Michael Gracie

And figuring out if they’re really your friends too…

There’s a new set of standards being developed which aims to make it easier to discover existing friends on new social networks you join - the initiative is called The OpenFriend Project. It’s building on the chit chat from a few weeks back, and is being spearheaded by Anthony Romano of Tabber. This is a much needed idea-in-action, and implementation is going to create a lot of flexibility for users, particularly if the social network phenomena moves towards membership in multiple independent subject matter specific networks (as in groups, just not within some larger network). As distributed identity platforms such as OpenID take hold, I suspect that is exactly what is going to happen. (h/t to Pete Cashmore, who’s keeping his promise to keep up with this stuff for the rest of us!)

While having tons of portable friends is great, psychologists always say “know yourself” before you dive into relationships. For that, you have ProfileBuilder, which exists to help you create and manage a consistent profile. (Techcrunch gets the credit for this tidbit). Services like these are also needed, and for much the same reason as the above. However, there’s also going to be a need for people to maintain multiple profiles that can be “dragged and dropped” into newly joined networks - thankfully, ProfileBuilder has already thought of that. Note: TechCrunch highlighted that this space has several players, and I suspect it is going to get quite crowded as identity management and sharing standards proliferate.

To round up the week, Mashable also pointed us to a strangely needed Facebook app called “Profile Web Address.” Three points (sadly)…

There is cold beer, dog watching for the neighbors, and taking a few out-of-towners fishing in my immediate future. On the latter, I’ve provided a guarantee, although what exactly that guarantee entails will remain the subject of some internal debate. Wish me luck, and have a great weekend.

UPDATE: Sean Aune follows up with 25+ Ways to Manage Your Online Identity.

Ugly - With financial services representing roughly a third of online ad spending, what happens to the Web 2.0 trend (so dependent on advertising revenue) if said cash flow disappears? It’s probably not going to be pretty.

Uglier - Investment banks are soon going to be pouncing on each other, trying to convince the markets as to which of them is the best shorting opportunity. I wonder if their in-house hedge funds will get in on the game.

Ugliest - Freddie Mac finally has its accounting errors behind it, but now it’s facing the reality of reserves for losses. Back up…maybe they still don’t have their act in gear - a $320 million reserve on roughly 3/4 of a trillion in loans is a drop in the bucket. Still, what a way to “limit your growth.”

Following up on my Skype on the Blackberry experiment…

I wound up using the IM+ for Skype program very little, primarily because I start getting SMS messages instead of Skyped the moment I leave my desk. The program worked fine the few times I did use it, but it still gets a big F-. Why? Because it is virtually impossible to get the program off the device. I tried deleting it via the app manager - it doesn’t show up. I tried deleting it from the device - it’s not listed under applications. I tried deleting it module by module, but the associated modules don’t have a menu item available for deletion.

Then I trolled the forums, and it seems everyone has this problem. And nobody has a credible solution.

Bad, bad, bad.

The title is a complex way of saying: give me the power to transfer data between sites I use, with the help of OpenID. There are other initiatives being worked on along the same lines, including OAuth.

OpenID, TAS, OAuth…FOAF, SNAP, etc. etc. Fun times.

PS: As data portability goes, the Social Network Portability Google Group may also be of interest to some.

The person who snapped this photo was more impressed than I was.

After the release, I was coined a “trout guru.” I could only laugh. While catching a healthy brown on the second cast of the first hole you step into isn’t a bad way to start the day, you won’t be the bodhisattva of trout fishing until you actually become the fish. As it turns out, we all caught dinks for the remainder of daylight, and night-time streamer stripping turned bust when everyone forgot their headlamps.

Later, I was asked to “guarantee” some bigger fish on the next outing. Ha. All you can guarantee in fly fishing is that sooner or later you’ll leave a rod in a door jam. Nevertheless, I retorted…

“You mean one of these?”