Disruptive Conversations

Three vignettes to set the stage for the entry. First, Chris Brogan realizes that Facebook is a walled garden through his Twitter stream:

Facebook messages doesn't have FORWARD??? WTF??? You can't be an email product and not have the BASICS. 09:59 AM July 16, 2007
So, when you're *IN* facebook, using the messaging feature is cool. @Spin and I are having a video conversation and it's so cool! 10:09 AM July 16, 2007
but I just realized, I can't DO anything with the last video, that made me laugh and roar. I wanted to remix it. No download. No embed code. 10:10 AM July 16, 2007
Dan York wrote the article I was going to write tomorrow. Just read his: http://tinyurl.com/27jxxw 01:14 PM July 16, 2007
Sick of Facebook not letting out data. Mr. Zuckerberg : TEAR DOWN YOUR WALLS! 12:59 PM July 17, 2007

Second, a friend  and I are having an IM chat:

<name> says: I looked at your blog and noticed also the facebook entries
<name> says: Do you think that it is a cool stuff?
<name> says: I wasn' t quite sure.
<name> says: Whenever I looked at it I just didn't see anything where I could have said "That's really cool".
Dan York says: Facebook is... well... "interesting".
Dan York says: What intrigues me the most is that there is now a whole class of (typically younger) people who are basically experiencing "the Internet" through the lens of Facebook.
<name> says: That does not make sense to me.
Dan York says: Basically, they don't use "the web", per se, but instead use Facebook and have components of the web brought into them that way.
Dan York says: They are always logged into Facebook.
<name> says: Really?
Dan York says: Instead of email, they use Facebook messages.
<name> says: Why would someone want todo that?
<name> says: That's quite restrictive.

Third, Jeff Pulver makes the declaration in multiple blog entries, such as this one:

Facebook IS the internet portal of 2007. And it is where you will find me.

Let's face it... at the end of the day, Facebook is a "portal play".  If you want to use Facebook as your "lens through which to see the Internet", it has amazing capabilities and possibilities.  There are an incredible number of applications now being developed.  Facebook now reports having over 30 million active users.  They say their search engine is now among the top 20 on the web.

You would be completely and utterly stupid to not think about a "Facebook strategy".  With its growth curve and the sheer amount of content flowing into it, I think you ignore it at your own peril. 

To be honest, I like Facebook. I have an account there which, at this point, I am in pretty much daily.  I've been using "groups" there to see about building stronger communities.  There is now a "network" of employees at my company.  The "Facebook Platform" is quite intriguing and it's fascinating to see the apps that people are developing.

But...

The challenge remains that the walls around Facebook are actually open a bit - but only in one direction - inbound!  Through the "Platform", you can bring into Facebook all sorts of content.  On my Facebook profile page, you can find such things as:

• Updates I've made through Twitter
• Blog entries that have been automatically pulled in from an RSS feed
• My Skype status
• My latest del.icio.us links
• My latest Pownce post
• The status of my SIP phone connected to VoIPUser.org

And much, much, MUCH more... basically at this point I can pull pretty much anything in and display it on my Facebook profile page - and also have it in my "Newsfeed" that I can see and monitor on my home page.

Ah, but wait, if you aren't a Facebook user, you couldn't see it, could you?  No, you have to login first in order to see any of that content.  Only once inside the Facebook walls can you see it all.  Naturally you could go to any of those services individually and see the information from a standard web browser, but if you want it all aggregated and displayed along with other content, you have to login and become part of the portal.

On one level, I definitely appreciate what Facebook is doing.  They are succeeding as a portal where things like Yahoo!'s personalized pages or Google's iGoogle or <pick your portal play> have not... in part because of the API that let's so many users in, in part because of the "social networking" elements of the site, in part because of the "News Feed" that let's you see what your friends are doing and contributes to the viral flow of information.  There's a really nice aggregation of various social services going on.

But what if I want to make content inside of Facebook visible outside?  As Chris said:

but I just realized, I can't DO anything with the last video, that made me laugh and roar. I wanted to remix it. No download. No embed code.

