B. Mann Consulting

Scott Kveton does a bit of a round up of what some folks are working on a technical level with portable social networking, in and around OpenID and some loose markup.

He takes what, in my opinion, is a bit of a cut against Attribute Exchange:

Also, attribute exchange doesn’t solve the portable social networking component although I imagine it could be hacked up to do so.

Sorry, Scott, when you use phrases like "hacked up", I take issue. Frankly, I would never have gotten on board with OpenID if I didn't see AX on the horizon as the logical conclusion of the SREG stop gap.

AX is an extensible system that will be able to pass many different kinds of information back and forth between systems. It has the same decoupled nature that OpenID has. Different sites can loosely couple by doing nothing more than using the same keys to define different sets of attributes. Why, exactly, would one NOT use this? In theory, one could do something as simple as host an agreed upon list of attributes -- based on FOAF, XFN, or for that matter any one of them in their own namespaces or with mapping between them.

I mean, we implemented syncing of user profiles using Drupal's simple distributed authentication + FOAF *3 years ago*. Working with SXIP in their various protocol incarnations, DIX, and finally the merging into OpenID and AX has all been part of the process of consensus around standards.

Attribute Exchange is a flexible, extensible base on which to implement many use cases around data exchange for user profiles and related information. Any solution around portable social networking should use this at its base, and the OpenID community should move to finalize the extension and move forward to building cool sh*t on top of it.

I didn't get nearly as much time (hardly any!) to talk to Ton Zylstra at BarCamp Amsterdam as I would have liked to. He's continuing the conversation on his blog, with this post about P2P social networking:

I would like to have a true peer to peer social networking platform. Also I'd like to have my own spiders and agents.

FOAF isn't ready for this kind of thing I think, but we might look to an existing p2p infrastructure like Skype to be a carrier. Boris Mann pretty much repeatedly said Jabber can do anything during BarCamp, and seemed to be only half joking. Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: How to Get P2P Social Networking

You're right, Ton, I was only half joking. I think real time is very important. If the "IM Wars" have shown us anything, it's that we need to have common standards and formats. For XML message passing, including IM, Jabber is the answer to this (and might be the answer for voice and video as well, but I've got more to write about this later).