In this article, I’m going to attempt to cover social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster, Hi5, Bebo, Tribe.net, and Orkut as well as special-purpose networks like LinkedIn. It’s hard to provide a focused definition of this kind of site, but prinicipally users can create a profile page in the service, and then declare that other users are their “friends” and link from their profile page. Some allow “group” pages for affinity groups, sharing music, images, videos and other media, or even custom applications that tap into the social network data.

The format has been wildly successful and many other types of Web applications, like microblogs, social bookmarking, and photo-sharing, provide similar social-networking paradigm and functionality. There’s a fine line between this kind of site and a social aggregator like FriendFeed or SocialThing. Probably the main difference is that social aggregators pull together functionality from around the Web, while social networking sites tend to provide this kind of functionality within the site.

The news in this space is good and bad. Good, because there are a lot of Free and Open Source applications in the area, and also good because most of these work in a distributed model. Bad, though, because there are few or no existing well-known sites that provide social networking services to the public with Free Software (compare Reddit in the social news space). The worst news? Social networking sites like Facebook are some of the most egregious walled gardens on the Internet today — yet they remain incredibly popular.

A lot of software

• Elgg is pulling away as the leader in this area and is rapidly becoming the poster child for Free and Open Source social networking software. I’ve played around a bit with the version at community.elgg.org and it’s definitely a nice piece of software. The developers have put a lot of work into supporting distributed protocols like OpenID, OpenSocial and Open Data Definition, to their credit. The main downsides? First, there’s not a well-known flagship service for general public use — a head-on competitor to Facebook or MySpace. Second, although the data portability is impressive, it would still be nice to have cross-site sociality — so if your profile is on site A and I’m on site B, we can still be “friends” and interact. Finally, there doesn’t seem to be much emphasis in the code for Free and Open Content licenses; I don’t know if it’s possible to mark up pages for Creative Commons licenses, allow users to choose licenses for their data, and require license agreement at signup. I think these can come, though.
• DiSo is a project we’ve discussed on this blog before (see my Interview with Steve Ivy of the Diso Project). DiSo is built on top of the ubiquitous WordPress blogging software, with special extensions to support semantically-rich links to other people’s blogs. The goal is to create a social network of independent sites — one site per person. I think this is a strong contender, and the emphasis on distribution is laudable; using WordPress gives the opportunity to leverage that platform’s wide array of data-licensing tools, media-sharing, and other cool features. But the software remains pretty new. The ease-of-use is nowhere near competitive with proprietary sites like Facebook. I think DiSo still has a long way to go.
• AroundMe is another interesting, distributed product, using PHP and MySQL. It used to be aimed at a one-site-per-user model, but has recently moved to a group-collaboration model: one site per group. Each group has a collaboration site, group blog, and wiki; users join the group using OpenID (using, for example, the related Prairie software). I think this is an awesome way to push typical group dynamics into a distributed model, and it uses the increasingly popular OpenID network to achieve that. The downside? Very little of the sociality propagates back to people’s identity server. If I look at your OpenID page, for example, I can’t see the AroundMe groups you’re part of or the people you consider “friends”. I think this model, although promising, needs to push more sociality back into the identity page.
• NoseRub is a package similar to AroundMe but with more of a global network model. It seems to be doing a better job at “profile aggregation” — tying together people’s profiles from elsewhere on the Web — rather than centralizing in itself. The downside of that, though, is that people are still using non-free services for photo-sharing, video-posting, etc. Probably the most exciting thing about NoseRub is its distributed sociality model — it does a very good job of synchronizing data between sites. There are also a few sites with medium-high profile, like identoo.com, that are providing the software as a service to the public.
• HelloWorld (de) is a new project that autonomo.us reader Matthias Weiler recently notified us about. I haven’t got the German language skills to decrypt the site, so I’m not 100% sure there’s even software to check out, yet. I think this will be one to watch.
• I’ve only just poked at it a bit, but the CC Network looks promising, and the software is available under the AGPLv3.
• The Mugshot Project, part of/related to the Gnome Open Desktop initiative, is an attempt to make something like a social aggregator. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but the functionality hasn’t been built out very well, and the project seems to be moribund (no posts on the blog in 2008, for example). This may not be cause for alarm; Gnome projects are renowned for going dormant for years on end and eventually re-emerging with incredible strength.
• Many general-purpose community/CMS software packages, such as TikiWiki, Drupal, or Joomla!, have social-networking tools or plugins. To be honest, their social networking tools leave a lot to be desired, and with the exception of Drupal’s well-intentioned but poor efforts in cross-site login, there’s little or no cross-site sociality. The penetration of these kinds of community software packages is incredible, and activating them as a distributed social network would be a huge step forward for this effort.