It can't be shared with anyone who isn't inside of Facebook.  It can't be posted to YouTube or made available as a blog entry.  Outside of widgets to show your status and the one single RSS feed that seems to be available for your friends' status messages, everything else is inside of Facebook.  If someone sends you a great message, you can't forward that outside of Facebook.  You can't share content you create with those on the outside.

It's there... inside Facebook.  In fact, if you take a look at Facebook's Terms of Service, basically anything you create inside of Facebook really belongs to them (down under "User Content Posted on the Site", second paragraph):

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Note especially the part in bold.  All your content belongs to us. Irrevocably. Perpetually.  "To use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute... to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works..."  Even after leave, they will have an archive of your content.  Forever.

Translation:  All your content belongs to us.

Now consider this... through the various applications, I'm bringing into Facebook my entries from this blog, my Twitter posts (tweets), my del.icio.us bookmarks.  Potentially videos and pictures.

It would certainly appear from the ToS that I'm giving Facebook a license to do whatever it wants with all of that content.  Forever.

Interesting.

If you are a Facebook user, are you aware that you are giving Facebook that right to all of whatever content you bring in?  (Do you care?  Perhaps not.)

And do you care that in order to really use Facebook to its fullest, everyone with which you communicate really needs to be a Facebook user?

Don't get me wrong.  I have no intention of not using Facebook.  With its incredible growth in terms of users and apps, I do believe you ignore it at your peril.  It may very well be "THE Internet portal of 2007".

But let's realize that that is what it is... a portal... a "lens" through which you can see Internet content and collaborate with friends.  Granted, it's a portal with a really nice platform for bringing in content from the rest of the Internet into its own private garden. But the walls around the garden are quite high... and no one can really play inside that garden unless, they, too, come inside the walls.  (And bring their content with them...)

UPDATE: There is some synchronicity happening on the web today... shortly after posting this article, I noticed two other posts today related to the same theme:

• Chris Brogan, If I Owned Facebook
• Jeremiah Owyang, All your widgets are belong to Facebook

Have you ever been in an IM or email conversation and wanted to quickly show someone a screenshot or screencast/video of something on your screen?  But didn't want to go through the hassle of saving a file and then uploading it or attaching it?  Or you wanted to add something to your Twitter feed but didn't want to put the image somewhere first?

Well, yesterday the folks over at TechSmith (makers of SnagIT and Camtasia Studio) released an "experiment" to do just that in the form of a project called Jing at the URL www.jingproject.com.  As they talk about on the Jing blog, and also on the TechSmith Visual Lounge blog, this is truly an experiment in how to enhance communication:

The Jing Project is our journey to discover how we can improve everyday conversation. Think of all those IM chats, emails, blog posts and comments you’ve made over the years. Now imagine a more visual world where integrating screen captures and screencasts into those took nothing more than a matter of seconds. Can you imagine it? I can - I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it - it’s Jing.

Our goal is to explore this with all of you and together see how we can bridge the visual world and our daily conversations into a richer, more effective way to communicate.

I have to say I'd admire any company that experiments publicly (although one could argue that pretty much all of "Web 2.0" is one big "beta") and they have been very up front about the fact that Jing is really a "proof-of-concept" more than a "product"... they aren't sure what this will turn into, what the business model will be, etc.  They are more just throwing it out there to watch what people do with it.

So what is "Jing"?  Well, essentially it is a screen capture program that sits on your Windows or Mac and, when triggered, captures an image or records a video/screencast - and then uploads the image/video to screencast.com and... this is the key... gives you a URL on your clipboard that you can paste into an IM chat, email, Twitter post, whatever.  So the Jing logo I have above is now also available as a screenshot at:

http://www.screencast.com/t/PrPAEoQdZ

It's pretty cool in that you can just make a quick screen capture or a quick video/screencast.  For instance, here's an incredibly riveting video of me updating my status on Facebook:

http://www.screencast.com/t/Fk_6Th17s

Now, not terribly exciting in a blog, where I can just embed a video, but could be quite useful in an IM chat, Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce post or an email. For instance, just this morning I used it to email my corporate help desk and included a pointer to a screen capture of my Task Manager while trying to diagnose some performance problems. (And being security paranoid as I am, I didn't have an issue putting the screen cap on an external server because it didn't really show anything about my machine other than the fact that I'm pushing my laptop way beyond what I should! ;-)

