Beyond Walled Gardens: Open Standards for the Social Web

Harry Halpin, <H.Halpin a! ed.ac.uk>

RDF

October 27th 2008

Opening the Social Graph

facebook pic Ordinary people are both increasingly wanting more and more powerful applications to access their social data and are increasingly putting their most valuable social data in the hands of third-parties.

Developers and (some) companies are tired of lock-in to just one social networking site API.

Researchers could answer scientific questions about our social behaviour if they had access to the masses of social data currently spread throughout the Web

The Pieces might already exist...

Luckily, the building-blocks that allow us to open up these closed walls of data exist right now: all that is missing is a strategy for putting it together.

trotsky You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.Leon Trotsky

Or more specifically, your data.

OpenID Foundation

Log-in once. No more "I forgot more password and username"! openid

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:http://openid.claimid.com/hhalpin

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!"

OAuth

OAuth is a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their password. oauth

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 in$

Enter FOAF and RDF?

Open Web Foundation

open web foundation logo

The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Think Apache Foundation for open social networking.

Allows people who work at major corporations to work on social software without worry of patent problems.

The Data Portability Group

data portability

DataPortability.org been tremendously successful as a grassroots group attracting interest - over a 1000 subscribers and every single major vendor from Google to Facebook has joined.

Seems to be making little technical progress...transforming into a user advocacy group.

On Steering Committee, only one W3C member has made an appearance, myself and John Breslin (DERI Galway, Ireland). The rest are smaller or start-up companies, primarily San Francisco-based.

Have angered developers like Chris Messina of OpenID due their appropriation of their technologies without their explicit endorsement. He claims DataPortability.org also has really no significant interaction from major vendors, due to their no-baby killing agenda without any normative specifications or technologies.

Myspace, Facebook, and OpenSocial

Similar to "browser wars," there now are competing ways to share social graph data on the Internet.

  1. OpenSocial Alliance: Started by Google and Myspace, and endorsed by Yahoo! and virtually all the minor players in the social networking world. Open Source implementation: Shindig
  2. Facebook: The dominant player in the social networking world, has mysterious plans to offer "Facebook" connect. Microsoft has a large amount of shares in Facebook.

Obviously a W3C-approved Semantic Web compatible standard way of doing this would be ideal.

Current State of Play

companies

Google's Social Graph API: Mixing FOAF and XFN

Brad Fitzpatrick over at Google is working on using the hCard and XFN microformats to create and track identities.

Contact Finder follows relationships and indexes whose linked to whom...

social graph demo

DISO and Personal Contact API

Using OpenID, XFN microformat, and OAuth, the Diso Project are building workable applications for portable social networking.

Over at the Portable Contacts API, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo is mapping all the various contact APIs, from Microsoft Live Contact API to Yahoo Address Book API to Google's gData Contact API together...

social stuff

Research

The largest unsolved research problem is identification and privacy on the Web.

The Linked Data Strategy version 1.0or, just publish all your data on the Web will not work for sensitive social data. What we need is Linked Data 2.0 that takes into account needs for privacy and access control.

We need will need to harmonize and even research solutionsin this area, such as managing multiple profiles, trust, security, deleting your data on command... semantic web

Privacy and Portability: Together at Last?

Social data portability and privacy are usually viewed as opposing forces. Yet data portability and privacy are mutual benefits that a framework for a mature Social Web could bring users. privacy

Walled Gardens Do Not Give Privacy

The walled garden of data fundamentally leads to less security and privacy for users.

For example, the lack of portability does not imply a lack of privacy: the data of users may be data-mined and is all-too-portable, for it can be easily sold to parties unknown to the users without their explicit knowledge.

no privacy on facebook

Lack of Portability is a Security Hole

The lack of portability has made it common practice for many social web services to ask users to give third-party services access e-mail inboxes.

stealing addressbooks

This insecure practice that can easily led to identity theft.

By forcing users to have their data spread throughout the Web under multiple accounts, users often just repeat passwords and user-names, leading to insecure transactions.

W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

Most of the work in this field is happening outside of the W3C, and furthermore, outside of the Semantic Web, despite FOAF being an early competitor. Let's bring everyone together in the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking

mobile web logo The high level goal of this workshop is to bring together the world experts on social networking design, management and operation in a neutral and objective environment where the social networking history to date can be examined and discussed, the risks and opportunities analyzed and the state of affairs accurately portrayed. Based on the facts and a consensus-based industry landscape, plans for the future can be made by the industry participants. 15-16 January 2009, Barcelona

Position Papers Due Nov. 20th

W3C Social Web XG

w3c

Allows a much-looser and quicker moving forum than a Working Group for exploratory purposes, allows creation of a Working Group and recommendations to be "fast-tracked."

Serves as a forum inside the W3C to get diverse groups interested in this communicating, without patent restrictions so major corporations and non-W3C members can participate

Very transparent, with meeting minutes and mailing list will be open to the public..

W3C Semantic Social Web IG

w3c semweb logo

More of an internal Semantic Web forum than a place for all sides to meet.

Allow telecons, and a more orderly environment than the Semantic Web Interest Group

Would prevent relative nit-picking over ontologies to commence.

Also transparent, with meeting minutes and mailing list will be open to the public..and yet no expectation to become a Working Group in of itself.

Main Questions

The two questions are:

  • Can the W3C provide a forum to harmonize existing technical solutions? (OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, OAuth...),
  • Can the major vendors commit to a common set of best practices?
  • FOAF OAuth FOAF

    The W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy

    troll 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 XRIs (used in some ideas about data portability!) in the W3C, which led to the development of the W3C's patent policy.

    Royalty-Free might discourage both large corporations 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.

    Doomsday Census for Social Networks

    Social Network Global Map

    Corporations

    Open Source Foundations

    Non-profit expertise

    Academics and Institutions

    Likely Solutions

    Unlikely that we can get organizations to commit to a single API (OpenSocial, Microsoft Contact API, Facebook Developer Platform), although this may be possible in mobile platforms.

    Likely that we can create a common semantic and extensible meta-model (based on FOAF) that maps to the data existing APIs export.

    Unlikely that we can pass a single standard for privacy and authentication on the Web

    Likely that we can get the W3C to support technologies like OpenID and OAuth, and follow a data-driven development model like HTML5.

    Unlikely that the W3C can produce a single monolithic technology architecture for the Social Web

    Likely that we can produce a W3C Best Practice Standards (including accessibility) with three exemplary and compatible open source implementations that could be used by non-profit and educational institutions.

    Web Science for Social Networking

    Solving these problems should not be rocket science, although it may be Web science. web science

    Parting Thoughts

    gutenberg

    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