Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, DeviantART, LiveJournal etc. etc. etc. They're all closed internet communities. Walled gardens. Lovely, but walled.
There's nothing terribly wrong with this I suppose, but sometimes I don't want to be walled.
So then I can use WordPress, Blogger, or any number of available CMSs to host my own personal website. I'm not walled, but all of a sudden I can't communicate any more!
The walled gardens are great: there are communities in there.
The personal website are great: I can do anything I want there.
We need a way to connect the walled gardens to each other, and to the outside world.
The rise of web widgets and pasties was the prelude to this. Facebook has vaguely hinted at this with its revolutionary Facebook Platform.
What we need now are platforms for all the other social networking sites, and pluggable modules for personal websites that let facebookers, myspacers, bloggers and everyone else really interact with eachother on the level.-- conskeptical, Jun 24 2007 FOAF http://www.foaf-project.org/Annotate links to other people with a description of their relationship. [jutta, Jun 24 2007] OpenID http://openid.net/Share user identity information across systems. [jutta, Jun 24 2007] Relationship http://vocab.org/relationship/XML vocabulary for describing relationships between people. [jutta, Jun 24 2007] // Facebook has vaguely hinted at this with its revolutionary Facebook Platform
What's revolutionary about it?
Have some links to building blocks of a beginning open social networking infrastructure. FOAF is serious, easy, but not all that widely adopted; OpenID is still being pushed for; Relationship seemed more of an exercise - I'm not sure who uses it, or for what.-- jutta, Jun 24 2007 [jutta] What's revolutionary about the Facebook Platform is that facebook has a significant user base... The links you provided make sense, but they need to be adopted by the big communities, or acquire communities of their own, before they're of anything more than academic interest...-- conskeptical, Jun 24 2007 livejournal is behind OpenID; there are plugins for the Wordpress and Movable Type blogs. Not a big company, but also more than academic.
So, that's really a "let's all", then?-- jutta, Jun 24 2007 The big problem is that those "walled gardens" are all containing very separate environments. Livejournal is for written communications, typically of a personal nature. MySpace is for elaborate profile pages and relationship webs. I have no idea about Facebook since apparently you cannot even look at their pages unless you are a member. HalfBakery is about wild ideas solving real world problems.-- Galbinus_Caeli, Jun 25 2007 I've been thinking over this same problem. I've even been working on a web services API that could be used to interact with a "profile" concept in a neutral way. I plan to publish the idea and a prototype implementation before too long.-- ironfroggy, Jun 25 2007 > "that I can adopt multiple personas over several platforms" yes, when we start adopting universal ID, it becomes necessary to allow multiple IDs per person.
> "those "walled gardens" are all containing very separate environments" good! 'Don't Repeat Yourself' is a good mantra for apps developers. And by connecting the apps together, less repeating needs to occur...-- conskeptical, Jun 27 2007 (Off topic) I found a facebook group for the halfbakery. Neat.-- acurafan07, Jul 31 2007 random, halfbakery