I bought a Macintosh! Jesse's old G4 was cheap and capable of running GarageBand, which was otherwise slowly tempting me to buy a G5, which I can't really afford. I have nothing to say about GarageBand yet, it's still "Optimizing System Performance".
In other news, what I was describing as useless social software is apparently called "social networking software". Eric Gradman wrote an interesting paper (which doesn't use that term) on "User-Centric Distributed Social Software", which describes an architecture for making Orkut/Friendster-alike systems work a) without requiring one monster system that you tell everything about yourself (you probably end up with several) and b) allowing weirdos like me who run their own web servers to play. He does not address the issue of how you might selectively limit distribution of some of the information, or the "making sure people are who they say they are" issue. Neither of these are reasons not to implement, however. He does suggest another novel application: dynamically created playlists based on recorded trust in musical taste.
I found this via Corante Many 2 Many which also links to Leonard Lin's "Next-Generation Distributed Social Software Networks: Designs and Applications" presentation, which alludes to some interesting stuff but suffers from being a slide show.
Tibbetts suggests, in response to my address-book idea:
Doesn't seem to me like centralized infrastructure is a bad thing. Sure, its un-sexy. But its also where your customer lock-in comes from, assuming you want to benefit from the social software bubble.
I specifically don't want there to be lock-in for this sort of thing. I don't really want to benefit from the social software bubble, I just want the respect and adulation of my peers that I so richly seem to so far fail to deserve. That and an up-to-date address book.
Final note: GarageBand clearly has the potential to be an enormous time vacuum, but also will give me an opportunity to exercise bits of my brain that have been in consumer-only mode for the past decade and a half... and it says my disk is too slow for some of the demos. ☹
