The official listing says this is "A panel of experts on social network theory and practice debate the growing decentralization of social networks and what to do about it as they deconstruct the 'social software' hype while providing constructive suggestions and examples." Wow. Dana Boyd has this huge fun-fur hat on. The hat has ears.

Featuring:
Tantek Celik (Technorati), Jonas M Luster (Collabnet), Joyce Park (CommerceNet), Ernie Hsiung (Web Developer who worked on the Yahoo! 360 project), danah boyd (Google).

Notes follow...

[Celik is the moderator... sets up the panel...]

[Q: Does "social software" mean anything?]

[Q: Does "why" matter?] ...why would people use this system?... why are people using systems?... why are people making their personal information public... why are they exposing it to the archives of the web... analyse what people are doing and meet their needs...

[Q: Who owns your data?] ...disparity between copyright and Terms of Service...

[Q: Can technology can be too simple?] ... technologists overcomplicate things... trend towards simplifying design...

[Luster]: ...when the social craze started... i asked myself if software could be too simple... looking at social networks before computers were involved... [references John Scott's work.... Steeger... shows a slide containing 6 key attributes to social network: Density, Proximity, Direction, Source/Origin, Time, Type] ... if you have a list of attributes for a person and a list for their relationships, and the list of personal attributes is larger, you have a community, not a social network...
What's in a social network?:
- more than just one variable pertaining to relationships
- don't forget that netwroks are transient
- well defined vocabularies or free declarations?
- overlay networks connect: trans-communal networks.

[Park]
- built Friendster, got fired from Friendster... [heh]
- tension between openess and privacy... do people understand the consequences of putting info into a truly public realm (particularly women)
- big difference between genders: women have greater needs and desires for safety, discretion, deniability, understanding of public vs. private life
- "So far, most social networking sites have been built largely by young men for young men..." ...young men like to stalk women [uhh... ok]

[boyd]
- interested in questions of "why" and "who"... how are cultures and people transformed by technology?
- what does it mean to be open... open means being put into the public... it's very libertarian... everyone does not have equal access...
- there is freedom in walled gardens [security]... worst thing about going public is the lack of safety... even spaces that aren't really closed will be seen as closed by users... social spaces start out homogeneous...
- who's values are being served? most people don't want to be that open... people speak to their audience without having to worry about anyone else overhearing [out of context]... when UseNet was made more accessible, the culture changed...
- TechnoSocial Problems
--- social awkwardness [can't say no to a friend invite]
--- articulation problems [how do you express something formally?]
--- the problem with public ["not everyone wants to speak to the world at large"]
- social sofware is important because it's changing the way we do things... we are throwing technology out there and there are social changes as a result... paying attention vs. not paying attention to user base...

[Hsiung]
- web dev at Yahoo!'s community group
- personas: who are the types of users that would use a certain product?
- XFN: putting social relationships on a weblog... leverages the blogroll using attribute tags to describe relationships... there are some apps out there that will spider the blogrolls to figure out friend connections...
- there is some potential for XFN... bloggers are all about the ego... instant gratification... if you invest time in your blogroll with XFN, nothing really happens instantly...
- there isn't that much functionality currently to XFN... it's integrated into WordPress... there is no incentive to using it currently...

[Celik]
- XFN is in use in Metafilter... allows users to label each other... you can see comments by people in your social network... what else can we filter with our social network?... the idea with XFN was to throw it out there and see what happens...

[Hsiung]
- it's not hard to build on functionality to XFN... right now it's the geek coolness factor [hahaha]

[Luster]
- Mac OSX Tiger can pull out that XFN data [I think he means he's written something for Tiger that does this]

[audience]
- is there such a thing as verifiable anonymity? could it be implemented into social networks?

[Luster]
- there's a difference between explicit and implicit declarations of relationships... but relationships are not declared explicitly... if we look only in a declarative space, then this might work...

[boyd]
- anonymity is not possible... as soon as "source" is identified, anonymity is ruined... data is a fingerprint [writing style, for example]... collective communities of trust is a substitute for anonymity... layers of public information [insider info "encoded" into a blog posting]

[Celik]
- you can't build one tool to satisfy all the privacy requirements, community/social requirements...

[Luster]
- how trackable are users... Joyce Park wrote that the word folksonomies sucks, and I agree... tracked the meme across the web... determined relationships in knowledge transfer... by using this combined with other indicators I can break anonymity... if we are vocal people, we tend to use certain mannerisms and words that can be tracked...

[boyd]
- humans build social networks by gossip... references the monkeysphere...

[Celik]
- how do you disagree with someone? use votelinks...

[boyd]
- most people don't like to rate people negatively in public... what are the social consequences...

[audience: what are the international ramifications of social networks? i.e. Orkut]

[Hsiung]
- Orkut is still an invite-only system... the chain of friends eventually lead to Brazil, built upon itself...

[Boyd]
- Brazillians use Orkut because they perceived it as a nationalistic effort to populate Orkut with Brazillians... they made it fit the social needs that they had...

[Luster references the book "The Cow Patty Ecosphere" in the context of the Orkut situation]... as soon as you have a homogeneous group, they produce something that attracts more of the same...