Trust on social networks...

Can I trust you?

Should you trust me?

And what exactly are we trusting each other with?

I started thinking about these things recently when I started to get email requests for my trust on spock.com. Spock.com is a great "search application for people" which I wrote about in June. Since then I hadn't seen much uptake in my circle but recently I'm getting requests from complete strangers as well as my co-workers.

Good for the team at Spock as they seem to be gaining some traction, especially with the addition of the network and trust features (and this post shouldn't be seen as a dig against them), but is it good for me?

I've been using Spock (or should that be spock?) mainly for online identity management in conjunction with my claimID, so everything is public to start with. So I'm really just sharing with the people whom I "trust" the profiles of related people. Not too bad really, just a step away from "friends" on MySpace.com - or is it?

LinkedIn is a closed community and I do trust the contacts I have there as they are all people I have met or know through someone I trust outside of the web. Not so with the people on Spock. By just accepting the trust of 9 people I have the profiles of 688 others in my network. To what end? What is the trust we have? Could it backfire on me?

Maybe it's the choice of word that is causing me to over think this, but as we stampede into 2008 where social networks are sure to expand and encroach further into our daily online lives, should we be bandying around words such as trust in places where we know little of nothing about the people we're assigning that word to?

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The internet is growing again...

When I first started really using the Internet it was through a service called CompuServe and a browser named Mosaic via a 14.4k dial-up in Southend, Essex. It was all new and sites were appearing all the time. The web seemed to be continually expanding and as I started building sites myself using HTML Notepad, I found myself going back to foreigner's such as Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman who were becoming a constant in my daily "pay-as-you-go" surfing.

By the time I came to the US and started working for Optiem I was more comfortable with my online surroundings. I had a good grasp on where to go for information, had been lucky enough to meet a few of "those foreigners" and concentrated on improving the quality of the sites we were building by introducing CSS for layout, validating against W3C standards, focusing on accessibilty and usability and how all the above effect SEO.

But for a time the web, it seemed, had stopped expanding for me.

Most web designers were on board with CSS, semantic layout, standards-based (X)HTML. Blogs had increased the number of voices but RSS was diminishing the number of sites I actually visited. I found I was actually surfing a lot less though my consumption had increased.

Where I'm going with this ramble is that I feel the web, for me, is expanding again - This time in a new direction with a new toolset. I'm starting to feel as I did back in front of my monitor, listening to the modem and waiting for the new to reveal itself.

Social networks, content distribution, a choice of browsers that can be as individual as their users, the expectation of a truly mobile web that is portable, safe, semantic and built using foundations that make sense. The chance for companies to truly shape and grow their presence on the web in 2008 is HUGE and I'm really looking forward to being part of that.

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Great article on OpenID...

OpenID is one of those things that does seem to be getting a lot of mainstream traction. There is a great article about OpenID on Vitamin, written by Peter Nixey, about how he sees OpenID changing sites. I love the idea and use MyOpenID myself for sites such as ma.gnolia and ClaimID.  You can see by the range of different sites using this it has legs and if you group it with the way social networks are growing up and exchanging information it fits right in. Here's to more sites getting on board.

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