A Bill of Rights for Social Web Users

dscudder — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:33:48 +0000

The other day we blogged about Brad Fitzpatrick’s excellent piece on social graph portability and the evolution of the social web. We’re excited to see further support for this issue with the release of A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

The Bill of Rights was created by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington. The document asserts that web users are entitled certain rights to their information, such as “to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site” and “to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.” It’s a step forward in the movement to unleash the social capabilities and inherent social graph that is present on the web.

Rapleaf is a supporter of this Bill of Rights and our CEO was one of its first signers. We’re thrilled to see some of the people who have joined in supporting the Bill. As the social web continues to evolve, Rapleaf will play a significant role in alerting users to the presence of their information across the web – helping you better manage and control your online reputation.

Brad Fitzpatrick, Social Graphs, and Rapleaf

dscudder — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:30:28 +0000

The other day Brad Fitzpatrick (co-founder of LiveJournal) wrote an excellent piece on the evolution of social networks on the web. Brad’s main point is the issue of portability of the “social graph” and being able to transport your friend relationships across multiple social sites as you please. As Brad explains, there is no decentralized “social graph” service, and web users have to struggle to find the same friends on every new website they join. Additionally, small startups with a cool product lag behind because they spend too much time having to redevelop their own version of a social graph.

At Rapleaf, we fully agree with Brad and we are working hard to help create ‘online identities’ for web developers to benefit from. One of Brad’s future hopes is for a “reputation/trust API” that can be used, for example, to prevent comment spam on blogs. The Rapleaf API is a step in that direction – you can lookup the email address of blog commenters on Rapleaf and learn who they are. Additionally, the Rapleaf API can be used to leverage online identity across commerce sites, forums, and other web services that benefit from having a reputation/identity aspect. Over time, we also hope to unleash further aspects of our API that can provide a greater depth of benefit to web developers.

We also help users directly, not just web developers. Rapleaf helps you identify friends who you didn’t know had a profile on another social network. You can easily add them as a new friend on those networks to maintain that relationship. We’ve made this as easy as possible – all you need to know is your friend’s email address, and we’ll find them on the web. A great example is someone who you are exchanging emails with – search that person on Rapleaf and you can now find them on any matching social network where you both have profiles.

The social graph is an important part of the internet, and we’re excited that Rapleaf has a place as an online reputation and identity engine. Thanks Brad for helping define what a social web will look like.

Rapleaf » dscudder

A Bill of Rights for Social Web Users

Brad Fitzpatrick, Social Graphs, and Rapleaf