“To properly address some of these security issues, social networking sites need to change not only the technology, but some of the fundamentals of their business. And you can’t easily patch a business model.”

Central to the problem is that these sites are inherently social, right? Even if a network came in from the perspective of a niche/professional network, or one that wanted to empower organisations/individuals, wouldn’t the viral nature of the net still encourage malware, whatever the fundamentals of their business? To curtail their virality would surely mean to restrict sustainability? Also:

“The problem is that social sites reinforce many of the vectors that are key to infection.”

This is particularly interesting. What do you see as those vectors which are key… ?

I still say credit to Twitter for pushing the boundaries of the internet forward, let’s hope they do not become a martyr to their cause, and make use of that recent investment to retain their users. What is it Alistair, that causes them to be down every day? What did they do wrong to restrict their scalability?

It occurred to me in writing this that social networks and computer worms have something in common: Virality. So it’s no surprise that they work well together. But to stop viral spread of malware they need to curtail their own virality, which undermines their fundamental business model.

@chad — yeah, voyeurism is what makes people view the infected content in the first place. ;-)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/08/facebook-responds-to-security-issue-with-a-hope-and-a-prayer/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-twitter/

Worth the watch, certainly not a shoddy production, in fact very impressive. We are concerned about Ruby On Rails (RoR), as a robust and scalable way forward. The debate continues.