I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
William Morris. A Dream of John Ball
Knowledge may be power, but this knowledge is distributed throughout social networks of people.
Social networking users are trapped in walled gardens where they cannot share data with others unless they are on the same social networking site or use the same vendor-specific API. FOAF (Friend of a Friend) has not solved this problem and many major social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twittr) are not exporting FOAF.
How can your educational, academic, non-profit, or even enterprise social network access this data!
Berners-Lee thought the functionality they provided was not radically different than what the early Web provided - i.e. The Web was always social.
W3C rejected OpenID (sharing identity) as a potential W3C standard due to security reasons and belief that a URI should be enough (i.e. the Semantic Web).Almost none of the well-known Web 2.0 companies are members of the W3C.
As such, standardization work currently in the Social Web is taking place through a number of different standards bodies, such as the IETF (OAuth),OASIS (XRD-S), and the upcoming Open Web Foundation.
The two questions are:
Eduserv funded myself to initiate the first foray of the W3C into standardizing the Social Web: The Social Web XG
Totally public and encouraging individual participation, all work done on public list-serv and all meeting minutes public, most work done on wiki.Open Invited Expert policy: You still have to sign Royalty-Free agreements in order to edit the specifications.
So YOU can get involved! Weekly talks with leading edge techology from outside the W3C as well as inside.Right now, over 70 members ranging from industry to academia to non-profit sector..
With myself (supported by Eduserv) as W3C Staff Contact and co-chair with Dan Brickley (FOAF) and Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone).
One problem is without a patent policy we might inadvertently build a software patent into our standard.
Having a patent in supposed open standard that companies unwittingly implement is an instant business plan for troll.
For examples, see the conflict over XNS (now XRIs) in the W3C, which led to the development of the W3C's patent policy.Royalty-Free might discourage both large corporations (i.e. Microsoft) with huge numbers of patents from participating...but social data portability is only going to work if everyone comes to the table honestly and openly.
The Social Web XG is creating a framework to conceptualize the Social Web space.
OpenID is a way of a user "logging-in once" to a service provider and then having their log-in details be verified by a trusted identity provider.
Your new OpenID username is a globally-unique URI:a href="http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin">http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin
ClaimID gave me one...so can many others...Sound familiar?
Tim Berners-Lee: "The AWWW says that everything of importance deserves a URI. Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!"
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin/xrds" />
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://openid.claimid.com/server" />
</head><body>
<p>OpenID identity page for hhalpin</p>
</body></html>
Go use your OpenID (list from LifeWiki)
Built in support for desktop applications, mobile devices, set-top boxes, and of course websites.
OAuth prevents it by explicitly asking you if you want to let Facebook grab your details from the provider. While OpenID 2.0 providers (using OpenID Attribute Exchange) may hold general information about you (avatar photo, addresses, phone numbers) that it can with your consent to service providers so users don't have to re-enter profile details, it's not really extensible on a Web-scale or meant to compete with OAuth.Watch WRAP (based more on SSL) being more close on the horizon...
Came from OASIS XRI committee, but luckily now seized by Eran Hammer-Lahav (Yahoo!). Used by OpenID 2.0, replacing YADIS.
After all, how hard can it be to list a bunch of URIs and add some descriptions next to each one? The only issue is agreeing on some format that everyone can understand and implement. In developing a discovery protocol, we are trying to answer two questions:Provides a simple XML format to say "The resource identified by this URI can be contacted by a phone number, they have these other identities on social networks"
You can then use WebFinger to contact people and look at their plans in a distributed fashion.
Different APIs done with Javascript and HTML:
Work primarily done at Plaxo, a contact company that has lots data...
This API defines a neutral protocol for Consumers to request address book, profile, and friends-list information from service providers that matches what most social networking sites are together.
Also specifies an XML and JSON-based address book format. Working on making compatible with FOAF.Builds on top of vCard, works with OAuth, XRDS-Simple, OpenSocial...