Re: [Social-discuss] PHP-Based GNU Social structure

[László Török]

Hi,

I've been following this thread for quite a while, allow me to contribute some thoughts of mine:

Efficiency concerns
Although generally speaking I do like lightning fast systems, but efficiency comes at a price of higher effort investment. I don't think anyone of us can really state at this point, which kind of efficiency are we going to need to deliver certain features in enjoyable way. So why not choose a transport protocol that is widely adopted, ubiquitous even if there are others that can beat it in terms of speed. We don't even agree on the use cases and even if we did, there will be more discovered as we progress. Why not do it the agile way and have a working first version quickly? Based on the experience collected, we will have a clearer picture of what works and what could work better if we used xyz protocol/tool/etc.

Beating Facebook
I've heard voices anxious to "beat" Fb. However, I personally don't think that we can gain competitive advantage over Fb, merely by making things faster. It just has to be fast enough to be enjoyable for the end user. I am also quite skeptical about the idea that we can gain much traction solely by the promise of making it free and solve privacy concerns of current social sites. The ordinary John Doe (that is, the majority of people) doesn't seem to care about these things. The key thing is it has to be something that the USER _likes_. It has to offer things Facebook/Orkut/etc. can't / won't.
Look at the success story of Ubuntu. I think that can be our compass when thinking about higher level strategy.

Competitive Advantage
I am slowly coming to the point of this post. I imagine GNU Social to be a system that is not merely a distributed Fb / Orkut / etc. Following the principles of freedom, I'd like it to be able to talk to other systems and I'd like other systems to be able to talk to it. When a system reaches a certain complexity, system integration issues will dominate all other issues. How can we face this issue?

I think we can do that by following the principles of Linked Open Data[1], as already mentioned by Henry Story and Melvin, since this will grant us immense power in terms of expressivity. It is a huge paradigm-shift, it takes some time to get the hang of it. Nevertheless, if we managed to build GNU Social around these principles, then platform or programming language preference won't matter in the long run. As support for the current open web standards came about on merely every platform and programming environment, the same will happen to LOD and Semantic Web technologies. The Fb is a social net built upon Web 2.0. Let's build GNU Social on top of the emerging Web 3.0 ( which will be LOD, at least in my interpretation).

Laszlo

[1] http://linkeddata.org/



2010/3/30 Sylvan Heuser <address@hidden>:
> I've finally caught up with the mass of emails from the weekend... :-)
>
> So, personally, I would favor Carlo's approach. I like having perfect
> technologies, and I agree that they have social implications.
> But obviously we can't direct all our efforts in that direction.
> So why don't we think about a future-proof design, but apply it to the
> quick PHP hack Blaine&Matt want to see?
>
> I think we can handle this by abstracting the transport layer like Ted
> said - and focus on the HTTP module first.
> If the abstraction is "abstract" enough, we can think about implementing
> our own PSYCish protocol later, but would still be able to have quick
> results in PHP. This would probably even play well with an Elgg fork,
> depending on how they did it.
>
> --
> S.
>
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>