Re: Federation protocols

Simon Tennant wrote:
>
> With that in mind here's how I see us getting open and distributed 
> social networks adopted:
>
>  1. we build great easy to use tools, libraries and provide fantastic
>     documentation using existing established standards (eg Activity
>     streams, XMPP)
>  2. define the additional protocols for each of the functions of
>     social networking (follower management, post management, following
>     management, media sharing, inbox to client synchronisation) and
>     work them through XSF and W3C committees.
>  3. build great reference implementations (we're not build a clone of
>     facebook) of specific features - eg meda sharing between domains.
>  4. blog extensively about building on these tools.
>  5. Other developers that are less concerned about federation and
>     openness start building on these tools and creating their own apps.
>  6. now we start to see an ecosystem around the apps and users are
>     using their one identity to sign into existing social federated apps.
>  7. at this poing perhaps someone comes along and writes an app that
>     looks like a facebook wall - and it has more of a chance of
>     working because users can reuse their existing social login from
>     all the single use apps already written.
>

Umm... maybe I'm just an old guy here, but anybody remember a thing 
called USENET, and a protocol called NNTP?  There've been identity and 
authentication overlays for NNTP for at least a decade - and I've yet to 
see anything the Facebook does that couldn't be done with NNTP.

Years ago, the Netscape collaboration server did everything you might 
want to do in social networking, all building on NNTP. Unfortunately, 
all that work seems to have been lost when Netscape went down the tubes.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

Received on Friday, 31 May 2013 15:53:57 UTC