An Interesting Thought

[Carlos Killpack]

What are your thoughts on the following idea:

Building a distributed friendfeed (or facebook)-esque social network using Lifepress. It'd require some interesting architectureing, obviously. Specifically, we'd have to devise some kind of peer-to-peer authentication system (because privacy would definitely be a concern here. We would also need some kind of mechanism to facilitate 'adding' friends. For one how would your friend-to-be's server know where to find *your* server to be able to do any kind of authentication to begin with?

My suggestion would be to use OpenID (oauth?) to authenticate between domains. Though there may be something else out there that could fill this need more effectively that I'm not aware of.

I'd probably opt for this being an optional package (like a really big plug in, or a collection thereof) until we can make this an easy deal to set up.

-Carlos

[Carsten]

On 16 Mrz., 21:08, Carlos Killpack <killpac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Building a distributed friendfeed (or facebook)-esque social network  
> using Lifepress.

Nice! You mean the different Lifepress installations can communicate
with each other and send comments back and forth? Or send pull
requests for feeds or posts? I always liked Friendfeed, and I really
like what Google Buzz and the Facebook feed does: allowing users to
communicate in a really easy way. You see your friends post, drop a
comment and if he replies you get a notification in your inbox/feed
dashboard.

Although I have to say that I hate data clutter, and I want my feeds,
articles, comments on MY server. That's why I use Lifepress as an
aggregator on my own server: It pulls my own feeds and saves the data
in my own database again. So if Lifepress gets distributed
communication this would be a major point that I'll keep looking at.

Maybe we should start a poll somewhere how people use Sweetcron/
Lifepress. I'd like to hear if it is most commonly used as a personal
aggregator or as a blogging tool or maybe a twitter replacement.

> For one how would your friend-to-be's server know where to  
> find *your* server to be able to do any kind of authentication to  
> begin with?

Ah, I'd go with a simple URL input field that takes the base URL of
the other server. ;-)

> My suggestion would be to use OpenID (oauth?) to authenticate between  
> domains. Though there may be something else out there that could fill  
> this need more effectively that I'm not aware of.

I like OpenID a lot. OAuth is nice too, in a way that Flickr does it.
I like the clear message that Flickr displays, but you have to really
read it to understand what you're allowing.

I don't know yet how OpenID could be used as a auth mechanism for a
distributed version of Lifepress, I think it depends on how the
comments and sharing is done...

> I'd probably opt for this being an optional package (like a really big  
> plug in, or a collection thereof) until we can make this an easy deal  
> to set up.

It would be really cool to have a plugin. If you like to connect to
friends, you can activate the plugin and maybe get another page on the
dashboard with all the options you need and the authentication
mechanism.

Ah, this is a really good thing to dream about and discuss on. :-)

[Carlos Killpack]

Probably a mix of both actually, you'd have a private version of their
feed (if the friendship went both ways) that would be pulled and
disayed on your friends dashboard and (again if the friendship is
mutual) the servers would exchange comments and other forms of
communication.

I think I'm gonna need to read up on distributed networks to figure
out how we're going to implement the auth system. Particularly if
we're going to try to do it without SSL (which may be a requirement,
because most web hosts don't provide it at a particularly avoidable
price point.

-Carlos

Sent from my iPhone