A friend of mine today made an offhand remark about how I should have my own social networking site, which consists only of people I know, and whom I connect together. I tend to spend a lot of time doing that in real life, connecting together people I know from very different scenarios with one another. Some of it happens exclusively online, some of it in real life, and a lot of it meets somewhere in the middle.

But the basic point behind the concept, I think, is spot-on. The pool of value represented by my community of friends and associates is a rich mine of data which should be controlled and owned by myself and my friends (perhaps as some kind of automated ad hoc corporation or collective) - not by some gigantic data-mining corporation doing who-knows-what with my information.

I know there are some open source freely available social networking platforms out there, but I’m also convinced the world doesn’t necessarily need another damn social networking website you have to sign up for.

I guess, for me, this kind of idea more cuts to the core of what I think the future of computing will be like. Still haven’t got it all figured out, obviously, but I was using words like “securacy” a while ago, a portmanteau of security and privacy. The idea being that the digital self would be like a series of concentric spheres or zones, and you would be able to assign data access privileges to various people, services and agencies. It gets more complex and sci-fi than that in my head but that’s a good starting point.