found drama

Via Blogdex as usual… This one being especially for Mike… Amazonster. An interesting social-networking idea for sure. Opt in/out mentality to go along w/ this of course. How public do you want you buying habits/history and some of that peripheral data. Not that it isn’t already all in there and (to a certain extent) accessible.

The timing on this is interesting given last night’s conversation about private P2P networking. There was some wrangling about that not-so-recently w/r/t/ Waste and secure P2P’ing etc. The guy I was discussing this w/ last night pointed out that there was some limited private P2P’ing to be had using Kazaa. Specifically, he was talking about block lists and the use of Kazaa Lite to keep out malcontents and spyware (respectively). My counter to this was that I didn’t want to necessarily use AdAware (just one more app to track etc.) and it would take forever to accumulate block-lists that are going to do any good. The amount of initial investment that would take is pretty steep (time/attention-wise). Instead, I proposed private P2P scenarios in which you access to someone’s library is by invitation only. And vice versa. So this way you only wind up browsing thru known and trusted libraries. Granted, this doesn’t (on its own) solve the spyware problem (depending on the specifics of who is making this tradeware in the first place) but it may go a ways in keeping out malcontents. It’s about protecting yourself. And about knowing where you can turn and holding someone accountable (for what that is or is not worth) when Klez29b shows up gnashing teeth in your filesystem somewhere.

I bring up (only briefly) that it would also be nice to trade and chat using some level of encryption. But I’m like that when it comes to privacy. *ahem* Well then…

Granted, semi-private networks like this would (in a way) totally defeat the P2P purpose of making the world your oyster. Closing off the trade circle may tighten it up w/r/t/ matters of trust (vis a vis virii, malicious code, improperly tagged files, etc.) but you’re cutting yourself off at the same time. You decrease the likelihood of being able to get something a little more esoteric. A flip side to this would be that (if set up properly) you can browse through friends’ libraries and find stuff that way and get exposed to it. (Had some neat finds using this method when SoulSeek was working for me…) But when it’s not available from the (say…) 20 ppl on your sharing list, you wind up screwed. Not that there still aren’t plenty of instances where a balls-out free-for-all P2P mayhem session still winds up being totally fruitless. Sometimes what you want just isn’t out there.

So is this “trusted”, semi-private P2P network really a better idea? Depends on your goals, I guess. Sounds good to me.

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