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stimoceiver [email protected]

a life lived over the edge; poised on the tripartite brink between genius, madness, and utter annihilation; and enjoying the view as my words reverberate along the precipice

  • 2013-05-02T20:42:00Z via Microca.st Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Im currently listening to a very interesting podcast shared by pump.io developer Evan Prodromou. Its called "Mobile Can Disrupt Social" by Monica Lam at Stanford, check it out here: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/material_iphone.html?material=3114

    Its obvious that distributed and self-hosted social "inter" networking is a brilliant step beyond the existing corporate-tethered social "intra" networking, and I am inspired to start examining this technology at a deeper level by hearing this podcast so soon after noticing the pump.io project.

    In a world of monolithic providers such as facebook and linkedin, moving to a distributed or self-hosted architecture has numerous advantages including better privacy and sustainability of content. But even with a nominal density of early adopters I suspect many self-hosted or distributed social internetwork projects will languish unused by the mass of users currently tethered to the corporate networks. But one possible way to bridge the all-important missing piece of a userbase ready and willing to adopt, might very well be when one of the newer proposed distributed architectures decide to interoperate with facebook and linkedin as other "nodes" of the distributed social network!

    Obviously this poses numerous technical challenges in coordination since it is highly unlikely these corporate monoliths will agree or even support the emergence of a unified social networking architecture, much less implement it as an API, especially early on.

    But this highlights one of the key problems of having so many existing isolated monolithic social networks: There is simply no easy way to disseminate content to multiple networks simultaneously, and aggregate the comment threads in a single location for replies. 

    Maybe this isn't appropriate functionality for a basic social "inter"networking API like pump.io. But it definitely seems like a "killer addon" that could drive traffic to a new network in a big way. 

    In a sense this could be isomorphic to the concept of "transports" from Jabber. Unless a unified group text messaging architecture is someday agreed upon by the internet at large and all the monolithic social media players - which would likely also require a underlying unified identity and privacy management architecture to make any sense - it will require a dedicated development effort to stay on top of changes to not only respective social networks APIs, but to their EULAs as well regarding how cross-traffic between networks each network will allow.

    Up until today the only app or site I know of that has this capability is hootsuite, and believe me this is something that his been the subject of periodic searches for a few years now. But searching again just now I just noticed this article listing 4 more services, flipboard, glossi, rebelmouse, and flavors.me: http://socialmediatoday.com/jen-eisenberg/549608/top-5-social-media-managing-tools

    So its good to see there are a few other people working on ways for linking together our existing disparate social networks. But only one of them seems to be a self-hosting social platform of its own. So hopefully all of these efforts will eventually congeal into a series of open standard architectures, protocols and API's for identity, group and social interaction.

    Also, I see that Evan has coincidentally just made a post highlighting some of these concerns so its good to see this line of thinking is already being considered for the pump.io implementation. This is definitely a development which I'll be watching closely. To the developers I say: Cheers!

    May the best project win. To the vector go the spoils!

    Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , [email protected] like this.

    I guess you missed this option: http://friendica.com/

    This account is inactive at 2013-05-03T01:20:47Z

    stimoceiver likes this.

    I think that SN, PumpIO, Friendica/Red, Diaspora, Libertree, BuddyCloud, Movim, and Tent are all to some degree working on this same problem. Challenges: finances, small userbases, sparsity of federated sites. Opportunities: give people control of their "social" presence and their data, enable people to prioritize (according to their own preferences) their privacy and security.

    [email protected] at 2013-05-03T01:29:27Z

    stimoceiver likes this.

  • 2013-05-02T05:46:44Z via Microca.st Web CC: Public

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