NoseRub

As announced, I was at BarCamp 2 and Web2Open last week, both taking place in Berlin.

I got a lot of responses to NoseRub and enjoyed meeting and talking with David Recordon from SixApart. He is doing a lot on the topics of Social Graph, OpenID and OAuth and therefore was a real good discussion partner.

The last week showed me very clearly, that all users out there want open social networks. They don't care how this would look like and they most certainly don't want to drop off their old networks in order to do that. That could mean for NoseRub, that we need to try harder to get the information and content that users added already to their networks. But that also means, that NoseRub can not remain so picky about who you can contact and who you cannot add as a contact in NoseRub.

Currently, you can only add NoseRub-IDs as full contacts (beside the private ones, but they don't count here), so that NoseRub can access information about that user. But there already is a lot of information available out there. XFN and FOAF are already in use, as you can see on David's Blog, which is hosted at LiveJournal. There is FOAF-Data available and he uses XFN on his Homepage, indicating services he is using with the rel="me" attribute.

So, I think NoseRub should enable you to add his Homepage-URL when adding a contact. NoseRub then should parse this site for information about himself and his contacts. This can easily be done by parsing the XFN and FOAF he has on his pages. This way, we could build a real meta network from all the social network data, that is already there.

This way, we do not only define something, but make real use of the already existing social graphs out there and show people, what the difference between a closed and a completely open social network is.

Of course, Google's OpenSocial was in everyones mind the last week. Although it is not as open, as many of us wished, NoseRub will most probably support OpenSocial in both possible ways: as a container to host applications and as an application itself. I'm currently looking into the API and try to figure out, how this can be add real value to NoseRub. But imagine to be able to have any Social Application out there running on your own server. This is some kind of neat...

I'm also very impressed by all the new faces on Identoo.com and our Discussion Group. This is really cool and shows the interest in such a platform.

I certainly need to form all those thoughts into some kind of roadmap for the next weeks and month. We currently fixed some of the bugs and need to smooth ohers things, before we can do another update on Identoo.com. But after that, we need to start working on all kinds of stuff:

• Qualification of contacts (friend, family, met, work, etc.)


• Privacy based on that qualification (family may see my flickr account)


• Standarized format for exchanging profile and contacts, aka The Protocol


• OpenSocial

If you are on BarCamp London this month, I would be glad to discuss with you in person. I hope I will get as many input, as I did during the last week in Berlin!