “Social Graph” is kind of a dumb phrase to apply to the back question of relationships. I promptly re-dubbed the event “Social Foo” and thereby found interesting things to talk about. Kevin Marks proposed “social cloud”, clouds hide details. (operations people get hives when you talk about clouds)

XMPP, OpenID, OAuth are all going to be huge in 2008; DiSo, DataPortability, and Social Graph API aren’t as clear winners to me.

“Bowling Alone misses the point. There has been a transformative change from groups to networks. Groups are just a funny form of network.”

“Differentiated role networks”. Differentiated roles, and the failure of monolithic identity and friending were one of the things I went to Sebastopol to talk about this weekend, the people who got it got it, and everyone else wasn’t interested in the hard squishy details of real community. I think this might be the side effect of running social software for social softwares sake vs social software as bath for social media object sharing.

“Relationships can be broken down into 5 types: emotional aid, sociality, major help, minor help, and $$$”

Note to self: try block modeling interactions in high profile/high turn Flickr groups. (central, utata, etc)

No one really understands user expectations. Privacy expectation is currently, “unstable”.

Huge conceptual issues with the difference between public information hand aggregated, and public information computer aggregated. Cognitive dissonance ensues.

Rules, games, and rulesets. Modeling of social software as games. Tension of implicit vs. explicit rules. Mag.nol.ia’s altruism game derived from the cracks board (witnessing altruistic acts is a public good, way to update the Mag rules of game to support this?), Satisfaction’s status update game. Hoping Teresa can bring the quality gaming to BoingBoing’s anemic community. Social games + adversting.

Parody/pastiche as lit analysis. Investigate for web.

Social networks need NPCs. e.g. the Instructables Robot.

Standards works should be done in small groups, with a clear need, that selectively grow the list of participants. No hierarchy of early/late joiners (aka OAuth did it right)

“Everything public” bores me.

Beyond LAMP.

Find a feed for Nathan Eagle’s research.

“locations rights management”

“trusts are largely not transitive”

Language communities are “small world networks”, partitions communities by language. 2-5 hops vs 8 in analyzed network.

The Plaxo way: “We gets ze data Lebowski”

“Twitter is my early warning system. My blood pressure has gone down over the last 18 months”

Identity and sharing can make everyone warm and fuzzy, but also came face to face with sobering consequences that kept me up at night with a bottle of tequila. Re-thinking proposed Flickr features.

Registration is open, attendance is free, accomodation is urban camping.

Also if anyone has a suggestion for a talk for me to give, I’m coming up blank, I’ve handed out a number of excellent (IMHO) suggestions to others, but not feeling the inspiration personally.

A great time was obviously had by all, except for the handful of souls who were too cool for it. I was not among those, self proclaimed web fanboi that I am. To the extent I had no agenda for the weekend it was a wild success, to the extent it could have been even better, I’ve got a few thoughts.

Squid Labs

Squid Labs are my new heroes, its one things to do inscrutable and mind altering hardware hacks, its another to incorporate training, and knowledge sharing for all ages as a core component. Instructables is an awesome attempt to open source knowledge, while Howtoons are just brilliant. The work by Saul Griffith, on self-replicating machines made me wish my math was better, a hard feat. The reality enhancing devices had more of an “oh wow” factor, but what really sealed it for me, is they all travelled up in a modded school bus, full chopped up bikes.

Microformats

I felt like I saw early potential in microformats, and yet am also sort of late to the koolaid drinking party. The best definition I ever heard of artificial intelligence is that AI is the technology that is perpetually 10 years away, in the sense that once a problem domain has been solved (I believe the germane example at the time was computer vision) it is no longer considered AI. I wonder if the Semantic Web is a similar movable feast, and microformats are one of the first spin-offs.

I was impressed by Tantek and the other folks I met working on microformats in that they deeply understand the power of reuse, and more importantly understand that the social hack they’re pulling off is significantly more difficult then the technical one, and more important. That community/communication focus makes me think microformats will be a winner, and hCalendar is certainly the first standard I’ve ever seen that could enable a simple “add this to my calendar” technology.

When 2.0

Saturday morning we did a mini-calendaring track. Michael Radwin, Adam Trachtenberg, Larry Wall, Ray Ozzie and I spent an hour riffing on timezones, leap seconds, and the dismal state of calendaring libraries. (It was also noted that the Olson database might have a “Postel problem”, in that it is unspecified what happens when the maintainer dies)

We were joined by Andy Baio (Upcoming), Brian Dear (EVDB), Jesse Vincent (Reefknot, Data::Ical), and others for what I think will be an interesting ongoing conversation about the future of calendaring.

What take away was of the morning session was that it would be simple, and very easy to build a RESTful web service access to the Olson DB, keyed by region, lat/long, street address and the desired date. You could even support 304s as all the various change information is captured in the timezone files. Personally I’d also like some way of surfacing the rich, and eccentric commentary also contained in the files.

Other hilights were Quinn’s functional body mods talk (scary cool, get her to give you this talk), the potential of seriously messing with the mobile carriers, meeting a bunch of virtual friends/heroes IRL, Mark Fletcher’s talk on Bloglines’ crawling architecture, Segways, ice cream sundaes, free books, and generally incredibly high level of articulate, communicative geeks.

Self Organizing Technologies (for Humans)

Saul’s presentation on teaching machines to self organize was brilliant, and yet, to me, ironic. By sitting there learning about his work, I was missing half a dozen other sessions I would have killed to be in. FOO Camp is billed as a “self organizing” event, and to the extent that O’Reilly does a good job of providing people, space, food, and something like a rough skeleton it, this is true. But the techniques it used, could use an upgrade, it was very much “Self Organizing 1.0″

But not all self organizing is a like. Burned into my mind is the rugby scrum the first night, as 200 geeks pressed into a small space, trying to desperately scrawl and juggle their ideas across the grid. Many events that shouldn’t have been scheduled against each other were, and if you weren’t willing to push, and kick shins, then you didn’t have much say in when you’re session would be scheduled for. This is the kind of thing that gives anarchy a bad name.

I’ve seen it work better, any number of communities have better techniques, and groups like Aspiration and Blue Oxen are in the business of organizing self-organizing events. If I were to lead a session next year it would on “Self Organizing Technologies for Humans”.

Other report backs

• David Weinberger did a great job of reporting on Foocamp, unfortunately he doesn’t have category archives, so I’m linking to his stuff via Technorati. (anyone know if there is a way to see limit viewing tagged items by website on Technorati?)
• Check out the foocamp05 Flickr stream, Brian Sawyer was a good early uploader

On the wiki

• FooReview – manual trackbacks
• SlidesAndStuff

http://avantgame.blogspot.com/2005/08/im-not-werewolf.html

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004359.html

Interestingly I first met the wonderful/crazy folks behind Extreme Usability (and many of my close friends and colleagues), at Ruckus’ TechToolbox, a (radical) geek camp out, hosted in Sebastapol, a little over 3 years ago, less then 20 miles from the O’Reilly’s campus.

Clearly the spiritual progenitor of FooCamp

update: Some notes to come soon, but first FLOSS. In the mean time, check out the Foocamp aggregator