Take two completely ubiquitous retail outlets. Starbucks and the Chinese Takeway. You can find both of them just about anywhere in the world.

Starbucks is completely uniform. It's managed on a Roman military command and control structure from head office. The local management are arrogant and make no attempt to assimilate themselves into the local culture. They're supplies are managed by the regional head office who buys in bulk. Senior regional management are on a 2 year secondment so they put their kids in the local ex-pat school and hang out with ex-pats.

Contrast this with:

Every Chinese takeaway is different (while following the same formula). They're run by private entrepreneurs. While there is a wholesale support structure, that's also run by private entrepreneurs. The owners have no choice but to become part of the local culture because they depend on local suppliers. This makes them accomodating rather than arrogant. They live in the culture, their kids go to the local schools.

So we have the military machine vs the ant-hill. Centralised vs De-Centralised. Cultural imperialism vs Cultural assimilation. Startrek vs the Borg.

Now translate this into America vs China as they move into Africa to secure raw material supplies. I'm hearing stories that the Chinese are easier to deal with because even when they are part of large organisations back home, they behave like entrepreneurs in country. And entrepreneurs have to meet their business partners half way rather than trying to impose a foreign system and set of values on them.

To a certain extent I think both India and China have this quality. It's quite quite different from our Roman background here in the west. They operate as a chaotic, complex, mesh of 2 billion autonomous units, not as a pyramid control structure.

The Next Overused Buzz Phrase | AlwaysOn : "Social Graph" might become the new "Web 2.0." Phrase droppers of the world unite.

There's a lot of noise around Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph and the mailing list associated with it. not surprisingly, I've been a prolific poster, so I'm going to have to copy some of the mind grenades I've tossed in to here.

One quick thought. There's a set of people obsessed about the privacy implications of linking social graphs between social networks. I think they're misguided because the cat is already out of the bag, the horse has already bolted, etc etc. If you post on the net you have no privacy. Get over it. Your potential employers, various governments and people who might vote for you are already using all that data to draw big pictures about you. Assuming of course that anyone cares.

See also Tabber.org. They're creating FOAF on the fly from aggregated Social graphs. Which is giving another kick to the total amount of FOAF out there. I wonder again what is the total number of RDF FOAF files and RDF triples out there waiting for someone to do something useful with them.

Linking social graphs is prime Semantic Web territory so the usual suspects have dived into the mailing list. And yet again I'm kicking and screaming and being a grumpy old man because I find it so hard to follow their jargon, and because they're comments and solutions are still at the academic, system level. I've been thoroughly rude in the past about RDF that it's "Write Only Data" Sadly I think it still is as I've yet to see an end user application built on it. Every single proof of concept I've seen has been intensely geeky and aimed at "showing the power of RDF". What it doesn't do is actually solve some real world problem. The state of the art in RDF has moved on a bit since the Semantic Web conference in Galway 3 years ago. But the criticisms of it being academic wanking still apply.

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Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph Is Brad Fitzpatrick's manifesto for a way of aggregating friends and followers across Social Networks.

Good stuff. Read it.

See Also OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience

Facebook's data feeds :

# friends' status updates;
# your own status updates;
# friends' notes;
# your own notes;
# friends' posted items; and
# your own posted items.

Expose them on some public web site for Google to index. You know it makes sense. ;)

They're a little hard to find and depend on your privacy settings.

Don't fall for the Potemkin scam :

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble

What a glorious image and turn of phrase.

Anyone want to dig around in http://static.ak.facebook.com/js/statuspro.js?12:52414 looking for submitStatus() and /updatestatus.php

There is a route to updating Status remotely. Using cUrl and PHP
1) Login to Facebook, grab the cookies and store them
2) Switch to the mobile Facebook interface
3) Grab post_form_id from the form on the mobile home page using regex (be careful with regex pattern greediness)
4) Post the Form with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,'post_form_id='.$form_id[1].'&status='.urlencode($status).'&update=Update');

The problem is that logging in from there logs you out in your browser which is really naff.

Come on Facebook. Make this easier for us.

» The workaround that pipes Facebook status entries into a Twitter feed | Berlind's Testbed | ZDNet.com : In response to last week's post where I said it'd be real nice if updates to my Facebook status cascaded to my Twitter feed and vice versa, ZDNet reader Dan York (blog) pointed me to Julian Bond's workaround which involves using Twitterfeed.com.

Nice to get some recognition. But what's missing here is the link back to Robert Sanzalone. It was his original post about Twitter4Skype that led me to Twitterfeed and the two techniques of feeding RSS of your updates to your main Twitter account and RSS of your friends updates to a dummy Twitter account that you befriend. After that it was just a case of finding the Facebook RSS for just your own updates.

Meanwhile my good friend, Mr Winer, has been busy writing code to route Flickr to Twitter. But I don't get it. Flickr has RSS, so why not just use Twitterfeed? Why does this need yet another application to do the job? Then there's the question of why do it at all. Whenever somebody starts using an automated service to Twitter that generates entries like "I'm Listening to" or "I'm browsing" It just gets really really annoying for their followers. It seems that the way we use Twitter has a sweet spot of a maximum of 5-10 updates per day. Any more than that looks like spam.

Craig Murray - We Killed One Million People - Yes, You and I Did : Of course we don't know the exact number of Iraqi dead. Nobody does - dead civilians are not considered important enough to count by the occupying forces. I don't care if the estimate of a million is 50% out, either way. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died a terrible death, and we caused it. Not one of us has yet done enough to stop it. The guilt lies heaviest on Bush, Blair and Cheney.

