Marc Worrell

Federating Social Networks / SNES 00

Techniques and protocols to share information across the boundaries of individual websites.

8 Dec 2007

A workshop where we explore methods to federate Social Networks. Subjects include publish & subscribe using XMPP and Atom Publishing Protocol, migration and consolidation of accounts and works across websites, distributed search and linking to content across websites.

See also: upcoming.yahoo.com/event/335427
Live coverage at: jaiku.com/channel/fsn

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AnyMeta sharing diagram -

In all the buzz around social network portability, this one-day workshop will explore how social network services and Content Management Services can work together in a so-called federation. With a few presentations setting the stage in the morning, the rest of the day we will discuss the different protocols, formats and agreements needed to make such a federation possible.

Topics touched upon include:

• Aggregration of people, their profile information and works on other services.
• Migration and consolidation of people and their works.
• The ability to form relationships between people and works across services.
• Timely and efficient notification of changes.
• Distributed search.

Technologies that are likely to play a role include: Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, XMPP and in particular the XMPP publish-subscribe extensions, OpenID, OAuth, and more detailed descriptions of people and works using RDF, FOAF, vCard, microformats.