Social networking pickup
More people on Portable Social Networks
Yesterday Pascal tipped me off about a brainstorm session by some notables about Portable Social Networks.
They’ve got the stuff on the microformats wiki page right now.
On BarcampCologne (which I’m unfortunately going to miss) there is going to be a lot of activity around this subject, seeing at least the first release of Noserub (German post) a social network aggregator.
Here in the Netherlands Robert had also whipped up an implementation of this concept and he’s planning to hold a meeting around this same subject in Amsterdam. After my talk with Willem, we had agreed that PICNIC could be a nice event in or around which to embed these kind of meetings/devhouses.
And there’s going to b a Social Network DevCamp in Richmond sometime after.
I wrote about this earlier and it’s nice to see it getting adopted all over the web.
Dutch Hyvers
On the other hand, the leading Dutch social network is hinting at opening up its information to the outside world (Dutch article). It’s one of the largest silos of presence, profile and relation information in the Netherlands and as such is incredibly valuable. For now it has been hindered by a complete lack of applications from the outside and arguably amateurish development from the inside.
Yme Bosma —the guy leading the effort— looks like a decent sort and I’m curious as to how this will work out. Things that would be nice:
- Microformat (hCard, hReview, hResume and XFN) all content on the profile pages of Hyves members.
- Allow people to set their presence in Hyves using an API.
- Adopt an existing widget platform for integration in Hyves pages so the amount of widgets available will increase and developers can develop against a target.
- A smart implementation of OpenID providership would be nice. Log onto third party sites in the Netherlands using your Hyves username.
- Full application development inside the platform such as is possible on Facebook, judging from the current matureness level of Hyves, looks like it’s too far away to be realistic.
What’s next?
I think hResume and hReview are missing from the spec on the microformats wiki. I will add those today or tonight (I’m not completely sure what the procedure for editing is). Both should be optional but both could add much of the same information already contained on all those sites in a richer and opener fashion.
This does get my hands itching to implement some of this myself but it’s a bit of a conundrum what to implement. I know what the players already in the sphere should implement, but how do you get into the game?
(Posting has been a bit sparse lately. Summer is partly to blame for this. Expect lots of stuff from end of August onward and have a great summer.)
Yme Bosma http://www.yme.nl
August 3rd, 2007Let’s see how far we can go in meeting your requests;-)
It’s already possible to add a widget platform by the way. yourminis works best: http://www.yourminis.com/
Robert http://53miles.com
August 3rd, 2007Hehe, somebody from Picnic told me the same thing: we should do a brainstorm session there about this subject. I think it was Yme actually at some Twitter meeting. I’ll contact him about doing the meetup, and let you know how it turns out.
I think it’s actually just a matter of figuring out the right protocol and formats. If smaller existing networks would support it, or if we make a small network that demo’s it (like Jyte for OpenID), widespread implementation can happen. Good point on the hResume/Review!
Robert http://53miles.com
August 3rd, 2007Oh Yme is here already. Small world
Dirk Olbertz http://noserub.com
August 3rd, 2007Thanks for mentioning NoseRub. It’s not only an aggregator, but should also be some kind of personal profile page, which others can subscribe to and thus get automatically updates about your social network activities: you sign up for a new service, or delete an old one and you don’t need to inform anyone about that, because they subscribed to your NoseRub account and thus already know.
And you can install NoseRub on your own server - just like WordPress - and really have control about your social network.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
August 3rd, 2007Heh, we move to a dedicated server and it promptly suffers a power crisis and half the (ginormous) datacenter is shut down for about 78 minutes. Fortunately the server came right back up without any troubles.
Apologies for the downtime.
Caleb Elston http://www.spendapp.com
August 21st, 2007I have just recently had my eyes opened to the implications of widespread adoption of profile portability. I cannot wait to see how things develop. We will be implementing many of these concepts in our new project.