Re: [Social-discuss] Interoperability?

[Matija Šuklje]

Dne petek 28. maja 2010 ob 02:34:25 je Mischa Tuffield napisal(a):
> Given this current trend (motivated by all the facebook malarky), and the
>  fact that so many people are working towards this goal of a dsn, from my
>  POV it seems naive to think that any one of these projects are going to
>  "win" and become the defacto platform for this awesome future we are
>  hoping for/working towards. It seems that a specification of a protocol
>  which all these projects could use to communicate with each other seems
>  like it would be super valuable. I mean variety is the spice of life, and
>  as a user I would feel most empowered if I had the ability to choose which
>  software I use to be apart of a social network which I run off of my own
>  server.

Exactly my point.

It would be extremely naïve to think any one instance or one such project by 
itself would "be the next Facebook" and be just as hip and popular.

But if tackle this the way it was done with e-mail — i.e. no matter which 
server, which OS, which connection, which client etc. — users do stand a 
chance to eventually move to such server and client software they like, while 
still being able to communicate to each other.

How far are we with this protocol specifications? Which projects have already 
agreed to or at least participated in plotting it?

I'm not favouring anybody, but IMHO the current status quo is such that 
Diaspora has such a huge media coverage that:

a) it would be worth jumping on that wagon and make use of the spotlight while 
it's there. If we can claim we're decentralising the social network not only 
with Diaspora, but so wide that anybody can use any of the numerous projects  
and tweak it to their liking (or even roll their own), run it anywhere and 
still be able to communicate with Alice, Boris, Charlie, Diana, Estefan and 
Gérémie.

b) as was already posted elsewhere, the huge media coverage and tub of money 
combined with only 4 people working 3 months on a social networking project, 
does very much sound like Diaspora in that time won't be able to fulfil its 
patrons' aspirations. If we don't take use of that momentum to promote others 
such projects and show they're interoperable, we might have done more harm 
then if there was no media coverage for Diaspora (or suchlike) at all.

IMHO the challenge now is that to have a protocol specification out in these 
Diaspora minus 3 months and get as many projects to use it as possible. In the 
ideal scenario Diaspora (as current de facto flagship) would use all these 
shared protocols as well.



Cheers,
Matija
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