IDG News Service - Last week, Facebook announced that it had amassed 500 million users, a formidable portion of the global Internet audience. But even as Mark Zuckerberg and company celebrates, others are busy trying to uproot Facebook's popularity by establishing a set of open standards to share Facebook-like features across the Internet.
Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use, argued Evan Prodromou, head of open source microblogging software provider StatusNet, during the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), held in Portland, Oregon last week.
Open-source social, or "open social," networking services are not new. StatusNet has been running an open source implementation of its Twitter-like microblogging service for several years, called Indenti.ca. But no open-source service has gained Facebook- or Twitter-proportioned success.
Now, the developers behind such services are changing their pitch: Instead of stressing the open-source nature of their services and software, they are emphasizing how the interoperability of such offerings could free users -- and their data -- from the locks of any one social-networking service.
Prior to OSCON, a number of social-networking software developers gathered for an informal summit to discuss interoperability. They developed a simple test case to show how federation of social-networking services could share data.
In their example, a person uploads a photo of another person on some photo-sharing service, tagging the photo with the subject's name. The subject of that photo should automatically see the photo on his or her own preferred photo-sharing service. A friend of these two individuals who uses yet another service could see the photo and add a comment, and the message can then be relayed to the two other services.
"A federated social network would be a network of networks, using open protocols and a uniform name space that would allow anyone to participate," Prodromou said.
Such interoperability should be an inevitability, given the history of the Internet, Prodromou argued. Once some company-specific commercial technology gets really popular, it tends to be replaced by a set of open standards that multiple service providers use to offer generic versions of that feature.
E-mail is one example of this. "E-mail in 1992, 1993 was characterized by separation. We had large consumer services like CompuServe and Prodigy, with millions of users," Prodromou said. "It was used as a retention mechanism. You had to be on AOL [America Online] to e-mail someone on AOL." Governments and universities and single operator bulletin board systems (BBSes) also offered e-mail, though it was difficult relay messages across different systems.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Could open source tools make Facebook the next AOL? - Computerworld
Recipe for Longevity: No Smoking, Lots of Friends - TIME
A healthy social life may be as good for your long-term health as avoiding cigarettes, according to a massive research review released Tuesday by the journal PLoS Medicine.
Researchers at Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pooled data from 148 studies on health outcomes and social relationships — every research paper on the topic they could find, involving more than 300,000 men and women across the developed world — and found that those with poor social connections had on average 50% higher odds of death in the study's follow-up period (an average of 7.5 years) than people with more robust social ties. (See 10 smarter ways to reach your retirement goals.)
That boost in longevity is about as large as the mortality difference observed between smokers and nonsmokers, the study's authors say. And it's larger than differences in the risk of death associated with many other well-known lifestyle factors, including lack of exercise and obesity. "This is not just a few studies here and there," says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, lead author on the review and an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. "I'm hoping there will be recognition from the medical community, the public-health community and even the general public about the importance of this." (See TIME's special report on how to live 100 years.)
The friend effect did not appear to vary by sex or by age, with men and women of all ages and health statuses showing roughly equal benefit. Nor were lonely people unusually susceptible to any one disease in particular. (Comment on this story.)
But if it's true that we get by with a little help from our friends, then how, exactly, do our friends do it? That is, how does "social integration" — measured by surveys and questionnaires about friends, family size, marital status and the number of household residents — influence long life? The short answer is that we don't really know yet. "The truth of the matter is that the critical evidence on psychosocial processes and health have come about only within the last 10 to 15 years — even though there's been a lot of theory on it since the 1970s," says psychology professor Bert Uchino at the University of Utah. (See TIME's special report on how to not get sick.)
That may help to explain why doctors, for the most part, have yet to embrace social support as a factor in good health, on par with smoking habits, diet or exercise. Without a good sense of the physiological mechanisms that may link feelings of loneliness, for instance, to biological markers like blood pressure and resting heart rate, it has been easy to dismiss the power of social connections as nothing more than an artifact of the data or, worse, as touchy-feely pseudoscience.
To be sure, the direct physical evidence of the health benefits of social support is much more preliminary than the population-level association reported by Holt-Lunstad. But the evidence is mounting, says Uchino, who has written widely on the physiological links between social life and health outcomes. (Uchino did not contribute to the new review in PLoS Medicine, but has collaborated with Holt-Lunstad on other projects and was, once upon a time, also her grad-school adviser.)
We turn to family and friends for obvious tangible support when we're sick — from help preparing meals to keeping track of pills, appointments and insurance forms. And caring about others may also prompt us to take better care of ourselves. "A really good example, of course, is someone who has a child," Uchino says. That new bond is often the impetus to quit smoking, to drink less or to curb any number of risky pastimes.
