An interesting discussion from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/06/1427214 Starting from Wired’s article “Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up” (http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net) users are discussing about openness of social networks.

People should be able to choose between openness and privacy. While I want to share with as many people as possible my opinion on world news etc., maybe I prefer to keep my appreciation for grandma’s cookies available only to relatives, because other people would not really care.

The way to balance it? It is enough to allow users to set “disclosure” values for blog posts. Also, more or less as Orkut does, users can be provided multiple “sheets” for their profiles: public, business, personal, etc. They can decide if they want to activate them all, or just one, and what to write in them. Information are disclosed depending on viewer’s status (anonymous, logged in, friend, etc.). Same for APIs.

Also, I think it is time for an open source social network, based on a “hub” with users profiles and decentralized tools, such as blogs etc., which can be syndicated by RSS etc. That is exactly what we aim to build here.