The protocols

• The aforementioned Open Data Definition standard is intended to allow users to transfer their identities from one server to another. (This has been a goal for the Data Portability project, which seems to be getting more attention.) Currently, it’s only supported by Elgg; I’d like to get it built into Laconi.ca, too, if only for solidarity’s sake.
• OpenSocial is a project led by Google. It’s an interesting development, but ultimately it’s about providing a platform for widgets that fit into existing (mostly proprietary) social networking services. It does not, for example, allow users of one OpenSocial container site to be social with friends on another container site. I think ultimately social networking software like Elgg will do well to implement this protocol to encourage development and deployment of widgets, but I think it’s insufficient for building a Web-wide social network.
• Although it’s not normally considered a social networking protocol, OpenID holds a lot of promise in this area. The protocol allows people to associate their identity with a single URL and then use that identity to interact with other people, groups, and data objects on the rest of the Web. To a large part, that’s mostly what a distributed social network is about. What’s missing? Group and social data doesn’t back-propagate to the OpenID provider sites; my identity URL on for example certifi.ca doesn’t have a full-featured profile, links to groups I belong to, or links to the profile pages of my friends. There are some protocols for back-propagating data in the OpenID world, but no one has applied them to the social networking space. A great opportunity, though!
• XMPP is also an interesting part of this space. It’s distributed, it’s got lots of Open Source implementations, it’s got a strong concept of universal identity and it’s got a refined model for social connections. I think there’s a lot to watch here, and the xmpp social mailing list is an important place to monitor.

What is to be done?

A smart business person who wants to break into this crowded market could use the Free Network Service model as a strong differentiator and attract a sophisticated and influential crowd of early adopters to such a site. Using Elgg as an initial platform and applying serious development resources to it would probably give a big leg up. Alternately, non-profit groups may want to provide this kind of service, too.

More important, I think, is going to be the development of a featureful social-networking protocol that the developers of Elgg and other social networking software can implement. I think that such a protocol should definitely include OpenID as an enabling technology for user identity and as the base URL for profile pages; attribute exchange might be a good data platform to start with.

The great part about a good open protocol here is that it can be implemented in software that’s not specifically about social networking. Free and Open Source photo-sharing, video-sharing, microblogging, and social bookmarking software could implement the protocol and tie themselves into a Web-wide social net. Additionally, community CMSes like Drupal and blog software like WordPress could implement the protocol and expand the open network even farther.

There are a lot of challenges. A lot of the advocacy around opening up social networks has been around petitioning existing networks like MySpace or Facebook to open up to the wider world. This has been almost entirely unsuccessful; there’s a strong incentive for these companies — especially the more successful ones — to keep their customer base captive. Social networks are extremely sticky sites; abandoning one means leaving behind all the friends you have there. Finally, thought leaders on the Web have a strong incentive to maintain their presence on existing social networks; they already have influence there. Taking a principled stand is hard. (Let me note that I personally still have a Facebook account and probably will for some time.)

But I believe this is a fight worth fighting. (Some of my colleagues at autonomo.us will probably disagree; hackers are typically pretty sniffy about popular sites and software, and social networking is no exception.) Today’s social Web is one with too many walls, too much manipulation, and too much lock-in. We need to make the social Web look more like the document Web — open, distributed, and interconnected.

When you talk about “social software”, what do you mean?

Perhaps the crux of it is – social software alows people to interact with each other online in ways similar to their Real World interactions – with just a bit more wiring involved.

What’s the problem with social software that you’re trying to solve?

DiSo is a cleverly shortened form of “distributed social” – the idea that surely we can build ways for any site to participate in this “new” social web. The other way to look at this is one I really like: we’re pushing control of the social data out to the edges, as Danny O’Brien likes to phrase it. While total user control over this data may or may not be ultimately attainable, I think that working towards that goal is a good counterbalanace to the centralization that is prevalent in the silos.

What is the DiSo Project?

How is it trying to solve the problem(s) with social software?

DiSo got started from some hacks I did to the WP Microformatted Blogroll plugin for WordPress that Chris Messina (DiSo co-founder and Agent Provocateur) had written nearly a year before. I was reading about some work that the DIG (Distributed Information Group) had done with FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) and OpenId to create what we’d today call a social whitelist – I looked at that and thought I could do something similar with XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and OpenID. So I downloaded Chris’s plugin (GPL’d yay) and got to hacking. That work got rewritten a couple times, and now lives (I think!) in the wp-contacts-list plugin in the DiSo repository.

So, for contacts the foundation was XFN. Core to these interactions is Identity – for that we build on OpenId. In looking at Profiles, we have the hCard microformat, a convenient format that’s both human- and machine-readable. Messaging is trickier – regardless of implementation, there’s a real-time expectation from users there that we need to address. There’s a lot of interest in eXtensible Message Passing Protocol (XMPP) (the protocol used in Jabber chat and Google’s gTalk, AtomPub, and a few others, including Laconica (cue subtle suck-up to interviewer).

Tell us about yourself. Who are you? What’s your background? What’s your principal role at DiSo?

