Orkpiraten

I just had the most ama­zing idea (accor­ding to my stan­dards, that is. YMMV): This is how we fix the social web

For star­ters, let’s have a look what makes dif­fe­rent com­ponents awesome:

• Social Net­works are great at pro­vi­ding us with a stream of activity from those we deem „fri­ends“ or at least those indi­vi­du­als who are inte­res­ting enough that we spend time with their output.
• Blogs are a great thing to publish wit­hout a cen­tral aut­ho­rity or web­site. Track­backs enable noti­fi­ca­ti­ons across dif­fe­rent web­sites in pos­si­bly realtime.
• RSS is a great way to syn­di­cate con­tent automatically
• OpenID pro­vi­des us with a sin­gle source of authen­ti­ca­tion for each user, but still allows for dis­tri­bu­ted sites.
• XMPP / Jab­ber does essen­ti­ally the same as Blogs and OpenID, except for (text-)chat.

Each of these things have a down­side though:

• Social Net­works lock you in to one pro­vi­der. Cur­rently, this means eit­her Google or Facebook.
• Blogs usually require a healthy dose of site-jumping around. Also, the com­ment sec­tions are often messy to main­tain or read.
• RSS is as good as your reader.
• OpenID is a bit hard to set up for new­bies, and may or may  not have secu­rity issues.
• XMPP / Jab­ber is nice to sim­ply use, but has limited func­tio­na­lity when com­pa­red to Han­gouts for example.

Now, why don’t we add these things toge­ther? Let’s create a func­tio­nal social-network-layer for the blo­gos­phere. We expand the web­log stan­dard with the fol­lo­wing functions:

• More user-centric approach: Allow crea­tors to logi­cally con­nect all the blogs they con­tri­bute to under one per­son ID. Ide­ally tie this in to OpenID with cross-site user authen­ti­ca­tion (for com­ments and API use).
• Create an „add as fri­end“ track­back noti­fi­ca­tion: When someone adds someone to their blo­groll, add in a notification.
• Stan­dar­dize the rss-for-comments feed url and create an API to allow com­ments wit­hout visit­ing the site. Make sure that said API can get spam-proofed.
• Create a web GUI that basi­cally recrea­tes the bog-standard social media stream out of your sub­scri­bed blogs and their comments.
• This GUI will also allow you to publish con­tent to your own blog(s) and will uti­lize the API men­tio­ned above so you can com­ment on other peo­p­les blogs.
• For good mea­sure, throw in an AJAX Jab­ber client

The result should be a dis­tri­bu­ted web app­li­ca­tion that anyone could eit­her use from a hos­ter or host them­sel­ves. The com­ponents are all using open stan­dards and thus allow a ple­thora of other imple­men­ta­ti­ons, so ever­yone can poten­ti­ally have the GUI they love most. And we won’t have any cen­tral aut­ho­rity that can willy-nilly change things and break ever­yo­nes use-case.

Gran­ted this is a very rough draft, but so far, I can­not see anything wrong with this idea…