Re: Let's blow some new life into this community group

Hi Melvin, thanks for your in-depth reaction. this is a really
interesting topic, i think. comments inline

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 3:43 PM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a slightly different take on this.
>
> The Web is designed to be the 'intersection of information spaces'.  This
> includes documents and things, and was designed to be social from the start.

sure, the indie web. there was no webfinger, but a large percentage of
the first web pages were 'personal web pages' in which computer
scientists present their professional profile, plus a few 'fun links'.
The good old days... ;)

> But the web can also handle things like chat (gtalk, facebook, webchat),

well, that doesn't count, does it? that's saying federated social web
has nothing to do because chat already exists inside walled gardens?
i guess i should have made my premise explicit that i was talking
about federated chat under the user's control. having said that, as i
mentioned, i think Bosh counts. So if you run a buddycloud node, then
you have chat on the federated social web. I heard that with gtalk you
can actually federate as well, and i tried it once, but couldn't get
it to work. So that's not good enough for me. I want *seamless*
federation. i want to be able to open a chat session with you while
i'm using gtalk, and you are using facebook chat, and we wouldn't even
notice. the experience should be exactly the same as when we would
both be on gtalk. Sorry for not making that assumption more explicit
before.

> email (hotmail, gmail etc.).

ok, so there the integration is seamless, i agree. so maybe we should
use smtp as the server-to-server protocol for the federation of
private messages. i guess that could work. Would have to deal with
spam, but otoh, you would instantly integrate with a very large user
base. Would it be an option to add in- and out-going smtp to
StatusNet, BuddyCloud, Diaspora, Friendika, etcetera? if yes/no, why?

> The web was designed to be a read/write space, rather than, browse only.
>  Attempts to build this into early browsers were met with 'its too hard' as a
> response, but we've not given up and effort continues.

yes, that's my point 2, 'read-write web', and i also said it's
something we're working on in the rww cg, so i think we agree on that
point? maybe i misunderstood what you mean here, but i think we agree
on this one. :)

>
> There's no 'official' method of publishing, and every time you try and
> constrain the web, it breaks free, due to its scale free nature.  Certain
> patterns (such as linked data) are recommended and growing.

when i say linked data i mean "data that is linked", but i have a
feeling (especially because you mention it in the context of how data
is published), that here you mean the specific implementation that
uses sparql and rdf-stores. i totally agree there are, and will be,
several systems. i mentioned WebDAV, CouchDB and GetPutDelete, i
should have mentioned sparql+rdfstores, sorry.

> Universal systems tend to be interoperable (the secret sauce is using a URI
> to name things).  Local systems (often with local identifiers) or other
> protocols at least the successful one will also probably in the long term

i think we all agree on the interoperability point, and i think that's
why we're here, talking about federated social web. :)

> integrate with the web.

when you say 'integrate with the web', maybe you mean sparql+rdfbase
again, if so, then i probably disagree that we want to impose that
choice. as you said, people will do what works for them, and as long
as each user can update their own profile, plus read all the profiles
of (and messages from) other people, then we're fine. If some people
publish their profiles in rdf triples and others do it in json, then
clients should probably try to make sense of both formats. Even if all
data is retrievable on the web, then there still can be barriers
because different tools speak different languages inside the
documents. but i think if we get that far, then that's totally
solvable. If we get a federated social web that works, but you have to
write sparql queries to be able to access it, then i have absolutely
no problem with learning sparql, even though my personal preference
for storing structured data is json-ld. but at this point i think we
should be open to all content formats, and be 'generous in what we
receive'. :)

> Kind of a democracy of ideas.  It's all good, and
> let the best ideas rise to the top.

totally agree!

> Hopefully it will all come together on
> the Web, indeed, what may become named the 'Federated Social Web'.

hoping will not make it so, that's why i started this thread. As i
said, i think the first three points (indie web, webfinger, read-write
web) are all covered and being worked on in different places. What
this cg should IMO work on is chat, messaging, and comments.

To make it more concrete: suppose you run your own server with Drupal
and I run my own server with WordPress. Then we both already have
indie web, and if we activated the plugin, also webfinger. What i want
is to be able to update my WordPress using http requests instead of
using the built-in editor. Http is totally capable of this as you
said, and it would give me potentially a wider choice of blog editors,
and also wouldn't force me to choose between Drupal and WordPress
because of the editors that each offer. I think this is not currently
possible to update such mainstream blog servers over http, so let's
make that so, but that work belongs in the rww cg.

Now, i want to be able to chat with you from my browser. If we both
run an xmpp server with bosh, then we have that.

I want to be able to message you, so if we both run a webmail server,
then we have that as well.

Now i want to be able to comment on your blog without having to use
your comment tool. maybe salmon would already allow this? if i can
comment on your Drupal blog by virtue of being logged in to my
WordPress blog, then i think that counts as federated social web. If i
have to create a user on your Drupal blog before i can comment, then
it's not. Maybe IndieAuth can help here?

Ah, forgot to mention, i want this all to be an integrated experience.
So if i'm typing an email to you using my personal webmail server, and
my chat server sees that you've come online, then i want to be able to
click 'send as chat', and vice versa, if you go offline during a chat,
i want to be able to click 'send as private message'. This is
functionality that exists on SNSs like facebook, so i want my fsw
server to also be able to do this.

maybe the solution is to integrate squirrelmail and ejabberd into
WordPress? ok, i'm not saying that seriously, but i'm also not
discarding the idea of prescribing xmpp and smtp as 'best practice'
protocols for the 'chat' and 'inbox' functionalities i mentioned...


ciao,
Michiel

Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2012 13:37:46 UTC