May I Have Some More Social Networks?
4 min read
Some interesting conversations going on around the intarweb.
First, Stephen Downes peeled back the first layer of the onion and described the goals of his project.
Then, there has been some discussion on social networks in general, and the Classroom 2.0 group Steve Hargadon has set up on Ning.
Steve likes Ning's low barrier to entry, while Dave Warlick, by his own admission, doesn't get it. Tony Karrer points out that a social network alone won't do it, but that some degree of common interest is required to unify the discussion. I'll leave my thoughts on Ning, the service, out of this blog post because I'm in a good mood and don't particularly feel like dwelling on flaws.
Some common threads arise in the conversation. Stephen Downes' current work looks to make the social network bend to fit the user:
"Such a network would never need to be searched - it would flex and bend and reshape itself minute by minute according to where you are, who you're with, what you're doing, and would always have certain resources 'top of mind' would could be displayed in any environment or work area. Imagine, for example, a word processor that, as you type your paper, suggests the references you might want to read and use at that point. And does it well'€¦"
Dave Warlick says:
"I don't need someplace else to go to on the Internet. I need it to come to me, to my aggregator, or my mail box. I need it to be organic, infinitely shapable, and to be a valuable conversation."
And Tony Karrer adds:
"If it's an open system, i.e., can include my blog, my LinkedIn connections, my comments, my bookmarks, etc., then it's a much more natural take off."
My favorite piece of these conversations, however, came from the ClaimID blog in a pair of posts where they describe their new friendship system based on OpenID.
This is something we've been thinking about recently. A few weeks back I wrote up a description of a Friends Everywhere application that could be used across any web site to allow people to create their contact list over the entire internet, as opposed to within a single site. My original thinking was that it would be better to do this as a very simple solution, and to use OpenID 2.0 to extend the application. However, after further thought, and conversations with various people, that's just silly. OpenID 2.0 supports exchanging attributes along with identity. It already has the mechanism for verifying that someone is who they say they are (an essential piece of establishing both friendship and single sign on), and OpenID already supports multiple personas where the user controls exactly what personal information gets shared.
ClaimID's contact mechanism gets halfway there. It works perfectly well if you belong to ClaimID. But if your contact doesn't belong to ClaimID, there isn't much (aside from some generic relationship information) you can know about them.
The way through this requires that both sides of the contact have OpenIDs. As I describe in the Remote Friends post, a key piece of this involves letting people set an rss feed as part of their identity; this content could be used as another way to show a person's interests, and this feed could be different than their personal blog. Ideally, different feeds could be specified for for different relationships; friends see one feed, while work contacts see another.
When the ability to run personal OpenID servers becomes more widespread, this has the potential to create a distributed friends network over the entire internet. This would transform our contact list into a searchable feedreader, effectively bringing the internet we wanted into our own site. Give that Wordpress.com already serves OpenID's, and the ongoing work to build an OpenID server into Drupal, this capability isn't far off.
