>Therefore, if you appear in an Explode search, this is because you have made your information available to the public. <

So now if I can just figure out how to make my profile 'Friends Only'...Is Tribe really public? I guess you can access the profiles from the website without being a member (I thought not, I was wrong) maybe this should change?

extremehonesty.tribe.net/threa...634386

I see that if you list your age, your exact birthdate is viewable by clicking the "FOAF" thingy.
That's a breach of confidentiality.
But that's something on your Tribe profile, not on the Explode site.

"FOAF" should be voluntary - you should be able to switch it on or off, (as the fellow said on that thread.)

Somebody said that blog posts made on Tribe were visible via Explode, but I didn't see that that was so. Is it?
I think Explode just harvests your user icon (or avatar, as some would have it) and the icons (or avatars) of those on your friends list.
Or at least that's all I saw.

What if somebody creates a search engine that specifically just accesses blogs on multiple "social networking" sites, like Tribe, MySpace, FaceBook, Ning, etc., etc. Would that be a bad thing? (Does such a thing already exist for LiveJournal, Blogspot, etc. ?)

There was a site called ListPic that figured out how to reproduce only the pictures from all the ads on Craigslist. So you could view only the pictures - the guy's "casual encounters" ads, just for an example, were a parade of penises when viewed on ListPic. Listpic gave the title of the ad below the picture, and when you clicked on the picture the text would appear in a small pop-up box.
It was pretty great!
But Craigslist blocked it somehow, whether electronically (writing code, that is) or legally I'm not sure.

This post was deleted by Rich

Bloke alerted me to the fact that I am there and so I came in here and changed what appears on my profile page - like Deleting the 'Module' that lists everything I have been saying for the last 3 years LOL :P

That is interesting; by typing in whatever zipcode you want, like so: "www.00000.us", and neat little map of that zip code pops up, along with some area info.

I agree with you about Google being bigger and broader, but soon there will be advanced searches in Google where you can limit the results to only certain types of sites. Right now it is a little too big batch.
Would that be a bad thing?

What if I wanted to find you and used a site like Explode, rather than sorting through pages of Google search results - is that bad?
The only info you should be able to get off of Explode is your username and user icon (or avatar), and the icons or avatars of people on your friends list. And possibly your hometown/zipcode.
No other pictures or info are shared.

I'm not that comfortable with my Tribe user picture appearing on another site, sort of out of context, as it were.
On the other hand, I do like the idea of Tribe being searchable by a variety of search engines.
The key, as was said in the Brainstroming tribe's thread, is to make participation in the FOAF file-sharing thingy voluntary.

if I didn't read it the first time, why would I read it because you reposted it?

I'll be signing autographs for one hour tomorrow afternoon. start lining up now!

haha

just kidding.

no worries, it won't go to my head ;D
really, I'm more the type to shy away from attention.