Is there a better decentralized “Like” than status.net?
Út 31 května 2011
So, I was reading through my daily avalanche of blogposts and emails and various links from various sources, and I was thinking about my current obsession: decentralized clouds. And on each webpage I read (for example on this beautiful article from Slate) I saw “Like” button. Of course, given it comes from Facebook, “Like” button is an evil scheme to collect information to be sold later. So, the fact I cannot be tempted into pressing it is one of nice consequences (originally unintended) of me not having a Facebook account at all.
However, looking at those pages today I felt very strongly need for something like “Like” button. Something to say to my friends (however we define them) “Hey, this is a great reading, go and read it! What do you think?”. When thinking about it, I’ve made an inventory of resources I have. Email and plain Jabber are out (it is not cool IMHO to spam everybody in my address book or roster), Facebook (where I don’t even have an account) and Twitter (where I am present at least read-only) are too centralized to support them wholeheartedly. So the only thing which remains are decentralized social networks like Status.net (mostly identi.ca), OneSocialWeb, or Diaspora. Unfortunately, from these only status.net looks like having real life so far. Fortunately, it shouldn't matter that much, because if Diaspora and OneSocialWeb (and GNU/Social, and Appleseed, and …) all follow unified standards (which I am not sure they do) it wouldn’t matter that much which implementation of protocols you use.
Given this inventory, I am afraid status.net is the only currently available solution with substantial following, so I will concentrate on it. So, I have sent my links and comments to identi.ca with a bit of comment, and started to think how better status.net could be if it actually expected to be used for like-equivalent functionality. For example, it would be nice to get all links (or only links from today) mentioning some particular URL (after expansion of all shortening URLs, of course) with notices mentioning to collect crowd opinion on it. I guess this is something similar to Gina Trapani’s Think Up. (few moments later) No, it isn’t. I didn’t mean purely data mining thing.
Anybody any thoughts in this direction of decentralized “Like”? (of course, it would be also nice to have some tool, perhaps Firefox extension?, to send commented link from the page which I actually read).
While looking for the resources for this post, I found freelish.us. I am not sure whether this is what I want … for example I am not sure whether it shares roster with my identi.ca account. What I really don’t want is to build my roster again from scratch. I should research what it is about.