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Amsterdam, Mediamatic Lab 2 comments

Federating Social Networks / SNES 00

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

  • 8 Dec 2007
    09:00 Mediamatic LabMediamatic Lab, Vijzelstraat 72, 3e verdiepingPO Box 17490, 1001 AD Amsterdam, 1017 HL, Amsterdam, +31206389901, www.mediamatic.nl/ (view on map) Vijzelstraat 72, 3e verdiepingPO Box 17490, 1001 AD Amsterdam1017 HLAmsterdam,

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

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.

2 comments

2 relevant articles

Since I can't seem to post to Jaiku, I'll comment here (until someone suggests a better platform for this discussion)
Interesting is that Microsoft (I know, of all companies) yesterday also seem to have launched something in the FSN space:
gigaom.com/2007/12/07/can-feedsync-gives-microsoft-social-networking-props/
And Opensocial seems to be having its issues:
groups.google.com/group/opensocial/web/whats-up-with-opensocial & www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/opensocial-still-not-open-for-business/
I do think both are developments to watch: Nobody is happy with going from zero to three competing 'standards' for exchanging social network data.

Dataportability

The Data portability organization (dataporability.org) is getting pretty big. Their ideas are similar tot the Federating social networks idea.

Here's an article about he organization (in Dutch):
teletekstisdood.blogspot.com/2008/01/organization-dataportability.html

Their first report has just been released:
groups.google.com/group/dataportabilityactionevangelism/

Also they have started a nice project to share your thoughts on Data portability through video:
www.particls.com/blog/2008/02/video-project-share-your-thoughts-about.html