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Content Tagged with social-networking + user:alex

I’ve written another of my little javascript web apps, this time based on Digg’s new expansive API.

The API is very well designed and I’ve only found a couple problems with it: the license is very restrictive and getting back some info requires many multiple calls to digg, but I guess it points to the problems with web apis as just being poor proxies for direct database calls.

The Digg application is a friends browser. – It basically asks the question: “Who’s digging you”.

I wrote this script because i’ve noticed that the front page of Digg is guarded by social networks of people who digg each other’s stories. If you want to get your story noticed, you want to have digg friends.

Enter any top digger name, you will see a high ratio of repeat diggers – the same is true of my submissions as well (Thanks Pawfoots!).

As I wrote it, I was interested really in just browsing around the networks, so I thought that was fun enough for an app. It’s kind of like an earlier script I wrote: delimages.

Anyways my app started with a single function basically that gives you back a digg response object with what you want. If you write a Digg script, you can use my little Digg function:

var Digg = 
{
    apikey : 'http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/'
};

Digg.request = function (path, count, cbkName, offset)
{
    var url = 'http://services.digg.com/' + path;

    if (!offset) offset = 0; 

    var params = $H(
    {
        'count'    :  count, 
        'type'     : 'javascript', 
        'appkey'   :  Digg.apikey, 
        'callback' :  cbkName,
        'offset'   :  offset
    });

    url += '?' + params.toQueryString();

    var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    var request = document.createElement('script');
        request.type = 'text/javascript';
        request.src = url;

    head.appendChild(request);
}

All of these JSON Apis are really hurting my Javascript OOP sensibilities. XMLHttpRequest is cool with you making an anonymous function on the fly as the callback, but with JSON the best approach probably is having a callback name passed in the object return, which isn’t the cleanest.

I tried to make do in my script as best I could though.

Social networks today are a billion dollar industry, as Donald Trump might say. And Wikipedia and Facebook are great sites – generating a rabid core fan base and an enormous amount of visit and use. You might not think of Wikipedia as a social networking site, however it’s not just a dusty old encyclopedia moved to the web, it’s really a community of users who keep in close contact with each other, helping to patrol and improve the site.

But social networks in the real world aren’t immutable. Also, since many of these social networks share much in common with a game, it’s possible for people to become bored of the game in general. Are people asking the question: does anyone really need these network pages? Do I really have to have my facebook profile? If there is no core need, where is the stability.

Vauhini Vara, who writes for the online WSJ and is someone I went to High School with, recently posted an article on MySpace and Facebook: WSJ reports NEGATIVE growth at Facebook and MySpace.

The article I think is a little bit silly, with the byline “Some Users Renounce Social Sites as Too Big” – it sounds like what she’s saying is that MySpace is so popular no one goes there anymore. Also “Negative” growth really means a slowing of very fast growth, a second order property that doesn’t really seem that telling other than the fact that MySpace already has all the registered users it can find and now is just signing up TV Shows as new members.

But I think there is something there, I think there will be a backlash against these networks. The only tool that’s really needed for communication and real social networking is an IM client and a cell phone. Everything else is just a game, and a game’s fun lifespan is limited. Social networks need to develop further functionality than just social networking if they want to have longevity and avoid being a fad.

In my personal experience, I’ve seen a lot of people get tired of social networks, start to block the endless streams of linkedin ‘connections’, my sister has recently deleted her facebook profile completely, and a lot of Wikipedians are starting to grumble about the bureaucracy and petty mindedness that has started to define the administrative system there.