Now that I have deactivated my Facebook account I am looking for a decent social network. Of course, I could become more active on MySpace and revive my account there but quite frankly, I am more inclined to deleting that account as well because I hate it. Plaxo is a possible solution but not perfect in anyway.
But what should be core features of a social network I’d use? Well, actually that’s not very difficult to answer: It should be as open as possible, letting me import and export my contact list, my profile data, if possible my attention data (events I attend, Twitter posts, music I listen to,…) and maybe other cool stuff I am currently not thinking about. Though everyone who has been facing a similar problem knows that it’s not easy to find a suitable network.
My Blog = My Social Network?
But I run a weblog. Isn’t a blog a social app? Communicating with people around the world? So why not turn it into a social network or at least a hub for all my social activities on the net which could be leveraged by other apps? My blogroll is already marked up with XFN values where applicable, people can subscribe to my OPML file (currently it’s hosted on BlogBridge because it updates automatically when I make changes to it, though I could host it on this server as well), and even have access to two APML files. The first one includes my Twitter posts, tracks scrobbled to Last.fm, events I am attending and much more (hosted on Engagd); the second one combines categories and tags used on this blog (thanks to Matthias Pfefferle’s efforts). Also my contact information is marked up as an hCard.
It is a start, I guess, but surely not enough.
DiSO
Chris Messina and Steve Ivy probably had similar thoughts when they launched their new project called DiSO. DiSo (=distributed social networking concepts) is an
umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts.
They want to combine efforts and develop plugins and tools which help make blogging platform WordPress a basis for social network portability. WordPress is just a start, though; those tools could be migrated to other platforms as well. And everyone who is familiar with Chris’ and Steve’s work knows that OpenID, microformats and OAuth will be integral parts of those efforts. Will Norris who developed the OpenID plugin for WordPress has joined them already which is good to see because there is no need to develop new tools and plugins when there are good ones available already.
Too many Projects?
I applaud efforts like DiSo. However similar projects have been launched or discussed already (Dataportability.org, Brad Fitzpatrick’s paper on the social graph, the social network portability mailing list,…). That might become confusing to some people because they could lose track of who is developing what.
Also it should be noted that only some geeks will profit from these kind of efforts. Most people don’t run a blog (yet?).
