One Ring To Rule Them All

I think it's unlikely that we're all going stop hacking, sit down around 
a big table, hash out the perfect social networking protocol, and then 
rush off to implement it.

First, because if you think about it too little, you come up with an 
insufficiently powerful protocol to do what people need done.

Second, if you think about it too much, you'll go down so many ratholes 
that you'll never actually publish a protocol.

I think that by their nature, FSW technologies require internetworking 
protocols for instance-to-instance communication.

I think that developers will implement those protocols that make sense 
for their users, or for acquiring new users. I don't think they'll pick 
a protocol because it looks great or because it's easy; they'll do it 
because they have to. Because there are lots of users on that other 
internetwork.

There will probably be some components that we'll see making up most of 
the internetworking and client interfaces from here:

  * domain-based IDs (HTTP URLs and/or Webfinger)
  * RESTful APIs
  * JSON
  * OAuth
  * HTTPS for on-the-wire security

Finally: I think federation can be well-served by a monoculture of Free 
and Open Source servers. There are network effects between users, but 
there are also network effects between sysadmins, developers, 
documentation writers, translators, third-party developers, and so on. 
There are hazards of stagnation, and choke points, but more people 
working on the same codebase is better than lots of people working on 
different codebases.

-Evan