Comments on: The Case for Decentralized Social Networks http://manas.tungare.name/blog/the-case-for-decentralized-social-networks/ Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:35:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Sameer Ahuja http://manas.tungare.name/blog/the-case-for-decentralized-social-networks/comment-page-1/#comment-8579 Sameer Ahuja Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:44:18 +0000 http://manas.tungare.name/blog/?p=198#comment-8579 The problem as I understand it is that of owning and managing my own social graph across social applications on the web; and the associated problem of managing my data across social applications on the web. Note that the management aspect is as important as the owning aspect. Social connections form from varied contexts. Users have different social graphs at different places, and I do not think that one can assume that users want to 'merge' all of them into one universal graph that prevails over the web without having precise control over that graph. As you point out, none of the current approaches solves the graph problem (Including OpenSocial, that released after the writing of this article), and its not clear if any of the major social graph providers out there want to solve it either. There are, however, some early approaches: http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2007/09/were_opening_th.html , http://www.dataportability.org/ (I don't know what the current status of the former is, and the latter is more of an evangelical movement promoting use of open standards). Oh, and not to be a nitpicker; but along with XFN, FOAF (http://www.foaf-project.org/) is also one of the viable approaches to represent people and their relationships. Google indexes both for its Social Graph APIs (http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/). The problem as I understand it is that of owning and managing my own social graph across social applications on the web; and the associated problem of managing my data across social applications on the web. Note that the management aspect is as important as the owning aspect. Social connections form from varied contexts. Users have different social graphs at different places, and I do not think that one can assume that users want to ‘merge’ all of them into one universal graph that prevails over the web without having precise control over that graph.

As you point out, none of the current approaches solves the graph problem (Including OpenSocial, that released after the writing of this article), and its not clear if any of the major social graph providers out there want to solve it either. There are, however, some early approaches: http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2007/09/were_opening_th.html , http://www.dataportability.org/ (I don’t know what the current status of the former is, and the latter is more of an evangelical movement promoting use of open standards).

Oh, and not to be a nitpicker; but along with XFN, FOAF (http://www.foaf-project.org/) is also one of the viable approaches to represent people and their relationships. Google indexes both for its Social Graph APIs (http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/).

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