DiSo & The Web Citizen: Distributed Social Networking Starts Here

Chris Messina

discussed previous communities (Civic SPace; Flock; BarCamp; OpenID)

social networking is not about the ads; lots of friends you never meet; forced friendships.

so try distributed models.. first social networks had niches (mySpace, Facebook, Linkedin)

Each system required you to create yourself each time. Lots of repretition. So have system-centric views of use. leads to hypervaluations. users not the same as customers. users are ants. customers have friends, perhaps in the State Dept. (good laugh).

want to make it citizen-centric. his example: each transit system in San Francisco are system specific. How to get from San Fran to San Jose, must go through different websites and systems. want to have a single system.

who is the web citizen? they have identity, they have provenance. they have friends with identity and provenance. has agency – people have choice. can move data, friends, etc. somewhere else.

a distributed social network – identify where you come from. place to live. manage it from one place. web services subscribe to me, not other way around. If I change address, I should only have to push that out once.

Flexible permissioning. if I only have to update One site, more likely I will make sure data is up to date.

challenges – how do you find friends? hard on open web. maintain interface fidelity. (i.e. Firefox and add-ons). makes interface less intuitive. upgrading a problem.

components of DiSo site – activities. create easily used interface of life. display friends. more than email address. messages and notifications. make it easy. filtering hue number of unread messages across different sites. groups. grouping is ad hoc coming together (GSP is an example).

identity needs to be consolidated. technologies that exist today – openid. microformats. OAuth. atom (atomenabled.org).

current status – started in december. starting with wordpress. diso-project.org