Re: Federation protocols

On 31 May 2013 17:09, Darrell Prince` <prince.darrell@gmail.com> wrote:

> I also hear a lot of pushback on Facebook. Zuckerbergs recent involvement
> in some hare brained conservative PAC doesn't help. People want to get to
> something better. but there needs to be something out there noticeably
> better, 3 steps ahead, and provide more advantages than, better friend
> requesting.
>

Betamax was technically better than VHS.

I know I'm the downer here - but I'm trying to be realistic: people will
not go through the friction of switching for a small feature change. A new
product has to be an order of magnitude better to have users switch.

Here's how I see the future of federated social networks playing out:

I start with the following assumptions:

   1. unique features drive user adoption (Instagram)
   2. that federation and open are just features that some developers see
   as useful / we don't sell a solution by pounding these down someone's throat
   3. the majority of developers care about quickly building a solution
   that works and gives them existing libraries and tools / any solution will
   need to make their life easier than using the Twitter of Facebook API and
   SDKs.
   4. developers do care about building on APIs and protocols that don't
   get removed from underneath them (Twitter API example from Michał).

With that in mind here's how I see us getting open and distributed social
networks adopted:

   1. we build great easy to use tools, libraries and provide fantastic
   documentation using existing established standards (eg Activity streams,
   XMPP)
   2. define the additional protocols for each of the functions of social
   networking (follower management, post management, following management,
   media sharing, inbox to client synchronisation) and work them through XSF
   and W3C committees.
   3. build great reference implementations (we're not build a clone of
   facebook) of specific features - eg meda sharing between domains.
   4. blog extensively about building on these tools.
   5. Other developers that are less concerned about federation and
   openness start building on these tools and creating their own apps.
   6. now we start to see an ecosystem around the apps and users are using
   their one identity to sign into existing social federated apps.
   7. at this poing perhaps someone comes along and writes an app that
   looks like a facebook wall - and it has more of a chance of
   working because users can reuse their existing social login from all the
   single use apps already written.

At no point have we started out to create a facebook-like wall and copy
what facebook does. Instead we provide a great framework for developers who
have a problem building on the existing social APIs.

S.

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