5 ms·

So, here is what I suggest someone does: - A "drop it in and it works" wordpress like app that acts as someones homepage/social network interface so people can

by ErrantX 17y ago

So, here is what I suggest someone does: - A "drop it in and it works" wordpress like app that acts as someones homepage/social network interface so people can host their own pages - - include oauth/openid in the app so the homepage can act as a central login too - - drop pubsubhubub or something similar into the app so that people can share information with their friends and followers directly - implement a central website to act as a "search" clearing house (search for names and email addresses which resolve to url's). All it will store is name and a hash of your email (with options to store more if the user allows). - produce a "web bar" like the blogger one to go at the top of the web app - so people logged into their "network" get easy tools when on other peoples pages All of this exists in parts already (oauth, pubsubhubub etc) so it's just a case of drawing it together.

DennisP 17y ago
Search for friends on Facebook and the top result for "John Smith" is the one in your own social circle. It's not just a raw search for a name. You could have a central database with all the friend relationships, but you don't need that. You can search the way some P2P networks do it. Send the request to all your friends, who forward it to their friends, for a certain number of iterations. When the target is found it can reply to you directly.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Yeh that would be quite cool - but also a nightmare to get working because of the overhead of searching friends of friends via the friends web apps. Searches could end up taking a looong time - or just timing out. There could be ways (especially if people optionally added more info to the search profile) to narrow it down. Direct email searches for example would be easiest.
  - DennisP 17y ago
    Perhaps, but Gnutella did it this way and seemed to work well enough.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      Sorry, you misunderstand; technically it is a "solved problem" I agree. The issue is that it would be a web app not a client - and you have a limit of how long you can run requests for (and, also, if your hosting the app it means pretty much we are limited to PHP - and no fancy stuff like asynchronous requests etc) Example: if I have 150 friends and I send a "search request" to them, who then send a "search request" to their 150 friends - for, say, 3 levels of iteration that is a lot of work every page is doing - all within one basic request.
      - lallysingh 17y ago
        Control the search via ajax in the searcher's web browser. Think hierarchal DNS lookups, only fanning out instead.
      - DennisP 17y ago
        One approach: send a url which accepts replies, with a RequestID field. Now you just have to wait for your friends' servers to accept your request. Pubsubhubbub works this way iirc. To the extent your friends are on the same server, you speed things up more. If you got online by accepting an invitation from a friend, that will tend to happen. It'd still be better to have asynch requests. I'm not so sure PHP is necessary these days. A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. I don't think many people would be setting up web apps just for themselves.
        ErrantX 17y ago
        > A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. Well what I have specced out is to compete with Facebook and offer a privacy concious service to the masses. So something like that is infeasible for a number of reasons.
        DennisP 17y ago
        Obviously all these small groups would talk to each other with an open protocol and function as a single large network. In fact, looking again at your proposal, you mention pubsubhubbub. As long as we're using that, we could send search requests to friends, just like we send status updates. Each of them forwards to their own hub. The search data includes the URL for posting results, and a time-to-live that gets decremented each time the search is forwarded. Now we can get back to the simple PHP site.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
This is by far the best, most realistic, and most useful spec I've seen. I would use this. Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key. Exactly. And the beauty is that because the central search API is documented and, hopefully, the drop in code app is FOSS companies could host their own networks which support the API for those without the skill or inclination to set it up themselves. But because it is open there is competition and an incentive to stay on the "right side" etc.
  - jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
    yup, my fear comes in two forms: a) people will laden this with too much junk making this a bloated piece of software that is too confusing and takes too long to get out. b) people will forget the real benefits to people ala drop in easy.
rythie 17y ago
BuddyPress? http://buddypress.org/ http://buddypress.org/
- mortenjorck 17y ago
  That's actually... really promising. I could definitely see using this among my close friends if Posterous ever gets too cumbersome. The real question, though, is how BuddyPress installations might eventually communicate with each other. A federated mesh of BuddyPress instances, with a good UI for managing relationships between them, is the kind of thing that would be needed to take on Facebook.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    The only concern I would have with BuddyPress is that it is based on Wordpress. As a codebase WP tends to have quite a high rate of exploits (or it is a popular exploit target). Right now that's not a huge problem - but for a social network where we want to encourage non-techy types to be involved it could be explosively bad.
GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
http://onesocialweb.org/ http://onesocialweb.org/
jcl 17y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't a site that maps names and e-mail hashes to a homepage URL make it really easy for a spammer to take a list of name/e-mail pairs and find the ones that are in active use?

