Out of the way

@jod999, I agree that it is nice to have the option of restricting access, and any decent system can do that (although few do it really really well - there is a trade-off between usability and power here). What I hate about Facebook is that it doesn't have anything *but* a walled garden - Flickr at least lets you put stuff on the web that people can see without having to join Flickr.

I don't use Last.fm (I listen to music from my own collection, which is more than enough...) or Delicious (dunno why, just never did...), so can't really comment.

I do see the value in Twitter, I just find it hard to spend much time following stuff. Case in point was an idea to put some W3C stuff on twitter as well as mailing lists, wiki pages, etc etc. The huge problem is that we don't update the info enough already. Having a system that makes that easier (as you suggest, @jsmanrique) would be a motivation, but just adding another channel to watch is just eating more of my short short day.

(I agree that it would be nice if w fixed all the bugs in My.Opera and it were perfect. I'll check out the preview thing if I get some time, and file a bug if I can describe it...)

@andol, I'm not sure how the terms were actually created. I think those terms are more or less reasonable (although it might make more sense to restrict it to stuff you make available publicly - I will ponder that and maybe ask the lawyers). But allowing Opera to highlight some of your stuff on the site is, I think, a reasonable quid pro quo for having it there. The deal with the license being about anything is that there is no good way of choosing things otherwise (*perhaps* modulo whether something is 'public' as noted above), and it needs to be orrevocable because we can't afford to go into a position where we get permission to use something, and then later you decide you want royalties for our use and we are unable to pull things off the web.

I don't think we seriously plan to use everything you have (or very much of anything), but ther is some promotion of My.Opera from time to time, and that can include snippets of photos or blog pages etc... If you have some suggestions about what the license should say that allows us to do something like that still, feel free (or email them to me - chaals [and you should know where I am at given my job ).

@jsmanrique, My.Opera gives you (and every member) a foaf file by default: http://my.opear.com/chaals/xml/foaf/ is mine, and there is an option for me to point to another foaf file as well which gets included as a seeAlso in the source (I pointed to my old W3C file). Making more of this stuff would be valuable to enable people to share, but it turns out that a business model for social networks is advertising to a group of people whose behaviour, friends, etc is well-known by the people selling the advertising, just as Google gets more value by offering more services to find out more about you, and automatically sell more targetted ads to you.

Anyway, I find social networking fascinating, and if I was ahead of my work (instead of behind) in my day job I would love to study a whole bunch of things about it...

One day...