But the influence of social ties may be even more powerful than that. Social relationships, it seems, may also help our bodies help themselves.
Recent lab studies have shown that, in a stressful situation, blood pressure and heart rate will increase less when people are accompanied by a person who is close to them. Brain imaging also shows neurological differences between a person who is alone and a person who has support: in a lab-induced tense situation, brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region activated in times of stress, is attenuated when people have a close friend or relative alongside them. And it's not just adult stress. In an experiment published this spring, children who were allowed to talk to their mothers after a stressful encounter — giving an impromptu speech or doing math problems in public — showed increased levels of oxytocin, a neurotransmitter thought to dampen the hormonal stress response, compared with children who did not have contact with their mothers.
In one of the most famous experiments on health and social life, Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University exposed hundreds of healthy volunteers to the common cold virus, then quarantined them for several days. Cohen showed that the study participants with more social connections and with more diverse social networks — that is, with friends from a variety of social contexts, such as work, sports teams and church — were less likely to develop a cold than the more socially isolated study participants.
The immune systems of people with lots of friends simply worked better, fighting off the cold virus often without symptoms. Studies suggest that the immune response may be affected by stress hormones — catecholamines and glucocorticoids — so that a strong social life thus affects immune function by helping people keep physiological stress in check.
But turning such research into full-fledged medical advice isn't easy. "It's hard to legislate social relationships," Holt-Lunstad says. "And we all know that some relationships are better than others, and not all relationships are entirely positive."
Since Holt-Lunstad's new study reviewed the statistical association between mortality risk and relationship quantity, rather than perceived quality, she wonders whether we wouldn't see even stronger benefits if we focused only on the good relationships. Bolstering these connections may ultimately help people stay healthier than trying to build connections between complete strangers, as in, say, a cancer support group. (Studies on the physical health benefits of support groups show mixed results.) "We need to pay better attention to naturally occurring relationships and to fostering those," Holt-Lunstad says.
Read "Study Says Friends Extend Lives. Do Virtual Ones, Too?"
Buy reprints of TIME's health and medicine covers.
Ballmer says Microsoft at work to rival iPad | Beyond Binary - CNET News
REDMOND, Wash.--Acknowledging Apple's early success with the iPad, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer insisted Thursday that the software maker is hard at work on Windows-based tablets.
The Apple iPad: can Microsoft match it?
(Credit: Netflix)"They'll be shipping as soon as they are ready," Ballmer said, offering few details on the products, which he said will come from partners, not Microsoft itself. "It is job one urgency. No one is sleeping at the switch."
Speaking to financial analysts, Ballmer said the goal is "not just to deliver products, but to deliver products that people want to buy."
As for Apple and the iPad, Ballmer said, "they've sold certainly more than I'd like them to have sold."
But he added that Microsoft has a lot of software knowledge and intellectual property from the decade it has spent in the tablet business. He said the task Microsoft faces is similar to the early days of the Netbook, when many of those machines were Linux-based. "We have got to make things happen," he said. "We're in the process of doing that as we speak. We're working with our hardware partners. We're tuning Windows 7."
Some designs will show up later this year, he said, adding that the devices will get a boost next year when Intel debuts its more power-efficient Oak Trail processor.
See also: How Microsoft foresaw--and still missed--the iPad
Update 2:38 p.m. PDT: In the question-and-answer session, talk again turned to tablets and Ballmer tried to be a little more clear on the plan, which he said will center around Windows 7 as opposed to Windows Phone and Intel rather than ARM processors, at least for the near term.
"We're coming," he said. "We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows."
He reiterated something he said earlier, which was that Microsoft won't allow hardware to be the limiting factor in its plans, saying that the company will design hardware where it needs to in order to have competitive products. "We will embrace what we need to embrace over time," he said.
As for timing, Ballmer said he wouldn't say if the devices would come really, really soon or pretty soon, but said, "It ain't a long time from now."
2:55: More talk on tablets in the Q and A.
"When you get your Windows 7 machine, it will print," Ballmer quipped. "Some people actually like to print every now and then."
But he said he isn't trying to minimize what Apple has done, noting they are always tough to compete against, albeit usually at the high-end of the market. As for Android in the tablet market, Ballmer said that if Microsoft can't compete against those devices: "Shame on us."
"Every day you have to prove yourself prove yourself," Ballmer said. "We'll prove ourselves."
Turner continued: "We're in it, we get it. Stay tuned."
