Re: Federation protocols

Nick Jennings wrote:
>
> You just described the ability to poke, friend, comment, etc. across 
> any number of "federated" social networks. Which would effectively 
> mean that each of those networks would have to implement each of those 
> features. A twitter clone would need to implement poking and 
> friending? commenting and tweeting are different concepts too. 
> Messaging, posting, commenting, tweeting, activity updates (Jim played 
> Texas Hold'em on Facebook, on your Twitter stream?)... If this is what 
> federation is, then that's exactly what I see as one giant monolithic 
> feed that social networks are all expected to support.
>
> Take XMPP. There are a huge number of things you can do with XMPP, 
> various extensions that describe certain features and provide the XMPP 
> stanzas to implement them. However, most XMPP chat clients don't 
> support even half of the extensions described [1].
>
> In the end, when you talk about XMPP federation & interoperability, 
> you're only really talking about *the lowest common denominator* which 
> is sending a message from one place to another (OK, and presence & 
> buddy lists). It's more common than not, that all the nifty extensions 
> your XMPP client supports will not show up in someone elses chat 
> (encryption, alert/buzzing, even 'user is typing' /'user has stopped 
> typing' is an extension not every chat client supports).
>
> So, if we follow that same principle, in the end what we have is 
> "http://twitter.com/user1 sends a messages to 
> http://facebook.com/user2" ... but hell, on twitter you can't even 
> send messages to someone who isn't following you.
>
> That's what I mean about what do we mean about federation :)
>

Excellent points, which lead me to some thinking about what is it that 
Facebook does that other media don't.  For what it's worth:

It's all about threaded conversations - sort of like back fence or 
cocktail party or bar conversations - multiple people, potentially 
engaged in multiple conversations, simultaneously, usually short lived, 
and with some selectivity about who's in the room and in a specific 
conversation.

Email List:
- defines a community
- simultaneous conversations (threaded)
- but.. hard to set up and manage a group
- but.. people you want to talk with are often spread across multiple lists

USENET:
- communities
- threads
- easy to set up a new group (at least for alt.)
- harder to control distribution and access

Twitter:
- communities, sort of, w/ hashtags
- threads, sort of, w/ hashtags - but not really in the sense of 
threaded conversations via email, usenet, Facebook
- no control of who follows you

Facebook:
- one big community, but control of who can see a post
- threads that are attached to a specific message, and threads usually 
die out pretty quickly
- ability to follow, like, respond to, participate, share a post/thread
- ability to filter (sort of) what you see
- seems to match the feel of hanging out at a water cooler, or bar, or 
country club, or pizza joint, or <name your model "hangout">

Google+
- seems to follow a similar model to Facebook
- interesting question about why it hasn't caught on as much

LinkedIn Groups:
- somewhat of a cross between groups and short-lived discussion threads
- added benefit of notification by email
- seems to be pretty popular for professional purposes

All of this sort of suggests that the lowest common denominators are:
- ability to post a short message (a thought, a question, a link to an 
interesting web site, ...)
- ability to select distribution (specific individuals, family, friends, 
groups, ...)
- ability to filter your incoming stream(s)
- ability to read, follow, share, tag, like, comment
- (what did I miss?)

Starts to sound like RSS or Atom, plus aggregators, with some kind of 
access control mechanism added (almost has to be encryption based - 
where the question becomes how to distribute keys for a specific message 
- maybe something like Kerberos coupled with one of the encryption 
options specified for RSS/Atom).

Miles Fidelman

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

Received on Sunday, 2 June 2013 17:22:10 UTC