I posted the following entry in my other blog.
A couple of days back, Anne Zelenka wrote about DiSo, an approach to building a distributed social network using Wordpress as the basic platform. A week back, Chris Messina mentioned in his blog about his plans to work on a “prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out” and he called the project DiSo. As I mentioned in a previous post, others have expressed a desire to have a distributed social network as well. Based on the comments posted in response to Anne’s post, it is apparent that many others (including yours truly) have been working on realizing this objective. Anne’s post is focused on DiSo and Wordpress. If the objective is truly distributed social network, then neither is critical. One could have multiple platforms and multiple implementations. They all should work just fine.
As I mentioned in my VON presentation, three things are needed: a web-wide identity mechanism, an open API to post and retrieve data from one site to another and finally a way to authenticate the entity that is invoking an API call. OpenID and OAuth provide the needed technology for the first and the last items. So the critical item is a generally accepted set of APIs. I am hoping that OpenSocial will be that.
A friendly competition between multiple efforts will do all of us good. So be open and give your attention to all of us. If you are interested in distributed social networks, please take a look at other efforts as well.
Posted by aswath at December 13, 2007 04:48 PM