Giorgos Logiotatidis wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm posting my view on the proposed idea "People search server" for the
Google Summer of Code [1]. Being able to search for people and groups
among different websites supporting the ostatus protocol is a must for
the network to grow and evolve as a distributed open source social
platform.
The search server could read feeds from sites about new registrations,
updates, etc.
It'd probably be better to PuSH them.
Feeds are parsed and saved in a local database by a daemon
(besides the RDBMS, a noSQL database can be used for increased speed and
better structure of the data).
Really? Are NoSQL databases faster than RDBMSes? Are they better for
structuring data?
A Django or PHP powered website can provide to the end user a simple,
clean interface to search for people and get a direct answer from our
local database.
Maybe a smart way to do it would be to build a plugin on top of
StatusNet. We've got most of the basics (profile database, OStatus
subscription, object model) built-in already.
In general, the more your proposed codebase diverges from StatusNet's
(programming language/libraries/frameworks), the less likely we are to
accept it. We'll need to maintain this code in the future.
Spam bots submitting feeds, or searching, can be easily blocked by
integrating recaptcha [2] but more sophisticated techniques would need
something better (does spamassasin already have rules for
microblogging? :)
Probably not.
Spoofing will be an interesting field for research. Using GPG keys -for
the techies- or a "web-of-trust" -e.g. promoting users that have many
subscribers to the search results- could be interesting approaches.
Again, PuSH might be the answer here. However, we do already have RSA
keys related to accounts, so there may be some value.
As an extra: A crawler can be build to automatically find ostatus
compatible websites -carefully avoiding spam- and add their user
registration feeds to our aggregator.
This is an incredibly hard job.
-Evan
--
Evan Prodromou
CEO, StatusNet, Inc.
[email protected] - http://evan.status.net/ - +1-438-380-4801
_______________________________________________
StatusNet-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
