Re: Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Toby Inkster wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 09:46 +0100, Dave Raggett wrote:
>
>>   * Retaining HTTP based identifiers for resources whilst
>>     using P2P protocols for dereferencing them [...]
>
> Much of this list consists of things which the OpenMicroBlogging 
> spec handles pretty well. This is why I'm looking forward to 
> SWXG's talk from Evan Prodromou, whenever that happens.

Would you mind expanding on that? I've skimmed the OpenMicroBlogging 
spec [1] and it seems to only deal with a means to allow users of 
one microblogging service to publish notices to users of another 
service, given the other users' permission, and relying upon OAuth. 
I don't see how it supports load balancing, for instance.

As a reminder, my list of challenges:

  * Retaining HTTP based identifiers for resources whilst
    using P2P protocols for dereferencing them

  * P2P search algorithms for Social Networks

  * Support for access control and audience segregation

  * Supporting a mix of social web features, including
    traditional SNS, blogs, wikis and messaging (tweets)

  * Understanding and combatting DDOS attacks on P2P networks

  * Support for anonymous identities in P2P networks when
    people would otherwise risk state persecution

> Longer term, I hope SWXG leads to a W3C effort (a Working Group 
> perhaps) to develop a decentralised social networking protocol - 
> hopefully going beyond just 140 character messages though, and 
> instead allowing content in a wide variety of media types - 
> perhaps using OMB as a jumping off point, and certainly using it 
> as input to the process, along with efforts like Atompub and 
> Linked Data.

The open social web needs to be more than just microblogging 
although I agree that that is an important component. P2P techniques 
together with sub-pub models can offer near real-time performance 
without the need for relying on any one vendor for compute power.

[1] http://openmicroblogging.org/protocol/0.1/

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 10:30:07 UTC