  Since it's hosted on screencast.com, you can actually login there and then find other ways to share the screencast or screen capture.  For instance, I can do the much more blog-appropriate thing and embed the screencast right here:

So in my limited experimentation, I can definitely see the use for it.  The one "catch" that some of the others playing with the released version have latched onto is that right now it is tied to screencast.com, which actually is a commercial hosting service that you have to pay $70/year to have an account there.  Right now, and according to TechSmith "for the life of the Jing project", however long that may be, you don't have to pay to use it.  This is again an experiment and TechSmith seems to be figuring out how or if they can turn this into a business.  At the moment, Jing and the associated hosting on screencast.com is free.

Now the program does show its pre-release rough edges a bit when you first download and install it.  For one thing, because it uses Windows Presentation Framework on a PC you have to download Microsoft .Net 3.0 which took a while and was a separate install process.  The other major issue I had was that once you do the install... it seems like nothing happens.  If you are an astute observer (or have been clued in by someone) you will notice that you now have a new icon in your systray -   If you click on that icon and choose "Preferences" you get the big yellowish-orangish ball that you see in the image on the right.  Yes, that's the preferences screen. (The TechSmith folks are perhaps going a bit overboard on the "experiment" angle, although it is at least interesting to see someone thinking about a different UI for dialog boxes.)  The middle button gets you into the preferences where you can create a screencast.com account and set up a hot key to trigger the Jing capture.  (And yes, I submitted feedback with my concerns about some of the UI roughness.)  When you are done, you press the checkmark icon and you're set to go.

After that, it's just a matter of triggering Jing to take a capture.  You do that either through the hot key you assigned or through the strange little ball (half-circle, really) that appears at the top middle of your screen above all other windows in the title bar area:

When you go up to that ball with your mouse, it expands and you can initiate the capture. (Funny, but I can't seem to find a way to capture a video of it because the ball disappears as soon as you start the capture.)  Personally, I'm a keyboard guy, so configuring it to be Ctrl+Shift+S worked fine for me.

I guess my only major knock is  that even just sitting there idle waiting to be triggered Jing seems to consume about 15-20% of my CPU (per Task Manager). The TechSmith folks seem to think this is related to .Net 3.0 but it is a bit annoying (see previous mention of performance problems on laptop).

All in all, I think it's an interesting "experiment" and it's great that TechSmith has made it available for people to play with.  It's definitely still got some rough edges, but I know that the TechSmith folks are currently drowning in feedback right now so I'd expect they'll be making some changes.   I don't know how much I'll honestly use it, in part because I'm a bit reluctant to put content on a service where I'm not sure how long the service will be available... but I will continue to experiment with it when I have the need to add visuals into IM or other communication.

Could you see yourself using something like this which makes it easy to include images or video?  What do you think about it?

 UPDATE: There is a good amount of conversation going on right now about Jing. Some posts you may find interesting:

• Tris Hussey - Jing could make sending a screenshot or screencast painless
• Lifehacker - Take and share screenshots and screencasts with Jing Project
• Lockergnome - Jing! Timing is everything

Does your employer have the right to request access to your Facebook profile or LinkedIn contacts list if you leave the company?  That's essentially the question asked in yesterday's Register article: "Your boss could own your Facebook profile." The article is primarily about a legal case where someone (Junior Isles) was leaving a publisher (PennWell) to go set up a rival firm and was insistent on taking his contact list with him.  He had brought some of that list with him to PennWell, but had then added to that list while there. The key paragraphs to me are:

The Court ruled that the list belonged to PennWell. It said that if he had maintained a separate list of contacts for personal purposes and added selectively to it, he could have kept that. It also said that he could have taken his personal contacts and any that he brought to the firm in the first place with him.

Because Isles had tried to take the whole list, PennWell was allowed to keep the database of contacts and was also granted an injunction preventing Isles from using the database. The company did allow Isles to keep and use the contacts he had brought to the firm, though.

The ruling confirmed the right of an employer to treat as its own property the creations of its employees if they were made in the course of business. That includes digital creations, even if some of that creation is for personal purposes.

