One Shot Design

It is highly arguable that at the time of this famous statement, Andy Warhol could have foreseen that a US government agency created in 1958 to secure technological edge over the Soviets would combine with post-1975 personal computers after to enable common mortals to experience fame from the anonymity of their basement.

Since 1989, the World Wide Web has enabled skilled users to publish content on the Internet, and the ever-decreasing technicality of the process now allows laymen to publish 140 characters-long messages. The Web 1.0 era was characterized at best by free static web hosting, while the Web 2.0 saw the successive rise of free content management software, free blogging, MySpace, Facebook and eventually Twitter. On april 16^th 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher won his bet against CNN, reaching 1,000,000 followers on his Twitter account before the news channel.

Twitter is based on proprietary software, just like the social networking portal Facebook. Both networks boast a multi-million broad user base, but have yet failed ^{1 2} to capitalize on their popularity. Apple’s iconic iPhone received dedicated Facebook and Twitter applications and Facebook features a micro-blogging feature that can be synced with Twitter.

Users somehow consider the free service they get as something democratic, but truth be told, both networks are funded by capital venture; so at some point the investors will want to get their money’s worth.

On several occasions, Facebook did stir strong protest from regarding policy. The network is prone to phishing and is criticised namely for holding onto information even after an account has been closed and for reselling data to third parties. Similar concerns about Twitter brought some developers to create Identi.ca, an open-source Twitter clone that handles all the user information according to the Creative Commons license.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg coyly attempted to clarify his company’s policy regarding ownership of user information:

Who owns and controls your Facebook information? This has been a question many have debated over the weekend, but Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, finally gave us the answer (almost) yesterday.

Monster.com’s database having recently been broken in by crackers for the second time raises the question: is your information safe on social networking servers?

Read the full article at PCWorld.com

Crackers have recently started taking advantage of the success of social networking sites to lure unsuspecting users towards phising or malware-loaded pages. Simple advice: be weary of files or page links sent to you through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Read the article from The Wall Street Journal.

I am starting to grasp what the Web 3.0 could be like, or at least Web 2.5. After using Orkut (a Google spinoff) since its inception, I have started to use Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Hey, I like to think I’ve still got a social life, since I obviously don’t have endless evenings to waste in front of a computer.
The most fascinating aspect of Facebook, besides the obvious social networking, is the ability to use applications to connect it to other portals such as Googlemail, Flickr or Last.fm and to publish RSS feeds.

Facebook eventually becomes the place where one can gather all the information regarding contacts, taste and habits. It only lacks bundling with a blog, a chat protocol and -why not- a real mail service. There is however the possibility of going one step closer in that direction with the use of Flock, a free, open-source and cross-platform Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox, which has been developed with Web 2.0 in mind.

Flock features built-in extensions allowing it to connect to social, media sharing, blogging and bookmarks portals. As a matter of fact, I switched this blog from the Serendipity CMS to the more popular WordPress in order to be able to create entries remotely from Flock. The browser automatically detects embedded media such as videos from youtube and the likes. Video and photo streams can be directly accessed without having to process any HTML.

Flock and Facebook both combined both prefigure what Web 3.0 might be like. Incidentally, all these service tend to be cross-platform: their content and appearance can be handled through a hots of devices ranging from mobile phone to smartphone to PDA to personal computer. This is the kind of universality Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he devised hypertext and the World Wide Web.