Marc's Voice

Episode #27 of theSocialWeb.tv

So the open dudes got hung up waiting for the Facebook announcement embargo to be lifted, so we shot an episode of theSocialWeb.tv talking about dashboard outlines, distributed friending and the open mesh.

Check it out.

This caused me to run home and get a new draft 4 of my treatise book - up and out.  So that’s available now - as well.

This includes a coolio preview feature.

We started working on federation today

We’re gonna glue this new blog into an instance of PeopleAggregator.

That will enable us to:

- be single signed on between the two systems (WP and PeepAgg) - for full membership and other roles

- pass back and forth and synchronize blog posts, links and gallery entries

- connect to JanRain’s RPX and ping.fm

So this turn of the crank will enable others to register into a new kind of tool community, where THEIR Wordpress installs could mesh into the community as well.  ideally members of teh community take our Wordpress plugin and get:

- distributed friending

- syncrhonizes and shared:

- galleries

- links

- CMS full of content

That’s our goal

Dashboards and Distributed Friending

I’m imagining a world where each of us, and all groups, networks, enterprises, institutions, agencies and NGOs have dashboards which are associated with our on-line presence.  Some of these dashboards exist today - in the guise of ‘NetVibes’ startup pages - or as iGoogle and MyYahoo.

Facebook, MySpace and all social networking software are another kind of dashboard.  And all social media services; from Twitter, Friendfeed and Flickr to dopplr, Blurb or NetFlix.  They’re all dashboards, each with it’s own nuance, subtly and approach.

Anytime you see ‘About‘ or ‘Your Account‘ - that’s your dashboard.  So each account you have - everywhere - is another dashboard.

Amazon, Microsoft and even your local government all have dashboards - so I’m betting we can ‘normalize’ on the notion that all software will have a dashboard - whether it’s for the individual, or the group or enterprise.

So now imagine that each dashboard has an ‘outline’ file associated with it - that can be shared with other dashboards.

And this shared outline file will enable us to establish friendships and relationships between systems.  I’m calling this ‘distributed friending‘ and it’s centered around common notions of:

- friends

- subscribing to someone

- following somebody

These three kind of relationships are what I’m trying to facilitate ACROSS systems.

Each of us will have an outline file that is our virtual dashboard. It can travel with us between systems but more than likely will reside at my ‘favorite dashboard’.

The contents of my outline file will hold all the details of my digital lifestyle (more on this - later.)

Today I’m fleshing out how the outlines will facilitate distributed friending.

We’ll use Wordpress as a starting point (cause that’s what this blog is published in) - but we’ll get to other blogging and social networking platforms - pretty quickly.

Here are the three kinds of friending we want to create with a Wordpress plugin:

- a reciprocated “ADD as a Friend” kind of relationship (Blog A in the chart above)

- a “Subscribe to me” kind of one-way relationship, where you can control all the aspects of what’s exposed, who can see what and under what circumstances (Blog B in the chart above)

- a “Follow me on [this] service” kind of relationship, where the user does NOT have control over the exact access privileges, items and elements that are exposed.  This is simply connecting followers to Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. (Blog D in the chart above)

So here are a couple of charts showing this notion of distributed friending.

There’s also a fourth theoretical ‘friending type’ (Blog C in the chart above) - which imagines a giant shared social graph kind of scenario, sort of like what Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon wrote about 1.5 years ago (“Brad’s Thoughts…”) and what my ‘Our data’ server idea is.

But that’s for “future” implementation.

The Wordpress plug-in (we’re starting to build) will utilize our PeopleAggregator platform. We have a full set of APIs to implement the first kind of friending right now via a unique instance of our code; which I’m calling Marc’s Voice 4.0 (you’re currently reading “Marc’s Voice 3.0″
Anyone running Wordpress could take this plug-in and (eventually) implement these three kinds of distributed friending or ’subscribing to’ in their Wordpress blog.

The second type of “controlled subscribing” is only as good as your built up collection of stuff is and since no one has an account on my personal social network - it’ll be useless.  But it’ll make for great demoware!

While this is all going on, the Activity Streams standardization effort will be going on and we’ll hopefully all benefit from these efforts.  I’m hoping that this kind of granularity of control over access privileges (basicially what Facebook Connects ‘dynamic privacy’ does) will get standardized and available for all.  That’s what the second kind of friending is all about.   We’re just implementing the first and third kinds for now.

Our Wordpress plugin will establish relationships with anyone who has written a compatible plugin.  Anyone could run our plugin if they wish, and utilize the Marc’s Voice 4.0 instantiation of PeopleAggregator, but what I ASSUME/HOPE folks will do is write their OWN plugins.

So Chris Messina would create his own plugin with a Ruby-on-Rails framework, while Joseph Smarr would simply extend Plaxo, while Angus Logan and Dare Obasanjo would whip up an Windows Live interface ricocheting off of Live Mesh and David Recordon would get his SixApart dude to write a perl module for Moveable Type.

All we have to do is stuff the outline with the current set of each user’s friends, followers and subscribers.  Obviously the ‘agreed upon’ access privileges will take time, but we can get the first kind of friending working right now.  Each vendor will highlight their own services and tie into their own local ’stores’, but as long as we just agree to the schemas in the outline, we can remotely update each other’s friends tables and settings.

To plug into this ‘distributed friending experiment‘ the heavy lifting still has to be done by some ‘engine’, and that’s where Buddypress comes in for native Wordpress users.

But for the rest of us, there’s no reason why other social networking, aggregation and Live Web platforms can’t all plugin into this ‘distributed mesh’ and implement distributed friending - to connect people together ACROSS systems.

That’s the purpose of the exercise - DISTRIBUTED friending - NOT locked into one system - but ACROSS systems.

Once they hear about - Allen Hurff will ask Max Engel to gateway into this mesh utilizing MySpace ID, Eran Hammer-Lahav will create a mesh gadget for Yahoo Profiles and Kevin Marks - will personally roll up his sleeves and ask Mussie Shore to gateway into our mesh - as well.  It’s a group prototype demonstrating that social graphs, activity feeds and media and content sharing need not be locked up behind a single firewall.

Anyone with BuddyPress, Elgg, Drupal, Boonix or other ‘open social networking’ platforms could join in to this experiment and (I assume) it would be easy to plug into Ning, Times People, the BBC or [oooooooooops] I was gonna write Facebook - and guess what?

I’m not sure if they’d support or even allow this. :-)  Dave?

Well anyway - that’s the top level design and the charts I just created.  Now onto the technical specs.