12 items tagged “portablesocialnetworks”
2008
Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web. Ben Ward’s tour de force of practical tools and techniques for building out the distributed social web, using XFN and hCard to represent the data. If you only read one article on portable social networks, make it this one.
Find Your Friends. Flickr have added a characteristically classy friend import feature, pulling from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any unhygienic password sharing. It’s a crying shame that the Yahoo! contacts API they are using isn’t available outside the company.
The real roadblocks to data portability on social networks. A bunch of smart questions posed by Facebook’s Dave Morin. This is why I think data portability is the wrong framing—moving data between sites is really hard. Importing social relationships between sites is much more viable (hence my interest in social network portability). Also, the complaints about systems sharing e-mail addresses are neatly addressed by using OpenID as the GUID for a user instead. OpenIDs can’t be spammed.
Windows Live Contacts API (via) I didn’t realise Microsoft already have a contacts API for Live (which presumably covers hotmail as well).
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast.
Cashing in the Bling. Pownce is open to the public, and Leah has written up some neat friend importing tricks that take advantage of the pre-existing “profile bling” links to profiles on other sites. I hope to do something smart with the profile links on Django People in the future, although I’m not convinced the site would benefit from a “friends” mechanism.
The data portability folks want to make it easy for you to jump from service to service. I want to make it easy for users of one service to talk to people on another service.
DataPortability.org. “Standardized Data Portability is the next great frontier for the web. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors.”
2007
Portable Social Networks: Take Your Friends with You. Brian Suda explains how OpenID, XFN and hCard can be used together to bootstrap portable social networks.
Giant Global Graph. Tim Berners-Lee points out that the Semantic Web is designed to solve problems such as portable social networks.
Figuring out OpenSocial
So it’s out, and lots of people are talking about it, but I’m still trying to work out exactly what it is. There seem to be two parts to it: a standardised set of GData APIs for accessing lists of friends and their activities (like the Facebook news feed) and a bunch of JavaScript APIs for enabling developers to write hostable widgets and “container sites” to embed those widgets.
[... 289 words]Satisfaction signup page. Check out the box on the right: it lets you use hCard to instantly import your public profile data (including a user icon) from Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming and more.