Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web?
#sxsw #asocialweb
Evan Prodromou (and Tantek!)
StatusNet Inc.
Hashtags
- "Official" hashtag: #sxsw #asocialweb
- "Unofficial" hashtag: #fsw
Hashtags
- #hallelujah
- #ibelievenow
- #evanissodamnright
- #mrzuckerbergteardownthiswall
Other/and/or
- Hackpad: https://austin.hackpad.com/sDqZEVjBCGm
- http://socialhackpad.com/
- http://bonfire.im/tag/asocialweb
Talk meta
- Was originally a panel with broad spectrum
- Now mostly solo
- I represent one extreme of this conversation
- Fortunately for you I am right
Talk meta
- Dave Recordon: Facebook
- Tom Coates, Gavin Bell: pragmatists (skeptical)
- Blaine Cook: pragmatist (believer)
- Evan Prodromou: nutcase
Original title
- Breaking Down Walls: A Decentralized Social Web?
New title
- DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL WEB WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
Outline
- What are our social architectures now?
- How are they working?
- What is the federated architecture?
- What technologies implement it?
- Why is it not here yet?
- How do we get there?
Architecture
- Intentional structure of a system
- The shapes that change how you live
Social network architecture?
- Network topology
- Software affordances
Phase I: social graph storage
Phase I sites
- Six Degrees
- Friendster
- MySpace
Phase I: social graph storage
Plum pudding
Phase I: social graph storage
How we used them
- Make a profile
- Make a list of your friends
- Discover who their friends are
- Try to have sex with them
Saturation
- More complete
- Less engaging
Open standards
- FOAF
- XFN (XHTML Friends Network)
Phase II: micro-casting
Phase II: micro-casting
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Delicious
- Foursquare
"Micro-cast"
- Like broadcasting
- But just to an opt-in list
How we use them
- Create (or notice) (or copy) something
- Share it with your friends
"Micro-cast"
Introducing: the activity stream
- Creation events
- Social events
- In a list
- Reverse chron
One app, one graph
Cold start
- Not as fun if you don't have connections
- You don't go there if it's not fun
Phase III: Social platform
Phase III: Social platform
- OpenSocial
Single network
- Activities
- Identity
- Social graph
Social platform
Symbiotic relationship
- Easier for users
- Great cold-start for platform clients
- Constant engagement for platform provider
Metcalfe's Law
Value proportional to square of users
Phase IV: The imperial network
Players
The model
- Own the social graph
- Charge third-party developers for access
- Sell social data
- Advertise
Facebook has "won"
Facebook has "won"
- There is no graph but Facebook.
- Your only chance at success is on the Facebook platform.
- Other networks are laughable anachronisms.
Its advantages
- Metcalfe's Law on PCP
- One-stop shopping for dumb marketers
- Easy coverage for dumb tech bloggers
Its discontents
- Privacy (Individuals, businesses)
- Innovation happens at the edge
- Single arbiter of interaction
- One way to talk to each other
- Kicked off Facebook? Kicked out of society.
Its discontents (cont'd)
- Civic life (government, companies and organizations)
- Single point of failure (technologically, economically)
- The rent is too damn high
Insanely ambitious
- Monopoly on a mode of human interaction
- When has this ever happened?
- Why would the rest of us let it?
Meanwhile...
How real sites use social platforms
- Onboarding (Find your Facebook friends here)
- Use as many networks as possible
- Activity publishing for viral loop
New social graphs
- Quora
New pretender
- Google+
Breakaway principalities
- Zynga.com
Idioms of experience
- Activity stream
- Social graph
- Unidirectional ("follow") and bidirectional ("friend") graphs
- Membership in a group
- Maintenance of "lists" of friends
- Response vocabulary (like/fave/+1, retweet/share, comment/reply)
The walking dead
- MySpace
Open Source social web applications
Enterprise social software
- Closed network for employees
- Integrates with other enterprise software
- No way it's going into imperial network
Enterprise social software
- Yammer
- Jive
- Chatter
- SocialCast
The China Syndrome
- Local networks available inside the Great Wall
- Other messed-up countries doing the same
Unprecedented entrepreneurship
- Make a better mousetrap
- Disrupt the disrupters
Takeaway
- The game is far from over.
- There are multiple social graphs.
- The imperial model probably won't work.