There is no direct connection here to Facebook, but the article makes the connection to social networking services and quotes IP lawyer Catrin Turner of Pinsent Masons:

"If [the employer] can argue that you have created something and it's in the course of your employment, it's irrelevant where it's stored because the law doesn't look at where it's stored, the law looks at the circumstances in which it was created," she said. "If you create a contact list or any sort of document during working hours using your work PC that relates in some way to your job or is of value to your employer they would have a very strong argument that that belongs to them."

And then later this:

"The basic law is that if you create copyright material, something you write or type into a computer, you take photographs, you do cartoons, you potentially create film, if that is created in the course of your employment then the assumption is that that belongs to your employer, so that doesn't have to be written down by your employer," she said.

All in all it's an interesting question that will no doubt be sorted out in legal cases over the next few years.  Once upon a time (and still, in many/most cases), we built contact lists for our employer inside the firewall... in CRM systems, databases, spreadsheets, etc.  While we still do that, we also build those contact lists externally through Facebook, LinkedIn and the many other social networking sites - as well as our IM contact lists.  Where does the dividing line exist between what is your employer's intellectual property and what is yours?  (Especially given that most corporate folks are probably accessing all those sites and services using their corporate PC or laptop!)

It shall be an interesting time to see how this all gets sorted out as the line between work and personal time/space gets increasingly blurred or even erased.  There's probably going to be a whole lot of job security in being a lawyer dealing with such matters...

(Tip of the hat to Denise Howell's Lawgarithms ZDNet blog, where I saw this link.)

Is anyone else bothered by "ginormous" being added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary?  Last week, the pedantic linguist (or is it "linguistic pedant"?) in me cringed when I heard the news that "ginormous" was among the 100 new words added to the M-W collegiate dictionary.

I mean... are they serious?

Obviously they are and had this to say:

“There will be linguistic conservatives who will turn their nose up at a word like `ginormous,”' said John Morse, Merriam-Webster's president. “But it's become a part of our language. It's used by professional writers in mainstream publications. It clearly has staying power.”

Okay, perhaps I'm a "linguistic conservative" but I think my major issue is that "ginormous" just sounds stupid!  The article goes on:

Visitors to the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's Web site picked “ginormous” as their favorite word that's not in the dictionary in 2005, and Merriam-Webster editors have spotted it in countless newspaper and magazine articles since 2000. 

That's essentially the criteria for making it into the collegiate dictionary — if a word shows up often enough in mainstream writing, the editors consider defining it.

Intellectually, I understand.  Languages are living things that evolve over time.  A good dictionary will attempt to keep pace with the times.  So I understand it at that level, but still....  ginormous?

But as editor Jim Lowe puts it: “Nobody has to use `ginormous' if they don't want to.”

Yes, you can count me as one of those, too.  I have an extremely hard time ever imagining a circumstance in which "ginormous" would leave my lips or be something I wrote.

How about you?

Today I went into one of my "Networks" in Facebook and was interested to see all the members (it was for my employer, and there are now 71 members in the network) and found yet more ways that Facebook needs to "grow up" outside of the college/university crowd.

First annoyance was that it just shows me some number of random network members.  If I click "Show More", I get some another batch of random members (seems to vary between 3 and 10 random members it shows).  However, if I change the "Sort Method" to "Alphabetical" I will then be able to browse through pages of, apparently, all the members.  I would really like the Alphabetical sort to be the default (realizing that some networks will be too big).

But the second annoyance was the sort options.  If you click on the image on the right you will get a larger version and see what I mean.

Here are the options for how to sort:

• Sex (M/F)
• Age
• Relationship Status (and this is the one open by default)
• Interested In (answers being "Men" or "Women")
• Looking For (essentially what type of relationship you want)
• Political Views
• Other Criteria (where the options are "Concentration", "College Year", "Religious Views")

Now, keep in mind that this is for a work network!  Why do I really care about any of this for my co-workers?  Outside of Sex which may help me sort through it better?  I guess if I want to have a workplace relationship, but, well, sorry... I'm happily married and have no interest in any of that.

How about things instead like?

• Currently employed with company (the network seems to have some former employees in it)
• Job title/category
• Interest
• Skills  (things like programming languages, specialties)
• Languages (of the speaking variety... say I want to find someone who can speak Italian)

I could go on... but you get the idea.  Those are the type of things I want to search for in the "work" context versus the "personal" context.  For Facebook to really gain traction within businesses, I think it will need to "grow up" a bit beyond the college/dating scene and add these type of search/sort capabilities.

