Now that I have deactivated my Facebook account I am looking for a decent social network. Of course, I could become more active on MySpace and revive my account there but quite frankly, I am more inclined to deleting that account as well because I hate it. Plaxo is a possible solution but not perfect in anyway.
But what should be core features of a social network I’d use? Well, actually that’s not very difficult to answer: It should be as open as possible, letting me import and export my contact list, my profile data, if possible my attention data (events I attend, Twitter posts, music I listen to,…) and maybe other cool stuff I am currently not thinking about. Though everyone who has been facing a similar problem knows that it’s not easy to find a suitable network.
My Blog = My Social Network?
But I run a weblog. Isn’t a blog a social app? Communicating with people around the world? So why not turn it into a social network or at least a hub for all my social activities on the net which could be leveraged by other apps? My blogroll is already marked up with XFN values where applicable, people can subscribe to my OPML file (currently it’s hosted on BlogBridge because it updates automatically when I make changes to it, though I could host it on this server as well), and even have access to two APML files. The first one includes my Twitter posts, tracks scrobbled to Last.fm, events I am attending and much more (hosted on Engagd); the second one combines categories and tags used on this blog (thanks to Matthias Pfefferle’s efforts). Also my contact information is marked up as an hCard.
It is a start, I guess, but surely not enough.
DiSO
Chris Messina and Steve Ivy probably had similar thoughts when they launched their new project called DiSO. DiSo (=distributed social networking concepts) is an
umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts.
They want to combine efforts and develop plugins and tools which help make blogging platform WordPress a basis for social network portability. WordPress is just a start, though; those tools could be migrated to other platforms as well. And everyone who is familiar with Chris’ and Steve’s work knows that OpenID, microformats and OAuth will be integral parts of those efforts. Will Norris who developed the OpenID plugin for WordPress has joined them already which is good to see because there is no need to develop new tools and plugins when there are good ones available already.
Too many Projects?
I applaud efforts like DiSo. However similar projects have been launched or discussed already (Dataportability.org, Brad Fitzpatrick’s paper on the social graph, the social network portability mailing list,…). That might become confusing to some people because they could lose track of who is developing what.
Also it should be noted that only some geeks will profit from these kind of efforts. Most people don’t run a blog (yet?).
Thanks for the discussion yesterday @Webmontag Frankfurt, and for posting this overview, Carsten. As a geek running a blog, I’m very interesting in approaches like DiSo
Enjoyed yesterday’s discussion as well.
@Matthias und @Carsten it’s a pity, that I couldn’t come to the webmonday and have the discussion with you. I hope there will be some other possibilities to catch up the discussion.
@Matthias: And when do you switch to WordPress
Yep, we have to meet someday.
To geek a bit
Hey Carsten, thanks for picking this up, you make good points about potential markup confusion and about who the potential benefactors might be.
We’re starting with blogging because, as you know, WordPress already has a good foundation for us to build on and it pretty widely deployed. It’s also better than starting from scratch and in terms of uptake, I think has a higher likelihood of benefiting normal folks than if we tried to build something brand new. Time will tell, but this is how we’re choosing to bootstrap the project.
Second, there are A LOT of people working on this. But everyone seems to have their own ideas about implementation details and aren’t necessarily working to commodify the 80% cross-over use cases that we really need formats and protocols for in order for any of the innovation to happen. There’s also a lot of talk but a lot less code being produced, so with DiSo, we’re trying to emphasis real outcomes over theory. We’ll see how we fare; at least up front we’re trying to get a hold on what are reasonable outcomes to put on a roadmap:
http://diso-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=roadmap
The wide amount of discussion about this topic is also a good thing, because frankly it’s the MySpaces and Facebooks that we’re going to need to convince to recognize us. We can get far and do interesting things blog-to-blog, but let’s be realistic: part of the goal of this project is to force the big guys to move in this direction when we start enabling cool cross-site features that they can’t compete with by staying closed or by not supporting these technologies.
