I’ve been looking into the whole decentralized network question. To have one social network, which you can share with other applications – within the limits you set yourself.
Thanks to pointers from several people and some googling, i found some interesting initiatives.
DiSo (dee-soh) is an initiative by the same crowd as OpenId. It aims to make a wordpress plugin so that your blog platform becomes a sort of social network repository. This by building a friend database (with their openid logins), and inserting microformats in your blogroll. The approach is very pragmatic, starting from a much-used framework and going from there.
Noserub is a decentralized social network in the sense that it’s a platform that can be installed on any host. When you add a friend, you actually add a reference to that friend’s node. By a mechanism that is not entirely clear to me, you can
The Higgins Project is somewhat off-topic, but still related to the whole question: it is a sort of universal authentication mechanism. Once you’ve got your identity set up under that project, it can be used for OpenID, SAML, and other sign-on mechanisms. In this way, it’s very realistic, since it doesn’t wait for adoption by everyone of one single standards, but insteads offers a way around them all in one go.
All the above are open source projects.
Clickpass, on the other hands, works with OpenID only, but aims to make the OpenID experience very user-friendly by offering one central portal from which you can login to some openid-enabled websites, well, with one click.
Of all the projects i found, NoseRub was the closest to what i was looking for. Not quite there though, despite a few excellent ideas. It makes the social network the go-to place to centralize all the web activity.
I’m more interested in a platform that would just be the repository for the social information, to be used at will in other applications.
Mh … i’ll keep looking, but looks like there’s room for a new project. I’m rolling up my sleeves.
Note: for those who don’t know it, the Operator plug-in for Firefox helps to be more aware of the use of microformats on the sites we visit. I plan to try adding microformats to my blog with my next upgrade.
bxlblog, the french-speaking brussels city blog was started up exactly one year ago by eMich. Mich was writing on the dutch Brussels metroblog brusselblogt – and he wondered why, in this city where most people speak french, there was no metroblog in that language.
