PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

So this past week has been super exciting for a few reasons. One of the highlights was TechLudd, one of the crappiest named tech-events I’ve ever been to, but a lot of fun nonetheless and packed to the rafters full of interesting people. Essentially, it was conceived as a reunion / meetup for the people who were at Paddy’s Valley and those who wanted to chat about it. After Paul Walsh promoted the event into the stratosphere by trying to stop it, the event saw over 100 registrations and in terms of atmosphere and excitement levels in the Odessa Club ( where were you, Wrafter?), was a great success for organiser Anton Mannering.

Now, seeing as I had nothing to pimp, in order to make the event relevant for myself, I brought my camera along. I didn’t drink too much, rather preferring, as Eoghan McCabe put it, to “network my ass off.” My trick? I swanned around the venue in my yellow and black scarf taking headshots of everyone who would let me.

Now, since I’ve started getting in to photography (around November 2006 or so), my photos have gone straight on to facebook, where I’d take a selection of 16 landscape photos and tag them accordingly. That technique wouldn’t work too well for the headshots. This isn’t so much because the technology doesn’t work, more the feeling that I don’t think facebook is the right place to post them. Now, I’ve been hanging around and chatting on Twitter lately a good bit with Marcus MacInnes ... Marcus has set up pix.ie, an Irish online photo sharing site. I’ve been using it lately to post my photos of Irish tech events—this makes a lot of sense to me, as Marcus has been very active lately in the grass-roots tech community and it makes me proud to support his work, and indeed that of any Irish company developing potentially international-standard web applications.

When I was in California last May, I got a great thrill being in the same room as Chris Messina when he was making suggestions to Alex Payne, one of the developers of Twitter, at Super Happy Dev House. So I’ve been excited using pix.ie over the past few weeks, getting to know Marcus personally and sending suggestions and comments to him. Attending an event like Techludd and of course events like Curry 2.0 really starts to compound that excitement—like stirring up the sediment and providing the backdrop against which the positive online social revolution that everyone in the Irish tech community is waiting for.

Now to the point of this post. I love Facebook love their photo application, I love the way I can tag photos and see the photos of my friends et al. I love the interface and the recent enhancements that make browsing an absolute pleasure. But for a set of photos like my Techludd headshots, I don’t think facebook is quite the right place to post them. Most of these people aren’t close personal friends of mine—I don’t really want to friend them to be able to tag them in photos.

Which leads me to think that perhaps a new twist on the “friends” model of social network needs to be conceived, one specifically based around vicinity. I’m brainstorming here, but I think there’s something to it and similar ideas have come up in conversations with both Anton and Marcus in the last few months.

I happened upon Chris Messina’s DiSo Interview which explains DiSo—The distributed social network. The Diso is basically based around the idea that everyone on the web has a unique identity, but also a set of things in their virtual world, that can be shared, linked etc. Just like in facebook—messages, posts, photos, applications etc. DiSo pushes the boat out further, though, by implementing a set of open protocols, rather than being contained in what is described as a “walled garden”. Facebook, for example, according to their terms and conditions, own everything you post on their site. Not cool.

So this is what I’d like to see:

If I attend an event, it has a TechLudd style registration / Facebook style RSVP system. This is to get a sense of the people who will be there, and useful for checking to see who was there. I post my photos to whatever photo sharing site / server / website / online storage that I choose. Then, I can tag people in these photos. The photos themselves allow for the creation of sub-networks. Eg. If I get tagged in a photo for “Techludd”, that means I was there, and now there’s a specific Techludd network containing all the people who were tagged in photos. Facebook allows tagging in notes too—so I think that paradigm could be copied in a DiSo style network.

As I attend more events, a web of networks starts to appear—and I can chart the people who are coming to an event who have been to an event I was at before. After that event, the network starts to strengthen.

I think the whole thing is confusing at the moment, and I need to do a lot more thinking and research into the microformats that Chris talks about in his video, but I’m convinced that most of the technology for this sort of thing is already, or nearly, in place. Even more, I think that within the Irish community there’s enough happening that we can contribute to this movement toward open social networks.