The Corporation's Two Bodies

The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost theological in nature. It is most certainly theological in, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "the promised land where every coin is marked In God We Trust, but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. ("Autobiography," A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958, New Directions)

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Building Better Silos

It's been good to watch the use of OpenID spread. It's great to see that ma.gnolia.com has dropped "traditional login" in favor of OpenID. And I was encouraged to read about Yahoo's support of OpenID. Granted, it took me a while to get around to trying it.
But when I got around to trying it, Yahoo!ID was a disappointment. The promise of OpenID is to return ownership of ID to the users, and to eliminate identity silos, in which the big sites compete to own your identity and your data. If that's the goal, Yahoo!ID may not be a step backwards, but it's certainly not much of a step forwards.

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Domain-Specific Social Applications

I haven't heard a whole lot about domain-specific social applications; most of the ones we're familiar with attempt to serve a very broad audience. Most of the talk at SG FOO was about the world's Facebooks, Flickrs, and LInkedIns--who of course were very well represented. All of these sites attempt to be something (in some cases, everything) to everybody.

But there's another way to slice the pie. Last summer, my brother was in the hospital for an extended period. He and his wife created a CarePages account. CarePages isn't all that unlike Facebook: it has a blog, a photo gallery, a message board, and "virtual gifts." You can receive notifications via email (they don't seem to support SMS). CarePages appears to be supported partly by advertising, though I would guess that the bulk of their funding comes by contract to the hospitals offering the service (in my brother's case, Johns Hopkins).

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Social Privacy

At Social Graph FOO, privacy was the proverbial elephant in the room. Its presence is widely acknowledged, and the OAuth and OpenID guys are doing what they can to make people aware of the problems that arise when people aren't allowed to manage their personal data effectively.

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