My earliest experience with the internet and the web up close was a the linux web/mail server I watched our ISP guy build for the agency I was working with at the time, around 1997. This idea that anyone could download this entire operating system, with programs, for free and install it on  commodity hardware was completely new for me, and Free Software was indelibly linked to the Web in my mind from that day. Now, this is coming from a die-hard Macintosh user, but my first web programming was in perl and msql, and I’ve always advocated for Free technologies where it seemed to make any sense.

Roll forward a few years, and I got interested in standards-based development in general, and involved in the microformats community in particular; it was my first experience with community-driven standards. The DiSo community is sort of modeled on the microformats community – it’s very adhoc. Chris and I are the co-founders, list moms, wiki gardeners, and askers-of-questions, and there are a few prolific coders who are investing time and energy in producing some complex bits of code. I’ve done my share of coding, but the day job means I don’t get as much time as I’d like. My most recent contributions are an XRDS-Simple plugin for Movable Type, and a fairly complex and (if I may deign to say, cool) Friends plugin for Movable Type. The Friends plugin lets you manage a Friends/Contacts list on your own site, will display a blogroll for your site, and uses the Google social graph api to provide some powerful discovery, import, and merging of contacts from other social networking sites.

How many people are working on the project right now? What are they doing?

The unsung hero of DiSo though has to be Stephen Weber. Stephen’s a coding machine, and participates in a lot of the discossions on the list, championing simple approaches when some of us start wandering off into the weeds. Stephen has done the majority of work on activity streams, profiles and permissions (something Stephen and I hacked on, and he fleshed out, that came out of the OpenId whitelist work early on). Recently Stephen built a very very cool social search engine that crawls hCards, FOAF, and XFN data via the social graph api. He’s now got over 100k profiles indexed, including contacts for each profile. It’s simple but very powerful.

There are others that have worked on code for various platforms, and there’s been a ton of really good discussion on the list. I’d call out James Walker of Lullabot who wrote an XRDS-Simple plugin for Drupal; Mark Paschal wrote the original Action Streams plugin for Movable Type, of which Stephen’s action streams plugins was a straight port. Technically, either projects are part of DiSo (i.e. in the repo) but both Mark and James participate on the list and have encouraged our work.

Your first release is based on WordPress. Why did you choose it for the initial rollout?

1. Chris’s initial plugin was built for WordPress, and we both used WordPress for our personal sites.
2. WordPress is really popular among hobbyists and web-savvy families, it can be hosted damn near anywhere, and it represents kind of a lowest common denominator platform.
3. It’s got a well-ish documented plugin api that provides access to near everything in the app.

Where does DiSo stand in relation to open standards around identity — for example, OpenID? MicroID?

I hope any MicroId proponents out there will correct me if I’ve misjudged.

Compare and contrast DiSo with some other open social efforts — XFN? FOAF? OpenSocial?

Open Social is always on the radar, sort of over there to the left. Personally, I kind of like what Google is doing there, but it’s not what I would call distributed. It’s more like tether-ball. You can play all around the silo but you still can’t really take your ball and go home if you get your nose bloodied (to violent a metaphor?). Friend Connect (Facebook) is the same. Now, Kevin Marks is probably going to set me straight on something I’ve got wrong about Open Social, and that’s ok. I’d like to see DiSo code talking to Open Social, but it’d be easy to get sucked into that ecosystem before we’ve got a solid one of our own.

Are you familiar with NoseRub? AroundMe? What’s your impression? How could they use DiSo, or interoperate?

Are there other interesting projects you’ve got your eye on right now?

What can users or developers do to help with DiSo?

To be honest, we’re not as close to having something for users to play with as I’d like. Developers or technical users, yes – there are quite a few components you can get from the repository and install on a site to test things out. But not much I’d point my wife at yet. The upcoming MT Friends plugin for is going to be the most complete piece I’ve worked on so far, and I’d probably set that up for a friend or fmaily member, but it’s hard to say “this is DiSo!”. It’s a small piece of the whole.

Where do you see DiSo in a year? 5 years?

Some people have confused what autonomo.us is doing with what DiSo is doing. How would you compare the two?

With this focus on principles, rather than code, we think we complement- rather than compete with- projects like DiSo, DataPortability, and Open Web Foundation. We’re not ivory tower types; every one of us has an extensive development background, so we all have the deepest respect for the people writing code (and specs), and no desire to get in their way.

I think the shared principles have to do with pushing Control of data, interactions, etc out to the Edges. For autonomo.us, the Edge means the desktop, and Control means Free and Open software that cannot be taken away at a corporation’s whim. For DiSo, the Edge is a web presence under the user’s control, and Control means Free and Open Services that can be replicated/federated at need. But that’s just a stab at a comparison – it’d be fun to get together sometime and talk about the parallels.

How do you think autonomo.us can help DiSo?

What comes next with distributed sociality on the Web, in your opinion? Where are we going?

What comes next for you personally?