Hi list, What i think this project should be is a bit of glue and a standard protocol and set of web service api's.
What i want is some service that knows information about me and contains my social graph. It needs to be able to have different classes of user such as public (identi.ca follwers), friends (both authenticate eachother) and be able to split these up into different levels of trust. I want to be able to define close friends/family who will have access to just about everything including my phone number etc and still allow casual people to friend me and get a little information about me. Control must be the central idea. If i go and comment on someone's blog post i may not want to give out my email to everyone but i might allow the author of the post to have it. We already have identi.ca, blogs, email, xmpp. So why not use these systems? It should not support one protocol, it should support as many as are possible. For public long form messages broadcast allow the service to pull your blog posts. For short public messages pull to identi.ca, for private send an email, for real time have a web based xmpp server. The system needs to be built so i can join other applications to it. I use libre.fm, so that should be able to send information into my feed of what i am playing. It should not just send text around the place, it should allow for different formats to be supported. It would be useful to be able to send things like html, links to files, song metadata, contacts, calendar. there needs to be a discovery mechanism where servers will examine what each other can do and prompt how to use it. The process of setting applications should be simple like identi.ca's federation. I go to libre.fm, i give it a url to the service i am using. it redirects me to my profile, it prompts me for what information is shared and asks me what permissions to give it. permissions should be post to my feed, pull my public contacts, pull friends, push followers, add info to my profile. A service like identi.ca would have a different set of services it sends and recieves, for example direct public messages, messages by my friends, messages in the groups i follow. so most of the information will be pulled from identi.ca but still have ways of pushing messages into the service. It should be an internet application not a web application. i'd like the ability to build something like steam where i can friend people i play with and send them a link to what server i am using. It needs to be able to move. I want a system where i can migrate my account from one server to another without causing problems. It needs to advertise multiple instances of my url so if one instance stops working services will start pointing to the other server. It should also allow me to permanently purge my account.
