[Social-discuss] Goals?

[Matija Šuklje]

Hullo,

(as on the Libre.FM list) I wonder what the goals of the GNU Social project 
are. I've gone through the mailing list's archives and haven't found much 
tangible then "trying to be something new".

In the past I've given a bit of thought about what I would like to see in a 
social networking thingamajigger, namely:
* tighter integration with the desktop and applications — APIs anyone?
* open standard technology like W3C's RDFa, FOAF[], SIOC[] ...maybe even 
NEPOMUK[]
* easy and better controlled access (e.g. from your desktop)
* less bloat — e.g. why reinvent the wheel with albums, IM and e-mail, if we 
have perfectly usable protocols and apps for that already! (also Facebook apps 
= big no no)
* lotsa lotsa more control over my data
* smarter ontology

Personally, I'd love to see it all happen on my desktop with a possible fall-
back on a website — an analogy would be how you can use your favourite e-mail 
client to handle your messages over IMAP, but when you don't have access to 
that you can still use the webmail.

BTW, have you read Steven Pemberton's[6] interview[7] and his talk warning 
about "Walled Gardens"[8] and how to avoid it? Well, he points out some very 
big flaws of current "Web 2.0" networking sites and how it could be solved. His 
idea of a "personal website" that would hold all the content of a person, 
which would be then aggregated to specialised websites (e.g. networking site, 
photo albums site, music sharing site etc.) makes a lot of sense to me.

Especially if we can have the desktop automatically push data to it and pull 
data from others' personal websites. ...just imagine if you wanted to write an 
e-mail to e.g. your best friend's brother's girlfriend you could just type 
into your e-mail client "best friend -> brother -> girlfriend" and it would 
check through the personal websites their FOAF entries etc. to provide you 
automatically with the appropriate e-mail address :]

...just my 0.0146616816948904 € ;)


Cheers,
Matija
-.-.-
[1] Resource Description Framework in attributes — http://rdfa.info
[2] Friend of a Friend — http://www.foaf-project.org
[3] Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities — http://sioc-project.org
[4] Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of 
Unified Knowledge [NEPOMUK] is probably the most advanced and the only viable 
ontology system for a semantic and social desktop which KDE[4] is nice proof 
for (and AFAIK Gnome started using it as well) — 
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
[5] http://nepomuk.kde.org
[6] Steven Pemberton is one of the old cats of W3C and the internet itself — 
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/
[7] http://dot.kde.org/2009/11/02/walled-gardens-semantic-data-and-open-web-
interview-steven-pemberton
[8] http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/10-23-steven-openweb
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