[Social-discuss] project ideas and use cases

[Daniel Sobey]

Hi list,

What i think this project should be is a bit of glue and a standard
protocol and set of web service api's.

What i want is some service that knows information about me and contains
my social graph. It needs to be able to have different classes of user
such as public (identi.ca follwers), friends (both authenticate
eachother) and be able to split these up into different levels of trust.
I want to be able to define close friends/family who will have access to
just about everything including my phone number etc and still allow
casual people to friend me and get a little information about me.
Control must be the central idea. If i go and comment on someone's blog
post i may not want to give out my email to everyone but i might allow
the author of the post to have it.

We already have identi.ca, blogs, email, xmpp. So why not use these
systems?
It should not support one protocol, it should support as many as are
possible. 
For public long form messages broadcast allow the service to pull your
blog posts. For short public messages pull to identi.ca, for private
send an email, for real time have a web based xmpp server.

The system needs to be built so i can join other applications to it.
I use libre.fm, so that should be able to send information into my feed
of what i am playing.

It should not just send text around the place, it should allow for
different formats to be supported. It would be useful to be able to send
things like html, links to files, song metadata, contacts, calendar.
there needs to be a discovery mechanism where servers will examine what
each other can do and prompt how to use it.

The process of setting applications should be simple like identi.ca's
federation. I go to libre.fm, i give it a url to the service i am using.
it redirects me to my profile, it prompts me for what information is
shared and asks me what permissions to give it. permissions should be
post to my feed, pull my public contacts, pull friends, push followers,
add info to my profile.

A service like identi.ca would have a different set of services it sends
and recieves, for example direct public messages, messages by my
friends, messages in the groups i follow. so most of the information
will be pulled from identi.ca but still have ways of pushing messages
into the service.

It should be an internet application not a web application. i'd like the
ability to build something like steam where i can friend people i play
with and send them a link to what server i am using. 

It needs to be able to move. I want a system where i can migrate my
account from one server to another without causing problems. It needs to
advertise multiple instances of my url so if one instance stops working
services will start pointing to the other server. It should also allow
me to permanently purge my account.