What do you think?  Is the current kind of sorting useful to you in a work context?  Or do you want something more like what I outlined here?

Yesterday over on GigaOm, Wagner James Au (blogger at New World Notes  and former Linden Labs employee) took Forbes to task for their "spectacularly incorrect" article about Second Life in a post "Debunking 5 Business Myths about Second Life" which I would recommend checking out.   Between that and his post on his own blog he points to many issues in the article.  I liked the ending of his own article:

So do these copious errors mean Second Life is a marketers’ paradise? For mass eyeballs, definitely not—several virtual worlds which allow outside advertising are much larger.  As a boutique effort to a demographically attractive audience?  Maybe, depending on expectations and investment. No one knows for sure.  It’s why I’m still hoping a top-flight business magazine like Forbes does the research to generate some meaty answers.

As well as that of his GigaOm article:

Again, none of this is to say Second Life is the most ideal virtual world platform for business, certainly not for all purposes. For one thing, it’s not anywhere near the largest online world to allow outside marketing (the kid-oriented Habbo Hotel and Gaia Online, to name just two, are larger.) And Time Magazine’s recent diss of SL, for example, is mostly fair (if arguably short-sighted.) Ultimately, my real bias is against careless reporting from respected publications which consider Second Life worthy of coverage– but somehow, don’t feel obliged to apply traditional standards of accuracy, when doing so.

I think we're all still trying to figure out where Second Life and other virtual worlds fit into our ever evolving choice of communication media.  But in order to do that, we do need to have solid data and accurate reporting.  Reading the Forbes article, it definitely does seem rather skewed toward the negative side of things.

Want to have a hamburger with local Vermont bloggers and politicians?  If so, head on over to North Beach in Burlington on Sunday (July 15) from 1-5pm for the Second Annual Political BBQ and Hamburger Summit.  The "Frequently Ass-Backward Questions" are at the very least entertaining.  This one, particularly:

Q: I’m a current office-holder, and worried about attending a gathering featuring beer and loose political chatter. Can you give me some assurance that my casual remarks won’t be edited out of context, uploaded to YouTube, diffused across 10 or 15 mega-blogs, and then viewed by 60,000 or 100,000 people as far away as Japan and American Samoa?

A: No.

Welcome to the transparent world, eh?

One of the aspects of "social media" that I enjoy so much is the "social" aspect and the way that this can translate into local events such as this.  I intend to write more on that soon, but today I'll just say that it's cool to me that Vermont Daily Briefing and Green Mountain Daily are putting on this event again.

Last year, I enjoyed reading the first event - "POLITICAL BARBEQUE ERUPTS ON NORTH BEACH; Officials Unable to Count the Injured and Disoriented; Welch Communications Director Hospitalized for “Percussive Gastric Event”; Odum Also Lost; Oh, The Humanity, the Humanity!" (and no one was actually hospitalized, it was an attempt at humor).  Now, it was an election year with the vote coming up in a few months, so naturally there was high attendance from local political campaigns.  We'll see this year in an off-year.  I would assume we'll probably see some presidential campaign crews there (although, with the completely screwed up 2008 primaries, they'll probably mostly be trying to get us to drive down to N.H. to help campaigns there).

This year I'll definitely be attending, since: a) I know about it (I didn't last year); b) it's a 5-minute bike ride from my house; and c) would I turn down a chance to chat with other bloggers?  not likely!

So if you are in the Burlington, Vermont, area this Sunday and want to join in the fun with other VT bloggers and non-bloggers, come on down to North Beach on Sunday from 1-5pm.  Note that you do not have to be a political blogger!

Q: Isn’t this BBQ really just for politicians and political bloggers?

A: No. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, a good cross-section of the crowd will be made up of office-holders and office seekers. And yes, political bloggers will be out in force, as will their readers, especially hard-core readers of Vermont Daily Briefing, Green Mountain Daily, What’s The Point?, and Rip and Read.

