tola - open source

OStatus: Real-time Distributed Social Networking

tola — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:59:15 +0100

The current popular breed of social networking services are closed networks which don't connect with each other. If a user from one network wants to connect with a user on another network, they generally have to sign up for an account with the second network. This inconvenience ultimately results in a few very large networks with an inordinate amount of control over peoples' most personal data and a lack of choice and privacy for users.

Current Social Networking Services

In 2007 I wrote about an idea for building a distributed social network using a collection of existing open standards. The idea was to allow for social networking functionality equivalent to services like Facebook, but in a more open way where users can choose their provider or host their own data, but still connect with each other. The result would be a "network of networks" connecting to each other with open standards and ultimately much more control and choice for the end user.

Distributed Social Networking

Things have moved on a little since 2007 and a new collection of protocols has now emerged to allow near real time publishing of "activity streams" which can be discovered and commented upon within a social graph in an open, distributed way. You can think of this as a Facebook news feed, but without Facebook. Users will be able to choose from a whole range of different social networking services (or even run their own), and connect with their friends on different networks. Your news feed can then aggregate information from all of the people you're following across a range of different networks, update you about what's going on in near real time and allow you to send a response from your network to theirs.

OStatus is a collective name given to a suite of existing protocols which make this possible. They include:

PubSubHubbub - Real-time publishing ("PuSH")
ActivityStreams - Represent social actions in XML with Atom
Salmon - "Upstream" comments and replies
Portable Contacts - Social graph and contact data sharing
WebFinger - XML representation of a user's identity in terms of the services they use

The OStatus standardisation process is just getting started to define how these existing protocols can work together, but sites like Google Buzz, StatusNet, WordPress.com, and Tumblr are already implementing some or all of the protocols.

There are lots of projects which are working on the idea of distributed social networking. One which has attracted a lot of attention in the press recently is Diaspora which was recently started by a group of four students from New York University thanks to funds raised with an online campaign. The Diaspora team hasn't released any code yet, but they have committed to supporting OStatus. There are many other similar projects, including but not limited to:

Hopefully OStatus and some or all of these projects can do for social networking what SMTP & Sendmail did for email, what HTTP/HTML and Apache did for document sharing and what RSS/Atom and Wordpress did for blogging. If just some of these projects choose to support the OStatus group of protocols (some of them already have), then the social web will be a much more open place!

See OStatus.org and a presentation by Even Prodromou for more information.

Google Chrome OS

tola — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:07:00 +0100

In my last blog post I outlined a design concept for a "graphical shell for the web", a replacement for a desktop environment for devices dedicated to browsing the web. On Tuesday Google announced the "Google Chrome OS" project which appears to be an implementation of a very similar idea.

Google says that Chrome OS will be "an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks" and is their attempt to "re-think what operating systems should be", with a focus on "speed, simplicity and security". Chrome OS will essentially be Google Chrome running on a Linux kernel.

After the announcement several people contacted me with messages along the lines of "have you heard about this? It sounds like what you've been banging on about for years!". I agree, and I think this is a significant development in the transition from applications installed on a desktop PC to services provided over the web.

I'm eager to see what the Chrome OS user interface will look like, the blog post mentions a new windowing system and I hope the UI doesn't resemble a desktop environment. Ideally it would be as simple as possible with only the minimal user interface elements required for browsing the web and operating the host device.

I think that devices based on this OS will have a range of benefits over the traditional Personal Computer:

Reliability - Solid state devices like netbooks and nettops have no moving parts and with a solid Linux-based OS could be exceptionally reliable.
Maintenance -With a significantly reduced complexity on the client-side software stack and potentially automatic updates, maintenance will be greatly reduced.
Security - With a new security model and a UI designed only for using the web, the risk of malicious software or malicious unauthorised use could be greatly reduced.
Environmental impact - Netbook and nettop computers tend to have a much lower power consumption than traditional PCs. The power usage of computing shifts to the "cloud", with a focus on efficiency and the use of renewable energy in centralised data centres.
Cost - Low cost hardware, no software license costs and low power consumption, with no vendor lock-in.

I look forward to hearing more about the Google Chrome OS and the devices it will run on.

BBC Radio 4 on Open Source

tola — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:15:21 +0100

MJ Ray points towards a BBC Radio 4 programme on Open Source by Paul Bennun.

I've just listened to the programme and it contains some wonderful ideas about how software is unique in the world, being a collection of ideas rather than a collection of physical components. It's an insightful, well balanced exploration of Free and Open Source software and how it is a social rather than technological phenomenon.

I particularly liked a quote from Nick McGrath, Head of platform strategy for Microsoft in the UK.

"We don't compete with the Open Source community, that would be like trying to compete with the weather".

GPL Java and Other Bloggings

tola — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:49:22 +0000

Some interesting technology related blog posts I've seen recently...

GPL Java

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) and Bob Sutor (IBM) both mention the news that Sun has chosen the GPL to open source Java with. Good news!

Me and Sam spent the afternoon trying to write an algorithm to calculate a winning hand in Gin Rummy using Java which wasn't much fun. I'm becoming a fan of Eclipse though.

Google has the ultimate answer

Jake Stride points out that Google has the answer to life, the universe and everything. Shame they don't have the question! Or, perhaps they did, until I visited that URI, at which point the universe was instantly replaced with something even more complicated.

network clients != thin clients

Jonathan Schwartz clarifies why he said "I don't believe in thin clients." He goes on to explain that web applications don't run on thin clients because web browsers do too much to be considered thin clients. What's important is network clients, not that they're necessarily "thin".

Open Standards vs. Open Source

In one of the slides from Bob Sutor's talk at the University of Texas, he mentions Open Standards vs. Open Source. He explains Open Standards as an open blueprint which can be developed and maintained in a transparent way and is freely implementable. Open source is a transparently developed implementation, possibly of open standards.

This is interesting because I strongly believe that open standards are even more important than open source. You don't have to believe in open source to implement an open standard, but open standards are crucial. Even if you implement an open standard in a proprietary way, you can still interoperate with an open source implementation of that standard.