But it lies on you and me too.

I've always been just a bit short sighted. Not serious but just enough to need glasses for driving and watching TV. Now I'm getting old enough to get a little presbyopia. So the range between distance and short sight gets narrower and narrower. Eventually you can't read close up, but can't see far away either. Welcome to bifocals. But I'm still a good few years away from that yet.

But what was really disturbing is that some time in the last 6 weeks, my right eye has decided to go wrong. I had the eye test and there's nothing basically wrong except that I've suddenly developed some astigmatism in one eye. So that's a new lens for each of my pair of glasses when they're only 5 months old. But what's worse is that working at the PC with my glasses on it's now too close to focus on. With glasses off, I'm basically reading with one eye. The solution is the second pair of glasses which I could really do without.

While all this is happening, of course you start to have all the deep fears. What if I can't read any more! What if it's a detached retina! What if I've scratched the lens (cigarette ash burn, perspex flake while working in the garage)! What if it's brain damage, hypertension, diabetes. Oh, right, that's "Man Hyperchondria". We don't go and find out what's actually wrong, we just obsess about what might be wrong.

Still. It's appeared suddenly. Maybe it will fix itself suddenly.

An application that let's use your FB Identity as an OpenID.

Here's a clue for Social Network Designers. Stop using "Friend" and switch to "Following" and "Followed By". Then you won't be tempted to overload Friend to control who can see what parts of a profile. And you won't have to annoy your members with endless "XXX says they are your friend, please confirm" messages.

If you use Following and Followed By, then the act of linking to a contact is entirely driven by the person who wants to follow you. So there's no need for a confirmation.

I'm beginning to think this was the single biggest innovation in Twitter.

Oooh, Errr. Upload your music collection (what all 100Gb?) to Anywhere.FM and then play it back mixed in with some Last.Fm style friends and neighbours. Uses Amazon's S3 storage. There's some deep copyright questions there.

The new Maps API ads layer: Released and ready for you to try - Google Maps API | Google Groups : Currently, the feature only shows ads for businesses in US. Apologies to our (many) international developers, who can, however, still implement the ads layer in advance of international ad inventory becoming available.

ARRRRR! Yet Another USA Only Maps Feature.

KTHXBAI !!

When you find yourself turning into a grumpy old man.

This is going to hurt my reputation as a closet anarchist, but I've been browsing a couple of UK Police Blogs. Police Inspector Blog and The Policeman's Blog.

When they're hanging round the local market town on Friday night, or stopping you for speeding and giving you the lecture, the Police seem like some strange version of humanity that was probably bullied as a kid and grew up to be power hungry bullies themselves. And I've never been able to work out why people become policemen. But then you realise what shit they have to go through every day and what shit happens on the edges of society and you realise we couldn't pay them enough if we tried.

The Ambulance blog Random Acts of Reality is a bit of an eye opener as well.

Dave Winer on Twitter : The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.[1]

That means a dead simple API that goes both ways. It's important to have lots of RSS out. It's equally important to have an API that let's you update the service from an external App. That's what separates Twitter from Facebook. It's why Twitterfeed can exist for Twitter but not for Facebook.

Where it gets tricky is when you've got the API, growing user base but not lots of users and not lots of developers working with you. Even if I exactly duplicate the Twitter API or Facebook API on Ecademy, I still won't be able to get the developer ecosystem going until we have 10 times the users. And although it would be trivial, all those Twitter Apps would have to be rebuilt because they all hard code the connection to a specific service. So this hard for me, but what about Linkedin? Let's say LinkedIn do their own Facebook style API. Will they be able to get traction? Will anyone actually code to it?

In the middle of the article, Dave drops another mind bomb. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. Think for a moment. Is a distributed Twitter possible? Where everyone runs their own system to show their latest status update and some aggregation system appears to draw all the content together and provide the following - followed by Social Network functionality?

[1]Dave. You need to see the last blog about routing Facebook to Twitter. It's got RSS. It's got APIs. It's got Open Identity standards. Should be right up your street.

Here's a recipe for routing all your and your friend's Status updates from Facebook to Twitter. See also my post about doing the same with Ecademy and other services.

Things you'll need:-
- An Open ID
- An RSS feed for just your Facebook status updates. Go to your profile, click on minifeed, see All. Click on Status Stories. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- An RSS feed for your friends' Facebook status updates. Friends - Status updates from the drop down at the top of the page. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- A dummy Twitter account. Create a new Twitter account and follow it from your main account.

1. Route your Facebook updates so when you post it also posts to Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your main Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time you post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will create a Tweet from you on Twitter with a link back to your profile on Facebook.

2. Route your Friends' Facebook updates so when they set their status on Facebook, you can read it in Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your dummy Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your friends' status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time any of your friend's post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will appear in your Twitter Friend's timeline with a link back to their profile on Facebook.

You can use the same basic technique for any service that has one or both RSS feeds. It works better with services that include the name of the poster in the title. So Facebook, Plazes, Jaiku but not Pownce.

AFAIK, Twitter is the only service with an API for updating a status externally and a 3rd party RSS to post service. Which means Twitter ends up as the best aggregator for all your services. So the next question is which service you should use as your main update. I'm finding myself doing most of my updates on Twitter with occasional updates on Facebook and Ecademy to keep my profile on those services fresh.

twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically
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