About Drupal for Facebook:
(from the Drupal project page)

This set of modules and themes turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications.

With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in your Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.

The Drupal for Facebook philosophy is that the functionality already built into Drupal should be used to create Facebook Applications. Where possible, we use Drupal’s user management, permission schemes, blocks, views, etc. to implement the Facebook App. Experienced Drupal users will find it very straightforward to build a Facebook App. While Facebook developers new to Drupal may want to spend some time on Drupal.org learning best practices.

Hiitch is a desktop social networking platform. It’s open source. You can actually download the source and create you own private social network with others you invite.

I’m still new to Hiitch so I’m still exploring its functionality, but it looks very exciting. I will definitely post updates as I get more accustomed with Hiitch’s social networking functions and others features.

What is ShiftSpace?

This is one of the most interesting applications of social network that I’ve seen in a while. Instead of operating on a completely separate domain, like MySpace, ShiftSpace allows the entire internet to be included in the landscape that forms the ShiftSpace network. This means that ShiftSpace users can interact in real ways with existing viewpoints, discussions, and events that are actually occurring throughout the world. This makes ShiftSpace more relevant than any closed system could be.

My last post discussed how MSPlinks.com redirects make MySpace. com more dangerous for users. Since then, I’ve stumbled upon a brilliant MySpace GreaseMonkey script by Jason at smert.net that reveals the true destination of MySpace outgoing links that have been dangerously hidden by these MSPlinks.com redirects.

MySpace is irresponsible to impose these MSPlinks.com redirects. It is yet another example of how MySpace treats its millions of loyal, dedicated users as enemies. However in this case, MySpace’s profit squeezing is actually jeopardizing their users’ safety as well.

Update: MySpace scores Coke money by blindfolding users

MySpace has openly displayed a blatant lack of concern for user safety by installing those msplinks.com redirects . In case you need a quick refresher, MySpace has installed software that forces every outbound link (links to other sites) on any MySpace.com pages to filter through the domain msplinks.com. Each link is then redirected to the original destination.

One very dangerous effect of these redirects is evident.
The msplinks.com redirects unquestionably make MySpace users even more susceptible to fraud, phishing, viruses, and other shady dealings.

Wordpress, like most other major blogging platforms, automatic add ‘no follow’ tags to the urls left in any visitor comments or trackbacks. This was initially done in an effort to combat blog comment spam. But there are now a growing number of people who believe ‘no follow’ tags create more blog spam - not less!

Why would I (or anybody) remove the ‘no follow’ tags from all visitor comments & trackbacks on their blog?

Community Fairness, Equity, &amp Available Technology

Community fairness, equity? People who legitimately comment on this blog (and all blogs) aren’t spammers. They are contributing to an ongoing, distributed conversation - their comments provide value to the sites they post on.

Some of you may already know that Open Academic first released DrupalED on April 20th. But yesterday they released an improved version (available for download through that link).

You can visit check out a live DrupalED installation to see how it’s set up. It’s podcasts, wikis, groups, FOAF functionality, bookmarks…. plus any other functionality available through the hundreds of contributed Drupal modules.

I’m very excited about this. If anyone has a DrupalED site setup that they want to showcase, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Mark Glaser wrote an interesting post that discussed whether social networking sites such as Facebook need to spend money on marketing & advertising. In the post, he states that the growth of social networking sites is ‘friend-driven’. From his post:

And the social networking sites are truly friend-driven and friend-powered. They don’t need to spend money on marketing, because they have the power of friends who cajole other friends to join in, who then tell 10 friends, who tell 10 friends, and so on.

I certainly agree that people enable the value of social networking sites to be fully realized. Social networking doesn’t work without the critical mass of social people.