[Social-discuss] Re: [foaf-dev] Yet another idea on a free social network

[Lucas Stadler]

> Hi
> 
> I take this opportunity to get some insight on something I was working upon,
> which i think is somewhat similar to ideas discussed here.
> Cross posting one mail I posted earlier.
> 
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I would like to get some suggestions on open profile idea.
> 
> We were thinking of implementing a open profile using open specs such as
> foaf and oauth. The aim is to let user makes his social profile just once,
> and get it be accessed everywhere. And the way is distributed,
> de-centralized. This is how it goes
> 
>     1. OAuth will handle authorization headaches.
>     2. User creates an account on one social networking website, which
> implements open profile .
>     3. The website generates a unique profile url for each user.
>     4. user goes to some other website, which also implements open profile
> and OAuth, the website
>        provides user with feature to make account using his existing profile
> on other social network.
>     5. User puts in his profile url from other website,
>     6. Using OAuth for user authorization, which one completes, the remote
> website, sends a user
>        profile xml file based on the open specs to the requesting website.
>     7. The network, gets the profile data, updates it into database, updates
> the open profile xml by adding its name into the list , which
>           contains name and other information of all the websites which are
> seeing this data.
>     8. Then it sends an update request to all other services, with the
> updated xml, using the rest url of each service,
>        specified in the xml file.
>     9. All the websites which receives the updated xml, updates their data.
>     10.Whenever user updates his profile in any one of the website, the
> website, after updating data, sends
>        a update request to all other websites seeing it, they in turn
> updates their databases accordingly.
>     11. The data is hence updated every where and once and no one is
> controlling the data.
> 
> Its just an initial draft and certainly requires polishing.
> 
> Cheers
I think you are a bit to fast for us, as there is no GNU Social protocol
at the time. But I was thinking about the problems we currently have and
support for having data not just within our network, but everywhere a
user wants it to have is something we certainly have to provide if we want
to be truly open.
>From this point of view, your draft is a possibility to achieve this. I
do not think, however, that it is the sole possibility, as FOAF+SSL does
try to do something similar (at least to OAuth).

I am not quite sure what you imagine with that 'XML profile', as this is
a rather difficult thing. But possibly this could simply be a RDF document
with whatever vocabulary that might be appropriate, such as FOAF, SIOC or
even relationships [1].
Did you have more 'real-world' ideas about this?

So, I think your idea is something rather interesting, but a little bit
too early, considering the state of our work. Nonetheless, it might be
added to the Ideas page on libreplanet [2].

[1] <http://purl.org/vocab/relationship>
[2] <http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas>