Social vs Professional

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t want everyone I know to know everyone else that I know.
It’s like when you split up from someone and you suddenly lose a group of friends because they were better friends with your now ex partner.
Imagine this in the online world. It would be a nightmare. You have a spat with someone in the office and all of a sudden everyone in your social network is also affected or vice versa.

I use LinkedIn for my professional network and it works well. I use Facebook, Friendster, Thingbox and AIMPages and any number of others for social networking. Essentially whenever I get an invite I join one and when I see one I want to test or evaluate I join it and invite my friends. What I tend not to do is invite the same group of people to all of them.

There are some people with whom I get on with really well on my social networks that I would never put in my professional network the results would be far too unpredictable. Likewise there are people on my professional network I would never invite onto Facebook.

Anyway back to the point. LinkedIn is considering opening their platform to developers if you believe techcrunch and others, or likely will create an app for facebook. I’m struggling to see the market. I know in an ideal world everything would be interoperable but in the real world I think it would cause more problems than it would solve.

Now of course some software manufacturers have entered the fray. Notably IBM’s Lotus Connections which has a delicious style social bookmarking element, a blogging element – despite most companies looking at ways of reigning in the blogosphere rather than promoting it- and profiles.

Social Network Sites

So Facebook is the new MySpace which was the new Friendster which was the new Tribe etc etc.
I was chatting with Davo and he quite rightly said something Anna and I have been banging on about for years. By the time you get to grips with the new site and make your profile nice and complete with pictures and information all your mates have messed off to the new next best thing. Now I’ll admit I’m fickle and am usually one of the first to get bored and move on but it brings me back to the idea of FOAF or at least something similar. I think what’s needed is a social networking site mashup where you can pull in bits from all your other profiles.
Of course the bigger problem with social networking sites is the fact that on-line unlike off-line anyone can be your friend and can see who your other friends are. Off-line we tend to keep our social groups separate we all do it to some degree but on-line you can’t. So my work colleagues can see my drinking buddies which is not necessarily a good thing!

Google Desktop

So I’ve indexed my laptop now and was worried to see files from as far back as 17 November 1996. On closer inspection most of the really old files seem to ship with MS Office.
Now I know having worked for a large company creating software previously that sometimes legacy code remains simply because no one knows what it does.
In this case however many of the files seem to be windows meta files. Now I know most of them are only 12 to 13k (like the lovely hearts C:\Program%20Files\Microsoft%20Office\MEDIA\CAGCAT10\J0230876.WMF) but that means that firstly Microsoft have not updated the clip art in Office since 1997 and secondly all of this dodgy stuff is cluttering up my hard drive. No wonder it takes so long to install and start etc etc.

So some other random thoughts here;
Can I remove all of these files safely?
Is Google indexing the dates correctly?
Why oh why did someone create this delight? C:\Program%20Files\Microsoft%20Office\OFFICE11\BITMAPS\STYLES\STONE.BMP