OneSocialWeb Project Status

Hello Federated Social Web peeps -

I'm writing to let you all know what is happening with the OneSocialWeb
project. As many of you know, this project was originally conceived by
Laurent Eschenauer and Alard Weisscher in late 2009.  Along with Diana Cheng
(and with some encouragement and cheerleading from myself and others in
Vodafone R&D) they built the project up as a prototype of what you could do
with XMPP in the federated social networking space. Unfortunately, due to
some circumstances out of all of our control, Laurent and Alard had to leave
Vodafone. At that point, we took the decision to continue the project with
myself and Diana. During the past year we have kept the project going,
including adding some new features (e.g. commenting) and we've also seen the
open source community around OneSocialWeb grow, with a few
community-developed clients (notably, the iPhone client).  We've also
learned a lot about the federated social networking space both through the
project and through participation in the burgeoning community.

However, we have limited resources, and we have now taken the decision to
concentrate what time we can spend on the federated social Web in the area
of protocols and standards. This means we will not be actively updating the
code base for OneSocialWeb (server or client), nor will we be adding
features. We will Continue to work on the protocol, and will support any
implementers (such as ProcessOne) and collaborate with them to improve it
and expand it.  Our intention is to contribute the work we have done on XMPP
extensions (e.g. Activity Streams over XMPP) into the relevant XMPP
technical committees.

Having said all that, all the code that has been produced is up there on
GitHub.  I know that several projects have used the code to develop their
own prototypes. It's our view that the OneSocialWeb open source community
has not grown to the point where it can become self-sustaining, but if
anyone would like to step forward to take ownership of the code-base we
would be more than happy to discuss this.

As we stated in the summit in Berlin, we are committed to making the FSW
a reality, and we (Diana and I) will continue actively participating in the
FSW incubator group and list and will con tribute to all the XMPP social
specs, and not only OSW. We will also like to be there to facilitate in any
way we can the work and activities of the FSW community.

Thanks,
Dan Appelquist
Vodafone Group R&D