Finally, I have to ask what these tools do to the old, low-tech concept of friendship. In some way, with their numbers and lists and classifications, these services can subtly make a social network into a trophy collection. Technology has made it easier than ever to count your friends -- but that doesn't mean you should.

Esther Dyson weighs in on the trends in social networking software.

Buying and Selling the Little Black Book

William Mitchell, the head of the MIT Media Lab media arts and sciences, has written a book, "Me++"

] Me++ describes the move from virtual reality - the old
] 90s idea of the net as a separate, alternative realm - to
] "augmented reality" (AR), in which ubiquitous computing
] and mobile wireless networks are used to reconnect us to
] the real world.
]
] Mitchell muses on how AR will change our sense of our
] selves. Me++ is "a play on C++, the popular programming
] language. Among programmers,++ means incremented or
] extended, so Me++ suggests the computationally extended
] self." He suggests we should no longer think of ourselves
] as "fixed, discrete individuals", but as nodes in a
] network. "I am part of the networks and the networks are
] part of me. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I
] am."

"I link, therfore I am," has resonance for MemeStreams.

Guardian Unlimited | Online | I link, therefore I am

] Like the Segway, Bombardier's Embrio concept--a prototype
] that may or may not make production--uses gyroscope
] technology to balance riders but adds a dash of flair
] absent in the Segway, which we as car nuts find slightly
] nerdy.

leet!!

Canadian Segway

] On October 16, 2003, VeriSign announced the sale of its
] Network Solutions (NSI) business unit three years after
] its purchase from SAIC. This is a report on the
] historical snapshot of Network Solutions and a collection
] of commentaries made in response to this event.

Some good comments here.

Reaction to VeriSign-NSI Break Up

] And those are the people who still dominate the standards
] bodies?
] They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right
] now. It's not OK to say standards are important, unless
] we don't like someone who implemented it. And it's not OK
] to say these services at the core should not be built
] out, unless you're one of the small guys and nobody
] really cares. How do we build a commercial business with
] ground rules that seem to shift based on personal agenda
] and emotion versus any particular logical data set?

More blood boiling commentary from the people who broke the internet.

The cultural divide and the Internet's future |CNET.com

] There is currently a healthy robust competitive market
] for expired domains. The WLS seeks to kill the entire
] market and allow a system devised by Network Solutions to
] decide who gets every name, and allows them to charge
] domain consumers exorbitantly for the privelege of using
] their monopoly.

The actual product is named "Next Registration Rights".. I commented on this awhile ago. http://www.memestreams.net/users/rattle/blogid3252412

Another reason to hate Verisign

] While still teaching at Berkeley, Stonebraker founded
] Ingres Corp. to commercialize the relational database
] technology. (The company was acquired in 1990 by ASK
] Computer Systems.) Shortly after launching Ingres Corp.,
] Stonebraker and his students pushed databases ahead yet
] again with POSTGRES, a relational database that could
] understand "objects," groups of simpler pieces of data.

29 years of relational databases...

This is an interesting paper about how the architecture Google has created to manage their massive search index database.

Also worth noting, pages on MemeStreams are the first results for the search term "google filesystem", on Google. Ironic? Not really, its actually "Google File System", or GFS.

Paper on Google's filesystem

] You also have an incredibly overzealous vocal minority
] that thinks it still owns the Internet, and the
] anarchists that think everything should be free. And then
] you have everybody else that uses the Internet every day
] and doesn't know what ICANN is. I think this is a broken
] model that we have talked to ICANN and the Department of
] Commerce about.

No shortage of things to be angry about in this interview.

"The vocal minority that still thinks it owns the internet". Last I checked, the point was that no one owned the Internet. The problem is that VeriSign thinks and acts like they own the Internet. This vocal minority they speak of are the people who run the Internet, and develop its standards.

CRN Interview: Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign

More comments from Decius:

] The giant recorder of Web addresses sure sparked a fire
] when it redirected site-not-found messages to its own
] search engine. It's a bum rap.

Businessweek doesn't get it. This guy oversimplifies the objections to the service, explains away his oversimiplification, and then claims that sitefinder should be allowed. This is what is known as a straw man arguement. Read the IAB's comments on the servie. Read verisign's technical response. Even Verisign hasn't managed to provide a coherent explanation of how services other then HTTP and SMTP are supposed to handle this change. If you think the internet is made up of SMTP, HTTP, Ping, and Traceroute then you don't understand the internet, and therefore you don't know what you're talking about.

BW Online | October 7, 2003 | Verisign Didn't Deserve This Spanking