blueprint-siocexplorer-social-content-aggregator
There is mounting evidence of frustration with the overwhelming number of walled garden social networks.
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/social_networking_3_0 describes the outcome of a panel discussion between social networking leaders regarding the future of social networks. The trend towards fragmenting the identity of users by having many different accounts, is acknowledged and seen as a feature not as a problem. The argumentation is: Users want to be able to have different identities, in order to separate their online behaviour from their real world behaviour.
I would guess, the real problem is that nobody has figured out a business model, around open social networking and data formats enabling such openness.
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net?currentPage=all talks about building a personal page, which has all the information which ones facebook page would have, but with open tools.
It basically suggest building a blog, and pulling all the various fragments of ones identity into that one page (like ones delicious bookmarks, flickr fotos and and such.)
The article concludes, that replicating facebook is entirely possibly, with one important feature missing: the ability to express the type of relationship with another person.
Thats where FOAF and SIOC could come in.
SIOC could allow aggregating all the content by using different post types (supported in the new SIOC spec, which makes content types extensible and modular)- normal post type: blog posts or forum posts
- media type: flickr pictures or mp3s, or youtube videos
- bookmark type: delicious bookmarks
FOAF could be used to model the social neworking aspects.
And both halves would not have to be seperated, but content could be associated to users.
Real problem: how to get proprietary data about the relations from facebook into such a system. Maybe writing a facebook widget, which creates exportable data is possible? Then these widgets could be written for all social networking sites which make this possible. (trojan social networking widgets :)
Outcome: Positioning the sioc explorer as an open source PLUS open data social aggregator might be the way to go for the future, and even for future commercial potential.
Possible overall concept:
SIOC-Ex (we need a different name) allows indiviuduals and communities the following: – Aggregate your data – Convert your data – Host your data – Explore your data and its connections.
Creating your own data might be also interesting for the future.
Current implementations of open social networking sites: http://peopleaggregator.com/ (some sort of web service approach ?) http://blog.mixxt.de/uploads/about.jpg (Mixxt allows you to define the features of a social network on the fly, and then fill it with people.)