We’re living in an age of Internet Explorer Social Networks and hell, it’s about time we had a Firefox to demonstrate what’s possible. Not that we need hubris, and I don’t presume that DiSo will be that, but, the momentum is growing, and it’s just a matter of time and concentrated effort.
Chris, you’re absolutely right that it’s important to start developing tools now. Otherwise an old slogan became true: Talk-Action=Zero (oops, I am responsible for that as well, I guess).
I guess big SN’s will watch efforts like DiSo, though I doubt they will quickly change because of them. Pressure by people like us won’t help. We’re not many (somebody prove me wrong, please). Maybe they will change if newspapers and magazines pick up the story and demand change. Some media experts have to join DiSo, OAuth, OpenID,…
I don’t want to discourage anyone, though.
Perhaps the answer is not to find the perfect network, but to find a way to tie all of the networks together so that you can communicate from the platform - whether a social network or Wordpress - that you prefer. A cross platform communication tool may be the way to go…
You are right. Hopefully this will become true soon.
Carsten,
I brought it up because it seems like I am being invited to a new social network site every week and all my friends seem to be on different IM platforms. It makes it hard to stay in touch and communicate with all of them. There needs to be a way to cut across all the options.
Additionally, if they all work together, they could open up just a single API to developers. Would mean better apps for them, and for us
“A cross platform communication tool may be the way to go…”
I do a lot of programming on various internet related things, and cross platform software can prove to be very successful. The problems arise though that without them all using an API, and having to go in the front end, with so many modded sites around it would be an astronomical job to make sure everything knitted together nicely. Even with an API the developer’s have a habit of constantly fiddling about with this and that. I have this problem with a company I write API software for, and that is not even cross platform, and yet I have to update the code once or twice a week.
Cross platform on the networks would probably end up being a full-time job for at least 2 programmers, and they don’t come cheap. And like AOL used to do with the cross platform IM’s, they changed the code on a regular basis just to annoy the programmers and users.
Still, we live in hope that one of the bigger companies can come up with something….How long will the grass be by then?!?!
I`m not sure if you have looked into Squidoo but I rate it highly as one of the best social networking tools it also lets you link back to your site/blog very easily also.
Check it out.
I don’t think Squidoo is doing anything similar to what DiSo is about. It seems to be just another silo.
Have to admit I’m not a big fan of the big social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace myself. I never thought of WordPress as one but I guess they are in certain ways.
Hi, I use many different social network websites but overall I feel facebook is the most user friendly and more fun for social aspects such as online poker, photo tagging and various games and comparison options, would like to see more band promotion though..maybe soon.
There’s nothing wrong with favoring Facebook, I guess. And it has probably good reason not to be as open as I would like it to be. DiSo would be rather experimental.
I have a hard time considering WordPress as a social network for the simple reason that each install is its own world, but I guess thats where openID comes into place and an API that could bridge not just the same platforms (WordPress/Joomla/Drupal et al) but also cross-connect those platforms.
Now, when we get there - the skies are the only limits!
Yes, it’s a little bit hard to think about a platform like WordPress as a social network. Though if you don’t have social networks like MySpace and Facebook on your mind, and consider a social network just to be a connection between you, your friends, family, co-workers,… it can work.
And yes, an API to connect all platforms would enable people to have one, great network.
It’s actually quite time consuming to keep up a Facebook account and I’ve been very slack with mine. I guess I am kind of over it all and waiting for the next big thing.
I don’t think it would take much to turn Wordpress into it’s own social networking site where every Wordpress blog owner is linked in some way. Would be interesting to see.
Everything about blogging is social. Its the medium that allows people to connect on a personal level. Until today I have not heard of DiSO. Sounds great in theory. Due to the fact that social networking is a big part of web 2.0, many people are now incorporating the social aspect (blogging) directly into their websites. We, in the real estate biz, are seeing more and more sites that are essentially wordpress themes with static pages built around the social hub (blog).