Re: An Introduction: SOCML

On 14 February 2013 08:07, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 13 February 2013 02:46, Christopher A <chris.socml@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Melvin, Pelle, Julian,
>>
>> It is nice to meet all of you. I was worried that I had stumbled into a
>> dead forum -- good to see some life in here! I also want to thank you all
>> for the feedback and encouragement!
>>
>> I have to say, I find the concept of Activity Streams to be nice and
>> close to what I would like to accomplish; however, it seems to lack an
>> emphasis on portability of user content, and largely seems to be "action
>> related." I worry that this format, based on the backgrounds of its
>> authors, will be mainly used as a method for the "big social networks" to
>> aggregate more user activities outside of their service rather than
>> fostering the growth of competitive alternatives.
>>
>
> Could not agree more.  AS is use case driven rather than a generic
> solution where you can plug in your own data models, afaik.   However, as
> you state it can be the right tool for the right job in some places.  I am
> concerned about portability of AS, and am unsure how much effort has been
> put into that aspect, to date.  Though it does have it's own mime type
> which can help the client understand what it's getting.
>
>
>>
>> While, I find JSON to be meritorious in its usefulness and conciseness; I
>> still believe that XML is the most widely understood and supported data
>> interchange standard. Most shortcomings with XML can also be solved with
>> simple compression algorithms.
>>
>
> Sort of yes.  The serialization isnt always that important, the principles
> behind the serialization are though.  Things like portability, namespacing,
> self describing data, non collision, extensibility can be beneficial when
> trying to build systems that scale.  XML in the form of RDF/XML for example
> kind of reached a local minimum in terms of adoption, and I get the
> impression people like to work with JSON these days.  JSON-LD is a
> promising serialization, imho ( http://json-ld.org/ ) and easily
> translatable to XML forwards and backwards.
>
> A good video on this from Douglas Crockford :
> http://inkdroid.org/journal/2012/04/30/lessons-of-json/
>
>
>>
>> With respect to Melvin's comment about putting too much of an early
>> emphasis on security and authorization; I think he's right. It's probably
>> best to keep the standard focused as a data standard and leave the
>> implementation of security and authentication up to the user's service.
>>
>
> Thanks :)  I do think security is very important, but also that the
> modular approach is the one that scales, rather than the, 'one size fits
> all', that tends to be popular.  This allows one team to work on
> communication and one to work on security and the ability to fit things
> together.
>
>
>>
>> Currently, some of the main design issues I'm struggling with at the
>> moment are:
>>
>>    1. Should the standard include "action related" structures that
>>    incorporate a "push" and "retrieve" methodology for facilitating interop
>>    between services?
>>
>> Would like to understand this better ... do you have an example?
>
>
>>
>>    1. How can we standardized social media objects such as messages,
>>    status updates, pictures, etc. while maintaining the ability to add
>>    additional extensibility to these objects?
>>
>> There's a few efforts in progress.  AS already mentioned.  Some work was
> done here http://xmlns.notu.be/aair/ ... tent.io have a neat system,
> opensocial perhaps, and facebook APIs and open graph protocol are certainly
> are worth a look.
>

I think it's fair to say that facebook represents the industry leader in
social networks.  I would highlight 7 use cases that would be good to
achieve for social networks aspiring to federation to this level.  (the
last one may be a bit too hard, but I think the first can be good goals)

