Monday a week ago I visited Mediamatic on invitation from Willem Velthoven to talk about how they could fit in Portable Social Networks in their anyMeta system. This meeting was inspired by our meeting in Copenhagen and the talks we had about opening up social networks.

Picture by Matt Biddulph

anyMeta and OpenCI

Mediamatic.lab implements and maintains a series of social networking sites for the creative industries (CI) in Amsterdam. These are sites built on the anyMeta system that resemble structured wikis with a strong social dimension. They are positive towards open source, but the anyMeta system is not open source for reasons of manageability of the projects.

Seeing as that these sites have a lot of overlap in both in functionality and in the people that have an account on them, they wanted to abstract and syndicate the social stuff as much as possible. Currently people can have accounts on each of the different sites, all with the same information on them.

Seeing as Mediamatic builds anyMeta themselves and they have total control, it is very feasible for them to devise and mandate the exchange of information between their own sites. To enable the exchange between their own sites, they will use their own protocol and data format to provide for a high fidelity exchange of information. Leaving implementation details for what they are, it should become possible to use one account on any of the sites in the network.

To verify your identity on the various sites of the network they are going to enable OpenID consumer and provider functionality in the next version. This way they will have a way of distributed authentication both within their network of sites and throughout the rest of the internet.

anyMeta and the rest of the web

Having solved the problem of information exchange between anyMeta sites, they would also like to play along with the rest of the internet as far as that is possible. Being able to share public information with the rest of the internet in a logical way is also on the agenda but not so straight forward.

Making public profile information available using hCard and related microformats looks easy enough. Problems arise however because the templates are made by different people and that is the location of the microformatted markup. This means the template authors have to be educated on the subject of microformats.

Whenever I advocate the use of microformats, I always have to fight against the blank looks and criticism about the aplicability of the technology. It’s a solid Catch 22 that has to be taken on with real life use cases and benefits to extoll the virtues of a dirty semantic web. For hCard there are various uses cropping up over the internet, but for the others it is a lot more limited. Having microformatted data on sites and being able to parse that using browser plugins is a first step and essential groundwork for the real use cases and richer interaction that we all want to have.

Another plan they have at Mediamatic is to first enable the sharing of information between their sites and make plugins for some of the bigger CMS’es out there (Drupal, Joomla) so they can also exchange information with those systems.

In these use cases and in the case with the internet the issue of fidelity comes up again and again. How much information can you exchange reliably and what do you do when stuff is missing? This is an important and valid question with no ready answer; though mine would be ‘get what you can, and ignore the holes where possible’.

Other stuff

I am currently not implementing anything relating to OpenID and Social Networks but I think I would like to. One idea was to make a Facebook front-end site which uses the information in Facebook to offer you a microformatted profile. There already is an hCard application but extending this with XFN, hReview and hResume would be a real winner.

Yesterday on the O’Reilly event I heard about Yme Bosma who’s job it now is to drag Hyves kicking and screaming into the world of Open Social Networks. I wish him a lot of luck as that would be a good thing to have. I have started my own work on scraping the Hyves site but that hasn’t been as simple as I would have liked.

(I just got back from Spain and I have a cold. I had not gotten around to publishing this post yet.)

I got an invitation by Daniel Spronk to have lunch at the Eight Media office in Arnhem Friday two weeks ago. I was curious to their setup and having just graduated I had some free time on my hands. Cristiano had noticed their product Soocial during FOWA but I hadn’t realized that they were based in the Netherlands.

They are situated in a nice building a small walk from Arnhem centre. Their office looks nice, cosy and heavy on the Macs (see the pictures).

Total Experience

After a tour of the office I talked mostly with Daniel, Stefan and Salmon. We discussed what we we talked a bit about what they do, why they do it and where they’re going. Eight Media started out with Daniel and Stefan in 2001 as a small web agency and has since grown to the twelve people it houses right now.

They are very big fans of Python and Django because it is a nice language (Doh!) and Django enables them to setup site prototypes really really easily. I saw a demo of a site they were making with a Scriptaculous powered live search functionality which was very rich indeed.

Soocial

Recently they started working on a startup of their own called Soocial.

Soocial creates a central repository of your contacts which you can easily sync from your mobile with SyncML but also to any other location where you might want to have access to the people from your address book. Easy and seamless synchronization is key for Soocial’s success and they are taking the mobile phone as the primary access point to solve. This means they are busy building a SyncML conduit and easy ways of distributing and installing that on a variety of mobile phones.

They also provide a web interface where you can easily view and manage your contacts. Contacts are presented with hCard markup so you can easily access your data. I believe the plan is to expose an API so anybody who wants to write a plugin for other remote stores can do so. So if you want to send your data to Outlook, Highrise or GMail it should eventually be possible.

Sociality

Once you have a listing of somebody’s contacts, you pretty much also have a very accurate map of their social circle. Address books used to be nexus of your social interaction in the pre-web era. A little book scribbled full with names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, post-its and whatnot. A very rich carrier of social information which has seen very poor digital equivalents.

In the online world social interaction has completely diverged into closed applications each with its own silo of information. E-mail started it off, followed by instant messaging —which already has never been adequately supported in addressbooks—, mobile phones with calling and texting and it has gotten completely out of hand with the current diarrhea of social networking across all dimensions.

Convergence is unlikely to come up any time soon and without that the best we can really hope for is easy and painless interoperability. Soocial is building that, but it is undoubtedly going to prove really really difficult.

Soocial’s first take on the sociality of address books is to make updates propagate through your trusted social circle. So if you enter a new cell number, all your friends will automatically have it updated on their cell phones. They are aware that the data they store has much more applications and they will work further on that after the base functionality is in place.

I think one nice thing would be for me to enter my details using an OpenID with an hCard available at the same URL or at my provider. This way I could be always in control of my own information and still tie it into their network.

Their FOWA presentation got them a lot of buzz and they are now busy getting an alpha release out to their initial group of testers. The testing group is already filled up but you can still register. I did, but SyncML is not likely to work on my Nokia 3310.

The vibe I got was that these are nice guys who definitely know what they’re doing. They have a small, fun results oriented operation and they are scaling operations and attracting new people and having fun while doing so.

It’s interesting to see what will happen and it is fun to see that the Netherlands does have its own share of startups even in remote locations such as Arnhem.