Dave Winer speaks of an ‘explosion of unbundling’ in a recent post called ‘Its time to open up networking, again’. He’s referring to how he thinks the distributed mesh of interconnected social networks will evolve - and Dave drills down into ‘the labels’ used to define social relationships - as one example of an open standard architecture that is needed.

It’s one of those epiphany moments which I think will have rippling ramifications for years to come.

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me).

Dave posits that a relationship label can be almost an arbitrary tag that can be assigned to what Dave calls the ‘arc’ of relationships between two people. These ‘relationship’ tags would be normalised and stored in a shared space, where anyone could anchor or ricochet off of them. I guess.

Creating a web service for sharing relationship labels should be easy enough but its the sourrounding activity and uptake that is required to really build an ‘open standard’. Dave should know. He’s seen his really simple syndication format blossom into an entire ecosystem.

Public servers fileld with shareable data, acting like a People’s DNS or even just ricocheting posts are other kinds of technology that can be brought to bear for ‘open standards’.

These sort of public servers would help form a distributed mesh which today is made up of ping servers, blog rolls and feed search engines.

So if you could imagine shared, open Twitter clouds, del.icio.us link lists, Digg opinions, Yelp reviews, Eventful events or MyBlogLog groups - that’s what I’m talking about.

Shared relationship labels or some sort of arbitrary way to just add your own label to a relationship and have it mean something, is another great technique for our distributed meshed web.

You can imagine other open public servers which could:

- keep track of your preferred blogging editor?

- store reviews or events - centered around a tag?

- keep a set of destinations of where you wish to send your blog posts to?

- let you keep track of where your friends are and what they’re doing?

- maintain multiple collections of all your media - throughout the web

- track which systems can understand the kind of data I want to import?

- something that can act as a reliable 3rd party and keep track of who I am and what claims I’m making about myself

- and ultimately store all this stuff in a master profile - which is not controlled by any one vendor.

These open servers are the foundation of what I’ve called ‘open source infrastructure’ that will help facilitate the meshing together of 1,000s of open networks - if not 100,000s.

We need to figure out how to do open Ecommerce, empower folks with their own behaviour patterns and click histories and aggregate various reputation systems together as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 4:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.