Hi everyone! My name is Nick Jennings, and I'm working on the Sockethub project[1]. I was invited by hellekin to join this list, and am happy to see discussion on this rather broad topic of social interaction on the internet. I read over hellekins brainstorm post[2], it hits on a lot of important topics and I think provides a pretty thorough overview of the situation as a whole, from a users perspective.
My goal is for Sockethub to solve some of those problems directly, specifically in regards to protocol independence, and provide a piece of the puzzle to help app developers solve the other problems mentioned, specifically 'support free' 'asynchronous and synchronous', and the concepts covered in 'memory, identity and privacy'. Just to give a quick overview of how Sockethub is being implemented. It's a WebSocket server which communicates using JSON objects based on activity streams[3] as it's protocol language. In your JSON object, you specify a 'platform' (which would be the method of communication, Facebook, Twitter, SMTP, XMPP, AIM, MSN etc.) and a 'verb' (which is the action you want to perform, 'post', 'message' etc.). Then an object containing the data to be sent, and related details. Examples covering discovery, messaging, posting, and subscribing are provided in a rough draft of the api_protocol[4] (which is still very much subject to change/improvement). With the help of Niklas Cathor and Michiel de Jong, we're making great progress toward having working examples for XMPP, Twitter, Facebook and SMTP, and hope to have a slick messaging app as a demo in the next few months (with Jan-Christoph Borchardt at the helm for the design). So, there's a basic introduction. I'm very interested to hear what people think, feedback, questions, criticisms and code contributions all welcome! We don't have our own mailing list, so most of the nitty-gritty dev-talk is handle via. github issues, so be sure to 'watch' the project if you'd like to become more involved. Cheers! -Nick [1] http://sockethub.org [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/consensus/2012-12/msg00006.html [3] http://activitystrea.ms/ [4] https://raw.github.com/sockethub/sockethub/master/doc/api_protocol.txt
