Note: I started this post yesterday, but got cut off cause I had to run off somewhere for a meeting. Therefore, it started off focused and I had an idea where I wanted the post to go, but when I got back I had no idea what I wanted to write. So towards the end it falls apart. Sorry.

As of late, I've been doing more reading than anything else. This would be a Good Thing since I was not a prolific reader of books throughout high school and college. I will probably devote a category of short book reviews sometime in the near future on this journal ...

One of the topics I've been reading about with a keen interest is the Internet (duh factor: a bazillion!). It means so many things to so many people ... on a social, political and economic level it's starting to change the way people do things. This is not to mean that this is a "revolution;" I feel revolution is too strong a word to describe a technology which is simply complementing our lives. The Internet will not replace TV; it won't replace coffeehouses, and it certainly will not replace the media. The Internet provides another channel for all those existing mediums .... the music video did not replace radio, for we still needed something to listen to in the car on our way to work.

The Internet, to me, is simply beautiful for its basic free flow of information and the way it allows me to connect with people. Look at my friends list. There is no way I would even know or care about a lot of the people on my list if I were limited to a 'real-world' experience alone. However, the Internet allows me, in a 5-minute span, to learn about the experiences of others. That's not to say the Internet allows us to know about people - no, that's completely wrong. The expectations of how well we know each other seems distorted by long-time Internet users; don't expect to know me because you read my journal on a daily basis. That is reserved only for those people in my life. I will never expect to be called a friend by anybody on my friends list (or maybe I am, who knows, that's another entry), but I will proudly say that their different viewpoints have allowed me to expand my own horizons. That's what it is for me; expanding your horizons.

I'll refrain from the political and economic ramifications of the Internet, but I want to focus on the technological implications of the Internet.

Anything can be done on the Internet. That is the one basic rule of the Internet. If you want to create a website devoted to Jessica Biel, you can. If you want to post a picture of some guy's ass being stretched apart (ala goatse.cx), you can. No one can regulate that.

This poses a lot of interesting philosophical questions for developers. Especially on a site like Tabulas which relies on the social networks formed rather than the underlying technology (not to say the tech isn't important, but the overlying social network is infinitely more important), there are a lot of philosophical questions to answer. How do you handle censoring? How do you handle user harrassment? I've written about these topics form time to time and usually came up with no real clear answers (and usually comments show the audience is divided).

Taking a step back from the myopic view of "just" Tabulas, we see a lot of services offering to "centralize" data. You see services like TypeKey which allow people to store their commenting identity in one place - this is akin to the now-failed Microsoft Passport service and the never-gonna-stop-publishing-white-papers-and-do-something-useful Liberty Alliance. The basic premise for these sites is that people don't want to have to remember 50 passwords to access a multitude of sites; store your identity once and then have all proper services query for it; basically you have one username and password to access any website (in theory). The reasoning is great; this is truly a value-added service that many of us can benefit from. So why do they fail?

There seems to be a running argument that people don't want to put all their eggs in one basket. Rubbish. These are the type of people who also have some weirded notion of privacy on the Internet, which I've stated time and time again - you should have absolutely no expectation of privacy when you're online. Ever. The fact of the matter is that if someone could do a proper secure implementation of a global ID login that was free (perhaps it could be funded publicly or through the government) and easy to implement for developers ... it would be incredibly beneficial for its early adopters. I think the failure has not been the users, but the site's creators. A truly quick and dirty implementation is required first ... then expand on that. Too often are we trying to build the perfect product from the start rather than building something that works and then fixing it (I love the latter methodology).

I use FireFox's "store password" option. And it worked very nice; I was registering for all these forums and FireFox would automatically log me into all these sites... until I have to reinstall FireFox. I even forgot all my usernames and it took me forever to retrieve all my username and passwords ... this "client-side" solution (as far as I can see) is not a long-term solution. As the Internet becomes further adopted by mainstream society, people are going to register for more and more websites ... and managing all those passwords is going to be a real problem that web developers are going to have to band together and solve.

In Korea, each citizen is issued a national identity number; this number is REQUIRED for registration to most sites. The ID number is an implicit trust; when you register with the ID number, you are offering the site a currency o f trust which the site can accept as fact. As it stands here, there is no way for me to verify if multiple accounts are being registered. The parameters I use currently (IP address, e-mail address, MD5 has of password) can easily be spoofed. I just wish there were a way of verifying identities online. The loss of privacy would be the price to pay, but imagine all the trust you can immediatly establish. Amazon recently took step forwards with this concept, offering its reviewers the ability to verify their identities. Since this new feature, I've always read the reviews of people who verify their identities over those who choose to post as random guests.

. . .

I just visited thefacebook again after reading Alfish's posts... man it got a LOT better. The functionality is a ton better and there truly is a feeling of networked connection. The UI is a bit messy in places, and I'm not a huge fan of passing tons of data through the $_GET attributes (the super-long URLs), but if it works, I guess I can't really criticize too much. I joined a bunch of faux groups ("Jackie Manuel's Posse" and "Roy Williams is my homeboy"). I also found my old high school crush on the site ... she started a group called "Still Haven't Left Chapel Hill." I may have to join it soon.

Posted by roy on January 2, 2005 at 04:15 PM in Ramblings, Web Development | 2 Comments

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ghost_tree (guest)

Comment posted on January 3rd, 2005 at 05:27 PM
Actually, I was kinda curious about that.... what's tabulas' stance on censorship?

And no... I'm not about to start posting hardcore porn nor relating my experience with a really hot nurse.
Comment posted on January 4th, 2005 at 02:03 PM
Haha, please post your experiences with the superhot nurse!

The original post regarding censorship can be read <a href=http://tabulas.com/~roy/117922.html">here</a>. Lately I've started amending my thoughts - I view Tabulas as more of a private park which needs to be maintained by some sort of authority ... so I'm still not entirely sure where I need to go. As a general rule though, I'm not going to censor anything (unless it puts me in legal trouble). Once I set up some sort of policing authority, I figure each case will be handled on a contextual basis.