On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Graham Klyne<[email protected]> wrote:
> Dan Brickley wrote:
>>
>> I'm been thinking about this idea mostly in the context of FOAF and
>> "social networking" portability, but I think StatusNet and the open
>> microblogging effort is a great place to test it, and fits with Evan's
>> "Control Yourself" motto here. There are also business model
>> implications for companies thinking about hosting too; I'm interested
>> on feedback there, as well as technical feedback.
>
> I do like your ideas, and the metaphor!
>
> Unless I'm missing something here, it sounds as if you could fake up what
> you suggest by using Apache proxy+reverse proxying and the HTML rewriting
> module. It's not a final solution, but maybe a way to cheaply explore what
> it would be like for users, and maybe to uncover where some of the technical
> issues might arise.
I'd thought of proxies, but not with HTML rewriting, that's
interesting. So a bit like greasemonkey scripts applied server-side, I
guess. Yes, that could be good way to flush out unanticipated
technical issues, fiddly interaction with things like Cookies and
cross-site scripting rules, etc.
There are lots of ways that variants of a "dockable" effect could be
achieved. The ugliest I can think of so far is HTML Frames, which some
DNS vendors (eg. Gandi) offer as a way of "forwarding" to other
domains. Painful for lots of reasons (linkability, bookmarkability),
but it shows the desire and interest is there. Another thing we're
seeing is Javascript that rewrites it's host document after calling
out to its parent site. There are 1000s of Web 2 badges and widgets
done in this style, eg. mini Flickr photo galleries or "my most recent
twitter post" sidebars. The downside here is that the generated HTML
is ephemeral; it is generated by client-side javascript code, and so
is very much a second class citizen of the Web. Such content doesn't
show up in search engines, has huge accessibility issues, and isn't
available eg. for normal HTTP-based re-use, eg. page translation
utilities. But again it shows the desire for the functionality of
putting social site content into user's sites. Facebook also have some
technologies they're pushing in this direction.
Apart from the DNS-based proposal I aired here, I have also been
thinking that the combination of something like OAuth with something
like AtomPub has a lot of potential. If sites could ask to be
delegated "posting permission", either for stable pages or for pushing
items into a blog-like stream, then you can imagine music.danbri.org
being maintained mostly, by last.fm for me; or perhaps by a
combination of last.fm, bbc music, and other musicky sites. At the
moment I'm looking at TV stuff, so the idea of a fancy site generating
a very rich user profile ("favourite actor" etc) and pushing it back
to my home site as HTML/RDFa is quite appealing. And I think the link
karma aspect might be enough to persuade some businesses that this is
worth doing...
cheers,
Dan
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