Open Source and the Open Social Web

Small pieces, loosely joined

Evan Prodromou

StatusNet Inc.

Who I am

• Founder Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/) 2003
• Founder StatusNet (http://status.net/) 2008
• Debian
• FreeNet
• MediaWiki
• Creative Commons

Communications revolutions of the last 20 years

• Email
• Documents
• Personal publishing

Email: 1993

• large consumer systems: AOL, CompuServe, GEnie
• University networks on Internet
• Government systems (Minitel)
• Proprietary systems in corporations, government
• X.500
• ad-hoc bridges
• BBSes (FidoNet) for customers or communities

Email: 1995

• Unified around Internet email
• Hierarchical addressing: user@domain
• BBS → ISP
• Telecom companies
• AOL opens up (1995)
• BBSes almost disappeared
• Open Source: Sendmail

Documents: 1992

• Proprietary, complex, internal in enterprise
• File sharing
• BBSes for customer download
• AOL, CompuServe, etc.
• Some FTP systems

Documents: 1997

• Web almost ubiquitous
• Hierarchical addressing: http://domain/document
• Intranet/Internet/Extranet
• HTTP + HTML
• Open Source: Apache

Personal publishing: 2001

• "Home page" on ISP
• Geocities, Tripod
• Frontier, Blogger
• RSS confusion
• Personal vs. Business

Personal publishing: 2005

• Hosted blogs ubiquitous
• URLs for identity
• Feed readers
• Podcasting (enclosures)
• RSS 1.0, 2.0, Atom: more than we need!
• Personal and business
• Open Source: TypePad, WordPress

What's my point?

• Revolutions happen quickly.
• Unconnected islands → federated networks
• Commercial adoption drives need for control

What is federation?

• Network of networks
• Open protocols (usually a lot)
• Uniform namespace
• Hierarchical addressing
• Anyone can play

Other federated networks

• Postal system (country + postal code + local addressing)
• Telephones (country + area/city code)
• SMS (ditto)
• TCP/IP (IP addresses)
• DNS

What drives federation?

• Control
• Distrust
• Greed
• Innovation

What drives federation on the Internet?

• TCP/IP
• DNS
• Scale
• Globalism

Metcalfe's Law

• V = cN^2
• "The more, the merrier."

Metcalfe's Law and federation

• Makes big networks stronger, easier to resist
• Makes federation important for small networks
• Once network of networks > big networks, makes them join too

Social software: 2010

• Facebook: 400M+ users
• Twitter: 100M+ users
• Application-specific networks threatened: Flickr, Digg, YouTube
• National networks threatened: Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, Hi-5
• Social gaming

One vision

• Some networks become defacto substrate for Internet.
  • Facebook: "Open" Social Graph
  • Twitter: Social messaging, "real-time"
• "Open" means "Use our API"
• Compare: Skype for voice
• Compare: Google for search

Another vision

• Commercial adoption of social messaging
• Need to connect
• Threatened networks fight to survive
• Open government requires 100% engagement
• Business needs of providers

Social software: 2012?

• Email-like identity evan@status.net or URL-like http://evan.status.net/
• Distributed real-time follow
• Combination of small and large networks
• Application-specific networks → general representations

Why should hackers care?

• Most important parts of our life: family, friends, romance
• Politics requires open discourse
• Making software that matters

Protocol suites

• "Email" = SMTP, RFC 1822 messages, addresses, MIME, ...
• "Web" = HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, favicon.ico, robots.txt ...
• "Blogging" = Web, RSS or Atom, Atom API, enclosures, pingback/trackback, ...
• "Social Web" = ???

Protocols: OpenID

• http://openid.net/
• Authentication (AuthC)
• URL for identity http://evan.prodromou.name/
• Devolving to a few identity providers (Google, Yahoo)
• Whitelist oriented

Protocols: OAuth

• http://oauth.net/
• Authorization
• Widely implemented
• Whitelist oriented (consumer keys)
• Not a lot of social parts
• Authentication (Sign in with Twitter)

Protocols: PubSubHubbub

• http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
• Real-time publishing ("PuSH")
• Atom- or RSS-based
• Web hooks
• Great support: Google Buzz, Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, LiveJournal, StatusNet, Cliqset, ...

Protocols: ActivityStreams

• http://activitystrea.ms/
• Represent social actions in Atom with XML namespace extension
• Subject, Verb, Object
• "Evan published a photo"
• Powerful when combined with PubSubHubbub

Protocols: Salmon

• http://www.salmon-protocol.org/
• Subscriber to publisher ("upstream")
• Comments and replies
• Activities

Protocols: WebFinger

• http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/
• Email-like identity for the Web user@domain
• XML document format matches identity to URLs (My photo service is X, my social messaging service is Y, my profile is Z, my OpenID is W...)
• LRDD uses URLs instead of Webfingers

Protocols: Portable Contacts

• http://portablecontacts.net/
• Define social relationships
• Static social graph
• User-controlled sharing of contact data
• Compare: XFN, FOAF

Protocol Suite: OStatus

• http://ostatus.org/
• Webfinger + LRDD = discovery
• PuSH + ActivityStreams = follow
• Salmon + ActivityStreams = reply
• ActivityStreams + PoCo = profile

What's missing?

• Privacy
• Client API
• Microapps

The Open Source enabler

• Who will be the Apache of the Open Social Web?
• Not sure yet
• Many contenders
• Trying to work together

Projects: Diaspora

• http://joindiaspora.com/
• 4 students in NYC, 1 summer, $100K!
• OStatus-like stack
• Ruby on Rails
• AGPLv3
• No working version yet

Projects: DiSo

• http://www.diso-project.org/
• Based on WordPress
• Chris Messina, Steve Ivy
• XFN
• Leading ActivityStreams

Projects: Elgg

• http://elgg.org/
• General-purpose social network
• LAMP
• Commercial version http://elgg.com/
• Some federation (PuSH), more coming
• GPLv2

Projects: GNU Social

• http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social
• General-purpose social network
• LAMP
• AGPLv3
• Some federation (PuSH), more coming
• No working version yet

Projects: BuddyPress

• http://buddypress.org/
• General-purpose social network
• Automattic project, very nicely done
• LAMP
• GPLv2
• Very little federation

Projects: StatusNet

• http://status.net/
• Microblogging server
• LAMP
• AGPLv3
• OStatus for federation
• Twitter-like API
• Plugin architecture
• Identi.ca + 22K other sites on the Web

Other projects

• AroundMe
• NoseRub

What next?

• Projects working together
• Integration testing
• Real-life usage
• Innovation
• Growth

How to help

• Hack!
• Translate!
• Theme!
• Implement!
• Use!
• Spread!

Thank you!

• Evan Prodromou
• http://evan.status.net/
• acct:evan@status.net
• http://status.net/signup code ELLAK 2010