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.

Since Yesterday I have been able to have a quick review at Pownce (thank you Robert G.). Pownce literally has web2.0 written over it in all the bad ways: it has a weird name, it’s in Beta (or is it Alpha?), uses pastel colored themes, allows you to share stuff with your friends, is invite only, and is generally useless. Honestly, I love web2.0 technology but these guys are really pushing the hype.

As if things couldn’t get worse, they actually managed to ignore all the issues I discussed recently with Reinier: they are monetizing it even from this Alpha/Beta status, they offer something that (honestly) we don’t need, they are not really specific as you can share anything with anyone without really differentiating from let’s say an email, and it is clearly not viral. The last point might not be clear, but if you think about the fact that you almost never want to share random files with people then it makes sense. If you want to share specific things like photos or videos, you go to a site like Flickr or YouTube.

As Kevin Rose (guy behind Digg) is involved in this startup they are getting a lot of hype, but I think that’s sad as it takes focus away from the truly cool startups. In the end they did some stuff right though, as Pownce allows you to group friends and send files to individuals and groups. Additionally they launched a nice desktop application for Windows and Mac to share and get updates. Their tool uses Adobe AIR and has one problem though as SmudgyPixel noted yesterday:

All and all I think Pownce is a rubbish product in its current state, and I am already becoming pretty annoyed with all those “friends” of mine sending me “test” messages.