Re: [Social-discuss] Interoperability?

[Mischa Tuffield]

Hello All, 

Once again, am popping out of lurking mode here, and am going to give my 2 cents to this discussion about interoperability. Earlier on in this thread (by Ted Smith I think/!?) there was mention of work to create a specification/implementation to united these various decentralised social networking (dsn) projects by creating a protocol to allow for the interoperation of nodes on these various distributed social networks. And yes, great ! 

As it stands, there are a number of projects, off the top of my head, onesocialweb, disco, diaspora (which I tried to contact to say hello to whilst in NYC last month), that new mozilla project (it is late here in the UK /me can't be bothered to awesome bar it now), wouldn't it be great if all of these projects could interoperate? I have mentioned this on the SocialWebIncubatorGroup (which i am involved in) last week, what we need is not to spec out languages, or design principles for these future platforms, we need to agree a protocol so that these projects can all interoperate. But am aware that before any standards are made, there needs to be a number of working implementations of a given protocol, and GNUSocial seems like a good place to such work/discussions.

Given this current trend (motivated by all the facebook malarky), and the fact that so many people are working towards this goal of a dsn, from my POV it seems naive to think that any one of these projects are going to "win" and become the defacto platform for this awesome future we are hoping for/working towards. It seems that a specification of a protocol which all these projects could use to communicate with each other seems like it would be super valuable. I mean variety is the spice of life, and as a user I would feel most empowered if I had the ability to choose which software I use to be apart of a social network which I run off of my own server.

Cheers all,  

Mischa *sorry for lurking and rambling :)

On 28 May 2010, at 01:04, Matt Lee wrote:

On 05/27/10 20:01, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

Which guys?

Sean Corbett and Ian Denhardt.

Is this a decision based on community input?  or at least community

feedback?  How are these decisions being made?

There was an IRC meeting a few weeks ago about it, yeah.

This mailing list was, for a while, extremely busy.

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Mischa Tuffield

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