Comments on: Anatomy of an Open Social Network

By: Stephen Paul Weber

Stephen Paul Weber — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:04:56 +0000

The DiSo Project (http://www.diso-project.org/) is part of an effort to build just this sort of system, and solve just these sorts of issues.

SGAPI beats RubHub these days ;) http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

By: Mat Scales

Mat Scales — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:29:49 +0000

Firstly, on the idea of Facebook being so important, I think you probably have a very distorted view of things because you and your friends are all on there. Most of my friends think LiveJournal is the biggest social networking site ever, for similiar reasons.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot recently and I would really, really like to get involved with something practical here. I want to see this idea get off the ground, so I started a blog to note down my ideas at http://blog.theopennetwork.org/.

I don’t know if XFN is really the appropriate tool for the kind of network I have in mind, but like with the Facebook/LiveJournal thing my perspective is currently quite narrow!

A lot of people are talking about ‘open social networks’ as basically just MySpace with an option to export your details. My idea is a much more distributed system, where I keep my friends list with one site, blog on another and have a swanky, polished profile page somewhere else, all tied together through my OpenID.

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:16:49 +0000

Manuzhai: This is a major problem with the system. In part, it would be a user-education issue, to urge users not to reveal their private keys to aggregation services. They should be treated with the same care as email passwords. (which, I note with some despair, many users do indeed reveal to Facebook so that it may plunder their contact lists for new signups...)

As a counterpoint, users could be encouraged to reveal more rather than less information through their hCard. Then aggregators could create meaningful indexes out of even just the public data. At the same time, more sophisticated aggregators could be xfn-friended by their users, which would allow a greater amount of their data to be indexed, with the understanding that the sites would not share this data beyond that user's list of xfn friends.

By: Manuzhai

Manuzhai — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:05:19 +0000

I’ve been thinking along the same lines (mostly because the social network that’s in vogue in the Netherlands, hyves.net, sucks so much). I think OpenID, XFN or FOAF and things like that could make a fine social network. There just needs to be one big player who implements that stuff, so that the playing field is moved up to another level.

One other problem with distributing social networks is that there can be a somewhat trusted provider who exposes information from a user on another provider to all it’s users, when the information was just supposed to be shown to the one user.

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:17:52 +0000

Fair enough. But most of those doing the talking are Silicon Valley tech-heads who are indeed talking about Facebook. And even if you do look to international successes (CyWorld, for example), I don’t think any other one in recent memory can claim the same extraordinary growth that Facebook has experienced.

By: Jarek Piórkowski

Jarek Piórkowski — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:45:13 +0000

"Anyone who talks about “social networks” today as if they mean anything other than Facebook is being coy, or is deluded."

Or does not live in North America.