Since its creation, the Internet has been a fast and easy way for people to communicate and share information.  Starting with basic networks whose nodes could be counted with your hands, the Internet has evolved into a gigantic web spaning the entire globe and linking billions of its inhabitants.  Similar to the Pony Express and telegram of the past, the Internet has become one of the primary ways people send and receive information, not to mention learn about other people, places and things that they may never actually see in person.

     Initially, finding the person you wanted to communicate with or the file you wanted was simple; there were only a limited number of users.  As the net expanded, search engines alleviated the process of finding who or what you wanted in a timely fashion with relative ease.  Today, however, the Internet is so busy and full of people, applications, and information that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to find exactly who you want to talk to or what you want to look at if you do not already know where to look.

   An interesting project I found in doing research for this blog post was FOAF.  FOAF, which stands for Friend-Of-A-Friend, was started by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller in 2000 in order to find out who is on the Internet, what role or space they occupy, how different users and programs interact and connect, and how their information could be shared more simply and quickly.  FOAF allows users to create profiles saying who they are, what they do, and who they interact with, creating a web of connections that can be viewed and studied, similar to the networks we have looked at in class.  It also allows people to post their files and web-pages for sharing and, by directing them to use simple code and terminology when adding their resources, creates a series of machine-readable pages that can be sequenced and categorized, allowing for quick and easy searching of information and programs.  Instead of having to wade through the endless pages of useless sites on search engines, users can quickly and easily find who and what they are looking for thanks to computer processing and scanning of information.  They can also find people who have interests similar to theirs and who may be friends of their friends or acquaintances, thereby bridging gaps and connecting individuals and groups in various social and net networks.

    I thought this project was a particularly interesting study of the social and computer networks we looked at and neat way of using existing connections between people and machines to make information on the Internet easier to find and therefore more accessible.  Often times on the net I feel a little lost and get frustrated that I am not finding what I am looking for, and so I think FOAF is a step in the right direction in making the Internet more friendly and making time spent on it more worth-while.  You can find FOAF’s homepage and information about getting started at http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/social.html .