User Interactions
==============

1. Adding a friend

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/friends/

2. Sending a message to a friend

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/send/

3. Sending a request to a friend

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/requests/



Feed Interactions
================

4. Adding a post to a news feed

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/feed/



App Interactions
============

5. Adding an app

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/add_to_page/

6. Setting app permissions

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/oauth/



Payment Interactions
================

7. Adding a payment

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/pay/


>
>
>>
>>    1. With respect to service interop: is there a way to uniquely
>>    identify users while allowing each service to assign its own IDs to these
>>    entities?
>>
>>
> Very happy that you mention this!  imho, it's generally the most
> overlooked problem in designing scalable protocols. If you have a common ID
> system across heterogeneous systems scaling and interop are relatively
> easy, case in point, http URLs have demonstrated massive scalability and
> easy interop.  If you are unsure of your ID system or create your own
> (which I think is the strong temptation) you struggle to scale to anything
> more than yourself.
>
>
>>
>>    1. How can we create a data structure that prevents impersonation and
>>    spoofing?
>>
>> You can never 100% prevent this, but there are ways to mitigate such
> things, such as PKI.
>
>
>> Most of you have probably noticed that I have been slow with updating the
>> Wiki. The main reason for this is because of the aforementioned issues.
>>
>> Any insight and help would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I
>> think I'll work on some of the low hanging fruit and knock out the XML
>> structures for some of the more simplistic social media objects.
>>
>
> Thanks for sharing some great ideas! :)
>
>
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Melvin Carvalho <
>> melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 11 February 2013 23:38, Pelle Wessman <pelle@kodfabrik.se> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 11 feb 2013 kl. 23:03 skrev Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 11 February 2013 19:27, Julian Steinwachs <
>>>> julian.steinwachs@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>  Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> this protocol agnostic approach sounds very interesting. Because you
>>>>> said you did not search the web thoroughly: There is a standard called
>>>>> activitystreams ( http://http://activitystrea.ms/ ) that is designed
>>>>> to describe social interactions (activities) in atom/xml or json. Beyond
>>>>> the discovery and requesting stuff socml could be designed as an encryption
>>>>> wrapper for activitystreams. Or to make it very short
>>>>> socml=activitystreams+PGP ?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I like AS, but my impression was that original poster asked for
>>>> something that was patent free.  If AS one day put under the IETF or W3C
>>>> that would work, but I dont see this happening in the short to medium term.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> AS is released under the Open Web Foundation which should make it as
>>>> patent free as anything put under IETF or W3C? See
>>>> http://activitystrea.ms/licensing/ and
>>>> http://www.openwebfoundation.org/
>>>>
>>>
>>> I know AS is very popular with some folks on this list so I hope not to
>>> offend.  It's a system I like, but I like to take a more holistic approach
>>> and look at the bigger picture, which includes linked data, open graph
>>> protocol, tent.io and some other promising projects.
>>>
>>> IANAL, but it seems to me a grey area.  I have seen lawyers involved in
>>> the AS mailing list, I have not to date seen that happen in social oriented
>>> specs elsewhere.
>>>
>>> Certainly there has been patent litigation between OWF members in recent
>>> years, Yahoo vs Facebook springs to mind ... in any case, I'd advise
>>> looking at all the options out there.  The legal aspect is just one of many.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> We have existing standards that are mature, well adopted and approved
>>>> by standards bodies, namely the linked data family of standards.  I would
>>>> suggest this is a better match to the requirements listed.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Greetings
>>>>> Julian
>>>>>
>>>>> Am 11.02.2013 02:03, schrieb Christopher A:
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello all,
>>>>>
>>>>>  First, I want to apologize if I have overstepped boundaries with
>>>>> respect to editing the groups Wiki page. I also want to apologize if you
>>>>> receive this message twice. For whatever reason, the Listserv was not
>>>>> showing that it as having been sent.
>>>>>
>>>>>  I recently posted a proposal for a "Federated Social Network Data
>>>>> Standard" on the groups Wiki. I admit, that I have not searched the
>>>>> web thoroughly with respect to other initiatives like this; however, given
>>>>> the superficial research I have done, I have come to the conclusion that
>>>>> there are no open dialogs currently on this topic.
>>>>>
>>>>>  Over the next couple of days I will begin posting proposed
>>>>> technical specifications for the standard. I would like for everyone to
>>>>> contribute feedback and make suggestions/modifications.
>>>>>
>>>>>  The solution I am proposing is simple: we need to standardize social
>>>>> media content such that independent developers can create their own
>>>>> services that can share and aggregate data under a common standard. Much
>>>>> like the RSS format, this data standard should be open and free, not
>>>>> encumbered by patents, and be easy to implement while offering these
>>>>> features:
>>>>>
>>>>>    - Complete end-to-end privacy control, with the use
>>>>>    of asymmetric encryption.
>>>>>    - A method for authenticating that people "are who they say they
>>>>>    are."
>>>>>    - True protocol agnosticism, this data standard should be
>>>>>    freely interchangeable with the number of web technologies that exist.
>>>>>    - Content portability, meaning the user can choose to use a number
>>>>>    of providers to store pictures, comments, events, messages, etc. while
>>>>>    still having their information available to those with the proper access.
>>>>>
>>>>>  Anyway, here is the current link to the proposal:
>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Proposal
>>>>>
>>>>>  The SOCML standard overiew:
>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Standard
>>>>>
>>>>>  And the Technical Specifications (in progress!):
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Technical
>>>>>
>>>>>  Please feel free to critique or reprimand.
>>>>>
>>>>>  I hope everyone is doing well, and I look forward to working with
>>>>> everyone.
>>>>>
>>>>>  Chris
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Christopher A <chris.socml@gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Hello all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  First, I want to apologize if I have overstepped boundaries with
>>>>>> respect to editing the groups Wiki page.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  I recently posted a proposal for a "Federated Social Network Data
>>>>>> Standard" on the groups Wiki. I admit, that I have not searched the
>>>>>> web thoroughly with respect to other initiatives like this; however, given
>>>>>> the superficial research I have done, I have come to the conclusion that
>>>>>> currently there are no open dialogs around this topic.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  Over the next couple of days I will begin posting proposed
>>>>>> technical specifications for the standard. I would like for everyone to
>>>>>> contribute feedback and make suggestions/modifications.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  The solution I am proposing is simple: we need to standardize
>>>>>> social media content such that independent developers can create their own
>>>>>> services that can share and aggregate data under a common standard. This
>>>>>> standard, should be open and free, not encumbered by patents, and be easy
>>>>>> to implement while offering these features:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>    -
>>>>>>     - Complete end-to-end privacy control, with use
>>>>>>    of asymmetric encryption.
>>>>>>    - A method for authenticating that people are who they say they
>>>>>>    are.
>>>>>>    - True data agnosticism, meaning the end user can choose to use a
>>>>>>    number of providers to store pictures, comments, events, messages, etc.
>>>>>>    while still having their information available to those with the proper
>>>>>>    access.
>>>>>>    - The ability to freely host or move their information to
>>>>>>    different service providers.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  Anyway, here is the current link to the proposal:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Proposal
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  The SOCML standard overiew:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Standard
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  And the Technical Specifications (in progress!):
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/SOCML_Technical
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  Please feel free to critique or reprimand.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  I hope everyone is doing well, and I look forward to working with
>>>>>> everyone.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  Chris
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>