Steven Johnson’s latest article is online @ discover.com: Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

His thesis is based on Cat’s Cradle, which “… explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon.” I was thinking on the way home tonight how the exposure of massive amounts structured data via xml (web services, rss, xml-rpc…) will make it exponentially easier to create applications like the InFlow software mentioned in the article. Allconsuming.net is one great example of that. Erik Benson gets information from weblogs.com, pings amazon’s web service and voila, we have a social book circle. While I’m sure the availability of this information worries privacy advocates, you can’t help be get excited about the possibilities that lie ahead of us.