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

HI,

On 12 Aug 2009, at 13:13, Toby Inkster wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 11:29 +0100, Dave Raggett wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Essentially OMB helps with load balancing gives you distributed  
> profiles
> - if peoples' profiles are on different servers, then load on one
> profile doesn't have to effect load on others.
>
> Messages end up distributed to more than one server. CiaranG  
> subscribes
> to my microblog, so my notices can be found in his stream should my  
> own
> server temporarily disappear <http://micro.ciarang.com/ciarang/all>.
>
> The laconica/OMB architecture certainly seems to represent a big
> improvement over centralised social networks.

Another MB project following a distributed approach is SMOB [1] while  
unfortunately not much active at the moment.
MB clients push their updates to multiple servers, but also keep the  
original post (in RDF, using SIOC + FOAF + linked to LOD entities  
based on hashtags) so that it could be later retrieved by new users  
(and stored in their MB application)
A paper describing the architecture is abailable at [2]

Best,

Alex.

[1] http://smob.sioc-project.org
[2] http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2008/papers/11.pdf


>
> While individual profiles are not hosted in a P2P manner - each is  
> tied
> to a particular server - the network as a whole is.
>
>> Retaining HTTP based identifiers for resources whilst
>> using P2P protocols for dereferencing them
>
> In the example of my notices on CiaranG's microblog, his  
> installation of
> laconica knows the full absolute HTTP URI of each of my notices, a  
> full
> copy of the notice text, and certain data about me, the author of  
> them,
> so could certainly be used to dereference the URI, maybe not providing
> the exact same byte-for-byte representation of the resource, but
> providing something "close enough" (e.g. maybe a different HTML
> template).
>
>> Supporting a mix of social web features, including
>> traditional SNS, blogs, wikis and messaging (tweets)
>
> There is nothing in the OMB draft spec that inherently limits it to
> messages of 140 characters or less - this is an arbitrary restriction
> which could easily be lifted. That would allow longer articles, wiki
> diffs and potentially even full videos to be distributed in a similar
> manner.
>
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 15:53:57 UTC