> Hi > > I take this opportunity to get some insight on something I was working upon, > which i think is somewhat similar to ideas discussed here. > Cross posting one mail I posted earlier. > > > Hello everyone, > > I would like to get some suggestions on open profile idea. > > We were thinking of implementing a open profile using open specs such as > foaf and oauth. The aim is to let user makes his social profile just once, > and get it be accessed everywhere. And the way is distributed, > de-centralized. This is how it goes > > 1. OAuth will handle authorization headaches. > 2. User creates an account on one social networking website, which > implements open profile . > 3. The website generates a unique profile url for each user. > 4. user goes to some other website, which also implements open profile > and OAuth, the website > provides user with feature to make account using his existing profile > on other social network. > 5. User puts in his profile url from other website, > 6. Using OAuth for user authorization, which one completes, the remote > website, sends a user > profile xml file based on the open specs to the requesting website. > 7. The network, gets the profile data, updates it into database, updates > the open profile xml by adding its name into the list , which > contains name and other information of all the websites which are > seeing this data. > 8. Then it sends an update request to all other services, with the > updated xml, using the rest url of each service, > specified in the xml file. > 9. All the websites which receives the updated xml, updates their data. > 10.Whenever user updates his profile in any one of the website, the > website, after updating data, sends > a update request to all other websites seeing it, they in turn > updates their databases accordingly. > 11. The data is hence updated every where and once and no one is > controlling the data. > > Its just an initial draft and certainly requires polishing. > > Cheers I think you are a bit to fast for us, as there is no GNU Social protocol at the time. But I was thinking about the problems we currently have and support for having data not just within our network, but everywhere a user wants it to have is something we certainly have to provide if we want to be truly open. >From this point of view, your draft is a possibility to achieve this. I do not think, however, that it is the sole possibility, as FOAF+SSL does try to do something similar (at least to OAuth).
I am not quite sure what you imagine with that 'XML profile', as this is a rather difficult thing. But possibly this could simply be a RDF document with whatever vocabulary that might be appropriate, such as FOAF, SIOC or even relationships [1]. Did you have more 'real-world' ideas about this? So, I think your idea is something rather interesting, but a little bit too early, considering the state of our work. Nonetheless, it might be added to the Ideas page on libreplanet [2]. [1] <http://purl.org/vocab/relationship> [2] <http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas>