The federated network
Note on terminology
- "Open"
- "Decentralized"
- "Distributed"
Why "federated"?
- Different authorities
- Clear boundaries
- Social topology
Ultimately
- Understanding >> right thinking
The model
- A network of networks or "Internetwork"
- Large and small
- Internally opaque
- Client-server
- User-to-user connectivity
- Well-defined interoperability
The federated social network
Similar networks
- Postal mail
- Telephones
- Web
Its advantages
- Points of control
- Robust
- Participative
- Innovative
- Global
Its advantages (cont'd)
- More winners
Its discontents
- Messy
- Complicated
- In its infancy
Its discontents (cont'd)
- Not how things work now => insane bullshit
- Commodification isn't scalable
- Bad for venture-backed businesses
Features
- Identity
- Profile
- Relationships
- Media
- Activities
Features (cont'd)
- Messages
- Groups
- Search
- API
- Data portability
Technologies
OStatus
- http://ostatus.org/
It's made of parts
- Activity Streams
- PubSubHubbub
- Salmon
- Webfinger
Identity: 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
Messages: ActivityStreams
- http://activitystrea.ms/
- Represent social actions in Atom with XML namespace extension
- NEW: Also available in tasty JSON version!
- Subject, Verb, Object
- "Evan published a photo"
- Powerful when combined with PubSubHubbub
PuSH: PubSubHubbub
- http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/
- Real-time publishing ("PuSH")
- Atom- or RSS-based
- Web hooks
- Great support: Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, YouTube, Blogger, StatusNet, ...
Responses: Salmon
- http://www.salmon-protocol.org/
- Subscriber to publisher ("upstream")
- Comments and replies
- Activities
Others
- Diaspora
- Appleseed
- DFRN
Why aren't we there yet?
- StatusNet: 2008
- OneSocialWeb: 2010
- OStatus: 2010
- Diaspora: 2010
Mainstream adoption takes time
- Computers: 1948 -> 1976
- Internet: 1968 -> 1992
- Blogging: 1994 -> 2004
- I'm giving myself till 2018.
Blank slate problem
- Re-invent ALL the things.
Over-concentration on basics
- To make a network of networks, ...
- First, make a network.
Gauging people's level of concern
- Privacy from whom?
- Rejecting hub-and-spoke
- P2P
- Cryptotopia
Incomplete stacks
- Static access to social graph ("Who are Evan's friends?")
- Limited distribution
- Client APIs
Different levels of support
- ActivityStreams: Fair
- PubSubHubbub: Good
- WebFinger: Poor
- Salmon: Bad
Failure to concentrate on user experience
- Make people happy
How do we get there?
Build, don't break
- It's not about breaking up big networks
- It's about joining smaller ones
Prodromou's Law of Internetworks
- No network joins an internetwork smaller than itself.
Prodromou's Law
Prodromou's Law
Prodromou's Law
Prodromou's Law
Prodromou's Law
Let's give 'em a reason
- Think by miles, win by inches.
Part 1: Indie Web
Everyone deserves their own Web site
- Publish to one place (or bundle of places)
- Syndicate to "big" networks through snowflake APIs
- Syndicate to peers through open (or open-ish) standards
- http://indieweb.com/
Indie Web
Indie Web
Indie Web
Part 2: Enterprise bridges
- Inter-organization communication
Enterprise bridge
Enterprise bridge
Enterprise bridge
Global ecosystem
- People search
- Firehoses
- Content search
- Widgets
- Spam filters
Get allies
- HINT: anyone who controls an email domain (@yourdomain.com)
- Mobile carriers
- Big organizations (gov't, universities)
- Broadband providers
Other allies
- Social network taxpayers (Hey, Zynga! Free users! CALL ME)
- Fading rock stars
- Hosting providers
- Domain registrars
- PaaS providers
What you can do
What you can do: human
- Use system(s) that produces PuSH-enabled Activity Streams
- Open Source or not
- Link them to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
As a developer
- Make PuSH-enabled Activity Streams (It's really easy!)
- Do some WebFinger
As an advocate
- Don't give up!
- We're closer than you think
It only ends once.
- Everything that comes before is just progress. (Jacob, 1887)
For more info
- http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/
- http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/
- evan@status.net
- http://evan.status.net/
Ilya Zhitomirkiy 1989-2011 RIP