But the greater point of the gathering is to bring together any and all politically minded individuals. People from all parties, and all demographics. And friends of those people, and the children of the friends of those people.

In short, no one in America is excluded from the guest list. It’s a wicked big tent.

Fun stuff... :-)

What does "Netiquette" look like in today's world of social media and social networking?  In his recent post, "Considering Social Network Etiquette", Chris Brogan starts a conversation about what are the rules of etiquette guidelines in these new services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  It's a great conversation to have because the reality is that "etiquette" is a constantly evolving set of conventions... and those conventions naturally morph and evolve over time.

Those of us who have been around the Net for a while will certainly remember the Usenet Netiquette guidelines (look at the column of links on the right side) - more or less summarized in the Wikipedia "Netiquette" entry.  Some may even recall that this was written down back in 1995 in an IETF informational RFC as "RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines".  While those documents are a bit dated in their technologies (not many folks use "talk" anymore and Usenet is no longer where the conversation is), many of the points are still sound, but yet there are new nuances to the newer services.

What is best way to politely decline a friend request from someone you don't know?  Given that Facebook now shows all your friends when you leave a group or remove an application, what's the most polite way to leave a group or remove an app that a real friend created?  Should you somehow acknowledge every blog comment?  How do you politely decline to forward a LinkedIn request?  or politely decline a request to endorse someone in LinkedIn?  What's the best way to deal with inappropriate "wall" posts in Facebook?  (And let's not even get into MySpace...)  When is it appropriate to copy/paste someone's email into a blog entry?

The reality is that we're all making this up as we go along... and in our daily actions and reactions we are creating the "cultural conventions" that over time come to be known as etiquette.   They will vary somewhat across cultures - and that's the challenge because while we are part of our own culture, we are participating in a global culture, and that can be a challenge.

"Etiquette" also changes over time.  Cultural conventions evolve.

The conversation is one we all need to participate in as we all actors in this particular evolution.  Reply to Chris' post.  Or this one.  Write your own post - or book - or e-book.  Start a mailing list.  Or a web page.  Many newcomers are looking for the guidance in how to navigate the new frontier... let's help.

My colleague Down Under, Lee Hopkins, has not been as pleased with Windows Live Writer as I have been.  Strange, really, because I've not had quite the same issues as he has with graphics.  For instance, the one to the right is in at the original size, i.e. "as is" and looks to me quite like the original.  Now I did not do anything to it like give it a drop shadow or a box around it, which would have resized the graphic and changed it a bit. 

Lee, I'll suggest that you click on the graphic and then on the Image tab under "Borders" set it to "None".  That combined with ensuring that the image size is set to "Original" on the Advanced tab should give you "as is" size you are seeking.  At least, it does for me.

As to posting in the future, I'll try that out with this post.  I would wonder if it is a function of the blogging platform you are using.  Lee is hosting his own Wordpress - I am using hosted TypePad.  We'll see.  I'll set this with a date and time of today at 6:46pm, about 1.5 hours from now.  Let's see if it uses TypePad's queueing to hold the post or if it posts immediately.  (Hmmm... I wonder what Timezone TypePad operates on.)

Here goes the experiment...

UPDATE: Nope, it didn't work. Lee's right in that forward-dating a blog post does not appear to work in the current Windows Live Writer Build.

I'll note that I, too, used to have this capability in Semagic, but Semagic queued it locally and then posted it to the blogging service (assuming Semagic was running at the time the item was to be posted - otherwise it posted it when it was next started).

What are you doing on September 8th and 9th, 2007?  If  you are in the San Francisco Bay area (or can get there), and more precisely Richmond, California (a bit north of Oakland and Berkeley), it appears that there will now be an "unconference" called "SocialNetworkDevCamp" with the purpose:

SocialNetworkDevCamp will focus on API and Widget development from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Linked In and others. The camp will also start the process of identifying open APIs and data structures which would facilitate the creation of open standards for social networking.

Very cool to see.... and hopefully it will stimulate a good bit of discussion and action around the potential mashups that can occur between all these various services.  "Open standards for social networking" would also be very good to see!

If are interested in attending, just edit the wiki page and add yourself to the list of participants (or volunteers).

(Tip of the hat to Julian Bond for raising this issue in a Skype groupchat focused on mashups.)