a common understanding of profiles

It's been 5 years since SWAT0 was proposed as an "acid test" for
microblogging platforms.  In that time it's been a struggle to implement in
an interoperable way, although Aaron seems to have come very close.

In looking at implementing this with SoLiD we realized that there were some
pre requisites.  Firstly, it requires a common understanding of
"following".  And it seems to me that a common understanding of profiles is
a pre requisite for following.

Ann mentioned that Boeing was hoping that some standardization of profiles
would come out of this group, and Amy also supported this, and part of her
PhD will partly deal with this topic.

So, I was wondering if it could be possible to try to come to a common
understanding of profiles.

[[
Some background reading [can be skipped]

Bradfitz original post on OpenID/Yadis

http://lj-dev.livejournal.com/683939.html

Terminology from the social web XG

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/#Terminology

Web Identity and Discovery.  A spec authored by timbl, henry, andrei (and
others) on web identity

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/
]]

Looking at what we have.

SoLiD uses linked data (webid) to denote either people or robots.  The
mandatory serialization is turtle, JSON LD is rarely supported, and hash
URIs are common.

Indieweb overloads your homepage as an indirect identifier for a person.
The mandatory (only?) serialization is HTML.  The first h-card tag in the
document is person.

ActivityPump: ??

It seems to me that the u-url attribute is very valuable here, because it
allows an indieweb h-card to have a URI.  At this time the indieweb parsers
dont notice this, but there's no reason why that might not happen in
future, if there was a need.  So I see a possible path to convergence on
that front.

I think the biggest mistake made in the social web XG, and OStatus was to
leave profiles out of scope.  We ended up 5 years later with every system
making their own profiles and no two different systems having interoperable
profiles (except perhaps for FOAF).

I'd like to understand the Activity Pump view on this.

I think it would be good if some of the participants in this group could
work together to find some common ground, which would make implementing the
deliverables that much easier.

One good thing about this topic that it's easily testable because
interoperable profiles will yield a browsable social graph.

[[
Below are some examples with using SoLiD / facebook:


   - http://foaf-visualizer.gnu.org.ua/?uri=http://danbri.org/foaf.rdf
   -
   http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fmelvincarvalho.com%2F
   - http://deiu.rww.io/profile/card#me
   -
   http://linkeddata.github.io/profile-editor/#/friends/view?webid=https:%2F%2Fakuckartz.databox.me%2Fprofile%2Fcard%23me
   -
   http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/browser/?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fgraph.facebook.com%2F721776474%23#https://graph.facebook.com/721776474#

]]
Would be happy to hear thoughts on this topic, particularly to see an
ActivityPump profile.

* Disclaimer * this tends to be a topic that people have strong views on,
philosophically.  If you'd like to reply to this thread, it would be
helpful to try and be constructive, preferably from implementation
experience.