Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authered a proposal for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web/Networks available under the Open Social Web website.
According to this proposition for a bill of rights, every Social Network and/or Application should guarantee 3 fundamental USER rights
- Ownership of their own personal information: own profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the the activity stream of content they create;
- Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
- Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.
which in practice means that this services should display the following features:
- Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
- Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
- Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
- Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.
As further reading about this interoperability problem between different services and networks, I strongly suggest that you watch both Brad’s Fitzpatrick slides and read his “Thoughts on the Social Graph”:
September 8th, 2007
The Web2Expo Berlin Tracks have been unleashed. Just by looking at the tracks, I can already guess that’s going to be a very special and unique conference in terms of tech conferences around Europe. Web2Expo will cover five different tracks:
The tracks session list is so large and covers so many interesting subjects, that the hard job is going to be choosing which ones to attend to. A special note for which I’m really glad is that we’ve managed to get some portuguese representations in there: Fred (WeBreakStuff) is going to moderate the panel “Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change” and I’ll be presenting “Conversational Design“:
Once we progress from the User Centered Design to Community Centered Design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding it’s Community design. This presentation collects more or less the key features and interactions that a successful Community should display in order to empower their users and facilitate conversation between its members.
This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.
Web2Expo will also include a Foo/BarCamp style event that’s being organized by Nicole Simon entitled Web2open which will blend pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees can fill in sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. It certainly going to be a unique space to connect with other attendees, learn more about elements of Web 2.0, and share their knowledge and experiences.
So if not before, see you in Berlin, next November! 
September 8th, 2007