You know I don't need Facebook to introduce (broker) me to anyone! I am more than happy managing my own relationships (gradations of trust included!) Oh and my friends are distributed in the real world as well! This works pretty well even without a "social network" or a "system". When the Diginotar certification authority was badly compromised I got a bunch of information from many sources using those protocols which span the standards sphere of the Internet each bringing information that I value at varying levels of trust and applicability. Between and in combination of all this input I was able to take action and remove Diginotar from my keychain. I could have waited for Apple to stir its stumps but didn't need to. All those independent distributed "trust brokers" did a fine job! thanks folks! Christian On 4 Oct 2011, at 16:38, Jay Ashworth wrote:
As usual, the underlying issue is one of trust.
Alas, I see no theoretical way that distributed systems like Diaspora *can* provide some of the functions that are core to systems like Facebook, *exactly by virtue* (vice?) of the fact that they are distributed; there is no central Trust Broker.