Re: Browsing the social graph

On 1 August 2015 at 22:00, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've made an attempt at writing up this user story here.
>
>
> https://github.com/w3c-social/SoLiD/blob/master/UserStories/BrowsingTheFriendshipGraph.md
>
> It is now the 2nd user story marked as interop - online on our aggregate
> page:
>
> https://github.com/w3c-social/social-ucr
>
> Feedback is welcome.  Please feel free to comment, ask questions, or
> verify the information presented.
>
> The friendship graph is not specifically related to SoLiD.  The friendship
> graph extends many million users over hundreds of domains.  Indeed it
> extends to GNU Social, identi.ca and other sites that form the basis of
> Activity Pump.
>
> IMHO this is a fundamental foundation to the social web.  However, there
> is a big difference between read only profiles and profiles that you can
> write information to.  The SoLiD spec aims to allow more profiles to accept
> social changes on the web.
>


I thought I'd illustrate the value of the web and machine readable data by
looking at some of the profiles in this group.

First let's take aaron:

Here's my *human* readable version of his github profile:
http://gitpay.org/aaronpk

Click on linked data to see the *machine* readable version:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http://gitpay.org/aaronpk

Now because aaron puts his home page in his github URL for indieauth we get
a seeAlso to his home page:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Faaronparecki.com

I expected machines to struggle here, but really they do surprisingly
well.  It's slightly messy, but you are able to get some idea of what's
there and can follow links.

Now let's take Amy

http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http://gitpay.org/rhiaro

Again amy puts a link to her homepage in github for indie auth:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http://gitpay.org/rhiaro

But not much there.  We might think to stop there, but I happen to know amy
puts machine readable data in /about so let's look there:

And there we have it:
http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Frhiaro.co.uk/about

One of the most beautifully marked up pages in the whole of indieweb from
the POV of w3c machine readable standards.

I hope this illustrates that there is a data layer that underlies the human
readable web, and gives some idea of the magnitude, and how to explore it.
Enjoy surfing the web of data!