It’s over now and it has been great here in Berlin, I hope it will stay that way now that the Web 2.0 Expo starts. These days have quite inspiring on the Open Social Networking front, not only because Google’s Open Social has been a topic (and hype) but also because some people of (or formerly) Six Apart have been here (David Recordon and Artur Bergman) which created also some discussion around OpenID (which was started at Six Apart). I also met Lukas Rosenstock, a german Open ID advocate (he also made a session about Open ID at the Barcamp) and had a nice talk with him about things like XFN, FOAF and related technologies. Additionally David also talked about OAuth at the Barcamp which is a protocol similar to Flickr’s authentication scheme in which you get redirected to the site where you give the OK for certain actions and then you get redirected back with the proper permissions.
Most of this discussion was around opening the Social Graph which is basically your friends list. There is also a nice blog post at Six Apart which describes this further with some nice videos. All this is quite interesting and inspiring stuff because it indeed is very annoying to collect your friends again on any social network you join. And of course I also think about Plone where much of this does not make that much sense of course simply because we lack the concept of friends and contacts.
But I’d really like to have some standard components for the basic functionality you need to setup a social network such as the mentioned contacts with maybe different permissions (anybody, friends, family) etc. Much of this probably could utilize plone.app.relations.
Once this framework is existing we could start adding features such as FOAF or XFN (which is not really a big deal anyway) but also experiment with some ideas on how to export and import your social graph or maybe with some API to define groups of your contacts which could then be reused in some other social network.
Of course all of this is also important for an implementation of OpenSocial for Plone to make sense.
So all in all a lot of inspiration and all in all a lot of things which maybe need some time ;-) On my way back on thursday I probably will start to dig deeper into the OpenID spec itself and the surrounding protocols such as YADIS, iNames and similar things. This definitely will be quite important in the future.
Tags: opensocial, socialgraph, sixapart, xfn, foaf, yadis, iNames, openid, oAuth, plone, bcb2, barcampberlin2, barcamp, berlin