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Guest post by Kim de Vries: Your Friend has just tackled you

Kim de VriesBite, lick, or tackle them back, or click here to theorize about what this all means. I'm very happy to publish the first guest posting here on datadirt. Kim De Vries, who I met via Facebook, wrote a very interesting paper about the symbolic kind of communication we all know so well from social networks like Facebook. “He who never superpoked shall throw the first rock” – enjoy the reading! Dr. Kim De Vries is working at the California State University Stanislaus, you can reach her at kdevries [at] csustan.edu

Introduction

Though Facebook was initially the province of college students, it has become popular with a broad range of users since opening its door to anyone with an email address in September 2006. However, until very recently, most research on Facebook has focused on the student demographic rather than exploring how Facebook is growing into a massive online society that is inhabited by many different groups using Facebook in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. The academics studying Facebook generally join it and use it in order to observe students; now that more faculty are using Facebook outside the classroom, to organize events and to socialize, turning the focus to our own use of Facebook reveals that our own communities are being affected as well.

As of August 2008, Facebook is one of the most rapidly growing social networks, boasting 100 million active users, translated into twelve European and a growing number of Asian and African languages. The extent to which groups of people connected on Facebook can be defined as communities is highly debatable and a useful alternative has been suggested by Rieder and Sch

Who’s gonna manage our digital identity?

Scotty, get those phazers ready – the battle for digital identity management is about to begin. The Google Klingons have yet not been able to successfully launch their not-so-secret weapon OpenSocial, while the Federation's OpenId primarily seems to appeal to nerds.

But hey, behold: the times they are-a-changing: just a couple of days ago myspace announced the introduction of Data Availability, which is basically an interface allowing myspace users to share their profile data with third party websites like Twitter, Photobucket and the like.

Just two days after the information became public, Facebook started talking about Facebook Connect, a perfectly similar system – Techcrunch has more. Both interfaces will be publicly available for any interested partners in a couple of weeks and both will fight Google and OpenId for supremacy over digital id management – and the battle is set up to be very interesting to watch.