A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

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For a long time, Plaxo was to me just an address book on the web. So, I was really surprised when I decided to check out Plaxo’s Pulse. Plaxo Pulse could be summed up as hybrid of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but this comparison isn’t fair as Pulse seems to have taken the best features of each and quite successfully in a technical sense but as we’ll see later, hasn’t gathered the momentum these three have.

About a year ago I was planning to rewrite my site so that it would show my activity on different sites like Flickr, Twitter et al. by using their feeds. I’ve previosuly written on how in 2006 I thought feeds were the real meat of the web. Anyway, fortunately, I never spent any time on my site as Plaxo Pulse does all this for me and throws in a social network there too.

Many similar services where you can hook up your web 2.0 activity have popped up recently, but many of them are just a bit glorified RSS-aggregators. Here I have to say that I’ve not tried out FriendFeed, but what I gather it seems to be a close competitor to Plaxo’s Pulse. Anyway, Pulse is probably best summed up by my friend who originally invited me to join: “[It’s a] new social network, and it is more open and for more grown-up people than Facebook”.

There are some really good stuff in Pulse. Where Twitter’s nice feature is that connections aren’t necessarly mutual (and thank God for that), Pulse realizes that there are different levels of connections. You must choose if your contact is Family, Friend (here Pulse means real friends and “not social network ‘friends’”) or Business. In Pulse’s terminology each of these are mutually exclusive, but if you understand each as a level more closer or farther from you, it isn’t much of a problem. The function of this classification is that you can define which of your feeds are visible to whom. This also allows you to have different visible profiles for your friends (aka. “facebook” profile) and business (aka. “linkedin” profile), which is neat. You also get a neat public profile with a nice URL (f.e. kari.myplaxo.com), which shows exactly how much you want it show. Pulse’s public profile is the most likely last stab at pre-social network concept of “home page”, which MySpace was first to make irrelevant and Facebook gave the coup de grâce.

The problem with Plaxo Pulse is that initially it might seem there’s little reason to join it if you’re already using Linkedin, Twitter and/or Facebook as there’s not anything radically new. Ironically, its main audience is exactly the people using at least two out of the thre. Where Pulse shines, though, is execution. Some of the navigation is confusing at time, but otherwise the design of the site and workflows are quite natural and nicely done.

The other problem is that you and, more importantly, your friends need to be web 2.0 “active” for the site to function properly. Where Facebook seems to notify you whenever any of your “friends” as so much as log in, Pulse only publishes feeds your contacts have added and defined for you (as a friend or business contact) to see.

Unfortunately, all these features aren’t enough. As I wrote some time ago, I really liked Jaiku technically better than Twitter but it never gained any significant momentum. I’m afraid this is the fate of Pulse as well. It is a shame really, because the people behind Pulse have really embraced all the new and hot web 2.0 technologies (OpenSocial, OpenID, FOAF, …) making it a showcase what a more semantic web could offer.

I guess this is the dilemma when a social network tries to plays nice and not lock you in its own services. Pulse, for example, doesn’t force you to use its own status update service if you happen to use Twitter already, but is ready to use your Twitter status as Pulse status, making its status update just a front-end for your twittering. It’s really nice that a social network is willing not to reinvent a more successful wheel, but unfortunately it might not pay off in any business sense.

Unlike some other glorified RSS-aggregators, Pulse really goes to lengths in integrating your feeds into its system, as the Twitter example shows. It does the same with your Flickr photos by showing them as an album in your Pulse photo album section. This, again, is really nice, as you don’t need to duplicate everything as seems to be the norm with other networks.

The only glitch that I find annoying is that del.icio.us feeds seem not to work, but Pulse warns you about this and hopefully they are working on it. The workaround is to subscribe to your del.icio.us feed through f.e. Jaiku and your del.icio.us links will pop-up to Pulse as Jaiku items.

Of course, the old Plaxo is still there and integrates rather nicely with Pulse. You can set up a shared calendar and address book and sync them with, among others, Google, Yahoo, and your PC/Mac. There’s also a nice Address Book / Pulse Notifier -software to keep you up with your contacts’ address and status updates. All around nice stuff, which integrates nicely at least with Mac.

What could save Pulse is that there is value in you using it even if not that many of your friends don’t. The problem with Jaiku was and still is that it doesn’t make any sense to write your updates there if most of your friends use Twitter. One thing is that if Linkedin continues to get more complex and starts to “suck”, I could see many people switching to Plaxo. It is a good alternative to Linkedin and seems to be designed its users in mind, but on other fronts it is not as perfect substitute and merely overlaps. With any luck, Pulse could find its niche.

All in all, maybe I just root for the underdogs, but I really like Pulse (and Jaiku) on some level. It’s really sad that they seem to be set as also-rans against technically less magnificient competitors. Unfortunately, these aspects aren’t at all important for most of social network users. Maybe these sites just show how important the lock-in effect is. It is the tragedy of commons in the information age.

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