[p2p-research] Henry Story on Open Distributed Social Networks

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi dan,

some non-technical overview for general readers would be most useful, for
publication on our blog!

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > FOAF is amazing. It's been around for a long time (since at least 2003
> > if not earlier), and works really well. Yet, it's been largely under
> > the radar
>
> Thanks Sam! Yeah, we've kept things a bit 'relaxed' the last few
> years, partly to cool down some unrealistic expectations from ~2004/5,
> but also while other pieces of the technology landscape came together.
> Without the likes of OpenID, OAuth, FOAF+SSL/WebID, and some machinery
> for handling trust/provenance, there's only so much you can do with
> FOAF on its own.
>
> > It's implemented by ostatus (identi.ca and GNUSocial) and I think
> > there is talk now of using it in diaspora. ELGG also supported it at
> > least for a while. Semantic Media Wiki also supports, and so does
> > Drupal, WordPress.
>
> Yep, it's also supported in http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/
> from Google (their social search machinery); in the Russian search
> engine Yandex (
> http://company.yandex.com/press_center/press_releases/2008/2008-08-15.xml
> ),
> in Google Rich Snippets
>
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/help-us-make-web-better-update-on-rich.html
> ... though as far as I know not directly in Wordpress. I think they
> emit XFN, which is a similar system from the Microformats community,
> and that's great too.
>
> I'm most excited lately to see FOAF and RDF playing a role in open
> datasets. The Social Web API scene is very crowded and I think the
> vCard-based Portable Contacts spec is doing fine work there. FOAF
> tends more towards extensibility and wide-scale data merging, which is
> getting much more interesting now we're seeing huge releases of data
> from goverments, activists, libraries, ...
>
> And yeah we started back in 2000 when I turned my homepage into RDF
> and Libby Miller did the same to hers. When big sites like LiveJournal
> started publishing FOAF a while later, lots of our cute early demos
> simply fell over due to the scale needed. So it's great to live in the
> modern day Web now with tools like Hadoop around to take the strain.
> Lately I've been pushing user data (from FOAF and misc open datasets)
> into Apache's (hadoop-friendly) machine learning tools,
>
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Recommender+Documentation
> .... .... it's amazing the tooling you can get for free :)
>
> Anyhow, I've been quietly lurking here on the p2p research list,
> something somewhere gave me the impression that many of the (largely
> unarticulated) thoughts behind FOAF fit with the mindset here, so I'm
> happy if FOAF is of any interest in these parts...
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
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