[Social] Authentication

[Sean Corbett]

Hi guys,

After starting to think about the design for the social networking 
plugins for StatusNet, Ian and I realized that implementing any of these 
plugins can't really happen before we implement a suitable 
authentication scheme to manage permissions... We *could* go ahead and 
write a photo gallery, but this would be rather counterproductive as 
we'd have to tack on access rules after the fact, which would make 
things a lot messier.

This is, of course, one of the big issues facing the project; thus, we 
should probably tackle this problem by implementing a proper 
authentication and permissions scheme before we start worrying about 
adding additional social network functionality. Ian and I think that 
FOAF+SSL is the way to go given its popularity its simplicity, 
popularity on the discuss list, and the fact that we have quite a few 
people who are knowledgeable of it.

--sean