by ErrantX 17y ago

DennisP 17y ago

Search for friends on Facebook and the top result for "John Smith" is the one in your own social circle. It's not just a raw search for a name. You could have a central database with all the friend relationships, but you don't need that. You can search the way some P2P networks do it. Send the request to all your friends, who forward it to their friends, for a certain number of iterations. When the target is found it can reply to you directly.

ErrantX 17y ago
Yeh that would be quite cool - but also a nightmare to get working because of the overhead of searching friends of friends via the friends web apps. Searches could end up taking a looong time - or just timing out. There could be ways (especially if people optionally added more info to the search profile) to narrow it down. Direct email searches for example would be easiest.
- DennisP 17y ago
  Perhaps, but Gnutella did it this way and seemed to work well enough.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Sorry, you misunderstand; technically it is a "solved problem" I agree. The issue is that it would be a web app not a client - and you have a limit of how long you can run requests for (and, also, if your hosting the app it means pretty much we are limited to PHP - and no fancy stuff like asynchronous requests etc) Example: if I have 150 friends and I send a "search request" to them, who then send a "search request" to their 150 friends - for, say, 3 levels of iteration that is a lot of work every page is doing - all within one basic request.
    - lallysingh 17y ago
      Control the search via ajax in the searcher's web browser. Think hierarchal DNS lookups, only fanning out instead.
    - DennisP 17y ago
      One approach: send a url which accepts replies, with a RequestID field. Now you just have to wait for your friends' servers to accept your request. Pubsubhubbub works this way iirc. To the extent your friends are on the same server, you speed things up more. If you got online by accepting an invitation from a friend, that will tend to happen. It'd still be better to have asynch requests. I'm not so sure PHP is necessary these days. A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. I don't think many people would be setting up web apps just for themselves.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        > A nicely packaged virtual machine can work pretty well for a small group. Well what I have specced out is to compete with Facebook and offer a privacy concious service to the masses. So something like that is infeasible for a number of reasons.
        DennisP 17y ago
        Obviously all these small groups would talk to each other with an open protocol and function as a single large network. In fact, looking again at your proposal, you mention pubsubhubbub. As long as we're using that, we could send search requests to friends, just like we send status updates. Each of them forwards to their own hub. The search data includes the URL for posting results, and a time-to-live that gets decremented each time the search is forwarded. Now we can get back to the simple PHP site.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

This is by far the best, most realistic, and most useful spec I've seen. I would use this. Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key.

ErrantX 17y ago
> Drop in easy ala wordpress is the key. Exactly. And the beauty is that because the central search API is documented and, hopefully, the drop in code app is FOSS companies could host their own networks which support the API for those without the skill or inclination to set it up themselves. But because it is open there is competition and an incentive to stay on the "right side" etc.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
  yup, my fear comes in two forms: a) people will laden this with too much junk making this a bloated piece of software that is too confusing and takes too long to get out. b) people will forget the real benefits to people ala drop in easy.

rythie 17y ago

BuddyPress? http://buddypress.org/ http://buddypress.org/

mortenjorck 17y ago
That's actually... really promising. I could definitely see using this among my close friends if Posterous ever gets too cumbersome. The real question, though, is how BuddyPress installations might eventually communicate with each other. A federated mesh of BuddyPress instances, with a good UI for managing relationships between them, is the kind of thing that would be needed to take on Facebook.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  The only concern I would have with BuddyPress is that it is based on Wordpress. As a codebase WP tends to have quite a high rate of exploits (or it is a popular exploit target). Right now that's not a huge problem - but for a social network where we want to encourage non-techy types to be involved it could be explosively bad.

GiraffeNecktie 17y ago

http://onesocialweb.org/ http://onesocialweb.org/

jcl 17y ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't a site that maps names and e-mail hashes to a homepage URL make it really easy for a spammer to take a list of name/e-mail pairs and find the ones that are in active use?