Smile. It’s going to be bigger than guns and bigger than cigarettes (for some company). Really.

Thanks Fred. I’d like one of the groups to offer a suite of the current features so that I don’t rely on multiple sites to get the value I current do. This is fractioning the community effect as some portion of the community resides on some sites and not on others. I’m part of a few different offline communities and I’d like to see the ability to separate communities eventually come online - whie retaining a single place to aggregate the benefits. As the features of traditional walled social networks become available what are the features that can now be available to uncentralized nodes on a network? I can think of a few but I’m not sure if they can be implemented at this point.

Thanks Fred.

I’d like one of the groups to offer a suite of the current features so that I don’t rely on multiple sites to get the value I current do. This is fractioning the community effect as some portion of the community resides on some sites and not on others.

I’m part of a few different offline communities and I’d like to see the ability to separate communities eventually come online - whie retaining a single place to aggregate the benefits.

As the features of traditional walled social networks become available what are the features that can now be available to uncentralized nodes on a network? I can think of a few but I’m not sure if they can be implemented at this point.

Now if I could just add a picture to my comment when I’m already logged in to mybloglog without having to jump through hoops, it would be great.

Candice and Fraser — we’re looking into why your picture isn’t showing up on this page. I’ll either post the reason it’s not showing up when we know more, or your avatar will show up and I won’t waste anyone’s time with another post

Hey Eric, thanks for the very quick fix. Impressive! So anyone who leaves a comment and url that has a photo linked to it in MyBlogLog has that photo show up? I didn’t know that… interesting. Doesn’t that have implications for lending credibility to spoofing, unless you know that photos are not directly linked to your MBL login?

Hi Candace, I think that if you’re already logged in the photo should automatically appear… but I see from the recent reader thing that you were just here and yet your comment has “add photo” beside it.

Strange.

Maybe the MyBlogLog guys have an idea - I’ll let them know of the issue.

Fixed!

And even though I said I wasn’t going to post a followup, I want to clarify something for Candace. You don’t need to be logged into MBL in order to have your picture show up — the reason the picture didn’t show up was because the URL from your comment didn’t exactly match the URL you entered for it at MyBlogLog (the trailing URL got us).

We want things to be easy. Transparent. Automatic. The goal is that you do the things you already do and now it just has additional value. Your picture shows up in comments. You join communities. And a lot more we’re not quite ready to talk about yet Please let us know whenever you feel like we’re making you jump through hoops because those are the places where we’re not doing our job well enough.

Awesome. Thanks y’all.

Fraser — it is a challenge, to say the least. The primary obstacle is that comments are an inherently insecure system. I can post something right now and say I’m you on most any blog on the web. And things like Typekey and OpenID, which are supposed to combat this, don’t help because they’re all opt-in. And who can blame them — if you made all your commenters log in via OpenID, you’d have a fraction of the comments. We’re certainly not ready to tackle that problem. Because it’s a huge monster, it’s going to require integration with every major blog provider, and they don’t have any real reason to make it safer for people to operate outside their walled gardens. So yes, faces can exacerbate, but don’t create, spoofing issues. Once we reach a certain size I hope we can help address some of the root causes.

its cool and I am happy to here this stuff. Very exciting tool.

Yeah opt-in is definitely not the right solution and you’re also right that faces don’t cause, only exacerbate, the spoofing problem.

If you’re able to reach a certain size without this becoming a major issue I suspect a lot of the major blog providers will be more willing to open up aspects of their systems.