2011/12/11 Niels Ole Salscheider <[email protected]>: > CC'ing [email protected] > -------------------------------------------------- > > Hello, > > while it is "cool" from a technical point of view to see some efforts to > integrate Facebook & Co. into KDE SC, I think that we, as a community around > free software, should try to integrate a social network built around open > standards, too. > > Given the recent move of discussions to Google+ in the open source community, > there seems to be a demand for social networks (even though I am happy with > mailing lists, blogs and IRC). But after all, Google+ is not much better than > Facebook: Google might be friendlier towards the open source world but it is a > closed network built around proprietary technologies after all. > > Unfortunately, there are not any good alternatives. While there are many small > projects trying to solve this issue, none of these is big enough to gain > momentum and become a real competitor to Facebook & Co. > > Because of that, I want to propose to push for a social network based on XMPP > (maybe reusing the efforts done by OneSocialWeb) and integrate it well into > KDE > SC (really well, not just the obvious stuff). The reason why it should use > XMPP > is that there are already many mail providers offering XMPP based chat > services > and I bet that these providers would like to offer social network extensions, > too, if there was an easy way. Each provider alone does not have a big market > share; but considering that about half of my friends that are not open source > related use an email provider that offers XMPP (GMX, web.de, 1&1, Google Mail, > ...), the complete network could have enough members to gain momentum. > > Of course, this will not happen if we do not work together with other > projects: We need to get together with the OneSocialWeb team so that they > finish their XEPs (maybe even help them and make suggestions how to improve > the > drafts). We also need the important XMPP servers (ejabberd, ...) to support it > and to find a project that wants to improve the web interface OSW started to > implement. Meanwhile we should implement the draft in KDE SC, too (this might > actually be an unique selling point for both, KDE SC (5) and XMPP/OSW). > > I know there might be reservation to put effort into such a project until the > standards are finished and there are enough users. But if we do not show > commitment and work simultaneously on this, each project will just wait for > the others to take a step and nothing will ever happen. > I cannot promise that this will work out but I think that it is our only > chance to build a real alternative to the closed social networks. And I am > confident that we could win quite an amount of users, at least in the open > source community and from the mail providers already offering XMPP. > > What do you think? > > Regards,
A couple of clarifications: - Facebook chat is based on XMPP (and is the only reason I use it) - GTalk is also based on XMPP and even though I know little about Google+ I assume they use XMPP too A way to provide support to an open social network would be to check what can we support from Diaspora, but chat-wise, I think we have that out of the box as I think Diaspora uses XMPP too. PIM-wise, we could check what do we need to import contacts from Diaspora, StatusNet, elgg and any other free-something we can think of. David E. Narváez _______________________________________________ KDE-Telepathy mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
