Learning from OpenID and other musings I'd like to share...

[esdaniel]

I've been a proponent of social network portability for some time, at
least 5 years.

A while back I had nascent conversations with an open-thinking
community regarding an open peer 2 peer social network. For a short
time another project appeared that seemed to address this challenge
however it was soon mothballed/decommissioned. Certainly this idea
has been floating about for some time and keeps being swept under the
carpet (thoughts appear on blogs and dissappear) unless I'm
mistaken ;-)

Some people even think 'this' is the NBT:
http://www.cpcs.umb.edu/vista/digest/?q=node/67

I'm glad to see this group appear today.

There are various challenges I'd like to see this community inspect -
most notably the ability for a user to control syndication of their
content - there is a reality check in that once syndicated the content
can be passed on however besides this caveat the opportunity does
exist I believe to improve the current status quo of centralised
repositories such as Facebook et al.

Where OpenID can shed light on successful architectures is in the
ability to move from one provider to another, it's this aspect of
portability that is fit-for-purpose in the context of OpenID that
might need more input into how a social graph, the corresponding
schemas and associated data might also be made portable.

From the expert user who puts-in-place and manages their data
repositories that can participate in this new 'matrix' to the novice
who can sign up for such a service has been something I've been
studying.

Other thoughts have been on the aspect of how a P2P system of indexes
(and meta-indexes) can complement the aspiration.

Finally, I believe this work will contribute to what we have begun to
think of the net as being, i.e. the matrix and no doubt this will
underpin any work by a community interested in creating an open
alternative to 2nd life.

Regards,

ed.

[esdaniel]

http://jrm.cc/articles/583-of-tall-walls-and-distributed-data-in-social-networks

Of Tall Walls and Distributed Data in Social Networks
October 11th, 2006 at 2:40 pm

I've a decent history of social networking sites. Friendster,
LiveJournal, Xanga, DeviantArt, MySpace, LinkedIn, and now Facebook.
Nearly every one of these social networks has a slightly different
focus (such as art, music, career, etc), but almost every one of them
has one thing in common -- a "blog" space.

Let's take my prime example here, my progress from DeviantArt to
MySpace to FaceBook. At each of these sites I could write regular
entries, which would be distributed to my friends, and they could then
leave me comments. It's a blog, pretty plain, but that added social
network let's the information permeate my network of friends very
quickly.

A blog like mine here, however, has the problem that it's
"notification" system is decentralized. RSS is great delivery tool,
and RSS readers are elegant and functional now, no doubt, but the
system offers nothing near what social networking sites do in terms of
ease and funcionality. Social networking sites simply seem to offer a
more complete, enthralling experience.

If you were to go and look at my DeviantArt, MySpace, and Facebook
pages you'd find I've written maybe once or twice in these "blogs"
over the course of nearly 5 years -- that's pretty abysmal. It's not
that I haven't been publishing online, the simple fact of the matter
is I KNEW my membership at these sites (and even the sites themselves)
are transitory*. I was never comfortable with the idea that my data
(blog entries, and comments) was stuck behind each site's individual
"Tall Walls" -- hence, I've always run my own blog.

I was suprised and elated to find that FaceBook allows you to run your
"Notebook", as they call their blog instance, from an RSS feed. I was
excited because it meant that I wouldn't have to publish several
places, I could just use my blog and be done with it. Sadly, I was
soon let down. As I described above, part of what you lose from
service to service is the comments that people leave for you. I enjoy
getting to read back in these as much as the entries themselves (if
not more sometimes). In this instance, the RSS feed would show up in
my FaceBook notebook, but all comments would be left in the Facebook
data space -- again running right up against another set of Tall Walls.

I dream of a day, some day in the far future, where I have a central
service (hopefully of my own) to which all social networking sites can
tie into for data distribution. I want blogs from here to show up in
my myspace, facebook, and even deviant art pages. I want comments from
all these sites to aggregate and mash up together so that no matter
which service I am signed into, I can talk with whomever has read and
responded.

I want the walls taken away, and I want my data. Of course, that's a
ways off. Damn.

[esdaniel]

Some musings from Tim too:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/social_network_operating_system.html

PS. this is the p2psn project that appeared in 2000 and then got
mothballed:
http://cilux.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cilux