On 2008-09-09 00:43, Nathan Fritz wrote:
I'll be there, but I'm looking for backup. I do know quite a bit about
PubSub, at least in it's current state, and I'll be pushing using
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/microblogging.html or a similar
XMPP spec for any federated microblogging service. However, I don't
think *anyone* knows the format of this thing. But I do think we need
some more representation from the XMPP community than just me.
Well, in what I have proposed up to now, and some of that has been
captured in this XEP, is using XMPP Publish Subscribe for exchanging
representations on social objects. The best candidate for the
representation format itself would be ATOM, in my opinion. Richer
representations, if needed, could be gotten by retrieving a resource via
HTTP, specifying the desired format (RDF comes to mind for some use cases).
I explored this space from when I was working at Jaiku and it appears a
very nice model. The presentation I did at XTech 2008 [1], but also on
the Social Graph Foo Camp and the XMPP Summit shows how that would work.
At the latter conference a bunch of people talked about this some more,
covering even auto-discovery of pubsub nodes.
In the mean time, taking it somewhat beyond just microblogging, at
Mediamatic Lab, where I'm currently employed, we already use this model
for exchanging representations of 'things' between the instances of our
(kinda semantic web like) CMS "anyMeta". Things could be articles, blog
items, events and people. You can check it out by going to e.g.
http://www.picnicnetwork.org/ and http://www.mediamatic.net/. Look for
links to XMPP URIs in the head section of each page.
That said, we do not only use XMPP. We also have a bunch of stuff on top
of OpenID and OAuth, and with all these things together we are now able to:
* Make a (shadow) copy of a remote thing and keep it up to date using
pubsub. This allows for a local representation of a thing.
* Establish relationships (called 'edges') between a native thing and
a remote one. Some of these relationships are also shared in the
Atom representation of the subject, so that they can also be shown
at the 'home' location of the remote object. Examples of such
relationship predicates are 'friend of', 'knows', 'author',
'participant'.
* Use an account to log into another site, and initiate the creation
of relationships there.
* Be notified of relations that the person 'thing' that represents
you is an object of, even if the subject is remote.
We are also working on moving an account between sites (with a fancy
drag 'n drop interface) and optionally merging it with an account on the
destination site. This will then result in rewiring the relations to
point to the resulting account, merging friends lists, etc. The social
objects themselves don't necessarily move along, but that would be quite
similar and is something we're looking it down the road.
[1] http://ralphm.net/publications/xtech_2008
