tola

Synopsis

A distributed social network using open standards and the semantic web.

Rationale

The current breed of social networking sites are all based on centralised isolated systems run by single companies. Users on one social network can not easily interact with users on another and people will often have to sign up for an account on several networks to keep in touch with different groups of friends. By using existing open standards, we can create a distributed social network which does not require a user to sign up with multiple isolated networks but allows all social networking services to interact to form a unified network. With a distributed system, anyone could potentially host their own profile, friends list, blog, events etc. and still be part of the same network.

Features

Below are examples of common social networking features which could be implemented in a distributed way using existing open standards.

Individuals

• Profile - vCard
• Friends - FOAF (plus XFN or relationship schema for finer grained relationships.)
• Messages - Email!
• Mediablog - RSS/Atom
• Events - iCalendar
• Privacy - OpenID (plus XDI & SAML)

Groups

• Blogroll - OPML
• Discussions - Mailing lists

Use Cases

• Jack registers with a social networking site which includes an OpenID server, fills out his contact details which can be downloaded as a vCard, writes a list of friends which is published as a FOAF file, starts a blog which has an RSS or Atom feed and a calendar which can be subscribed to using iCalendar.
• Jill writes a blog entry on her own web site and Jack syndicates her blog along with a list of his other friends, Jack comments on Jill's blog, authenticating with his OpenID.
• Jack arranges a party around his house and clicks an "invite" button which sends an email off to Jill with an embedded iCalendar file. Jack's friends who are already subscribed to his calendar already know about the party.
• James adds photos to his mediablog and tags Jack and Jill in a photo using foaf:depicts in his FOAF file.
• Jack looks through James' friends list and finds the homepage of someone he knows from school but hasn't spoken to for years, he adds them to his FOAF file and sends them and posts a comment on their blog.
• Company X sets up a service which crawls the web for FOAF files and displays a graphical representation of a network of friends. They have services for searching for people by their FOAF files, creating mailing lists and blogrolls (using OPML) for groups of people.