FSN blog

Open-CI

What is Open-CI?

Open-CI is a set of rules based on open standards enabling different web sites to work together intelligently. Open-CI enables users to use the same account and profile to create connections and data across websites.

Beside the main social networking site, smaller sites can also implement a light version of Open-CI. This way a site with a specific purpose can enable social collaboration, without needing to implement the overhead of user management.

Who uses it?

anyMeta is a social network built by Mediamatic Lab used by the creative industries in Amsterdam.

Open-CI is used in the sites of pilot 2008, CCAA, Picnic, NetworkCS.

Benefits of Open-CI

Open-CI is a social networking system that enables creation and collaboration between different social networks. The boundaries between networks are maintained but the effort to cross them is greatly reduced. New users can get up to speed quicker and existing users can easily participate on other sites.

The current state of social networking both in large sites as in small ones is too complicated and is taking too much effort. People also cannot easily reuse the content and connections they have created in any network. This state of lock-in makes participating in your new social site less enticing for users....

We will work on:

Progress and road maps

We will present the work we did till now and what we still have to do to get things working.

Technical stuff:

The tentative list of subjects includes:

XMPP Publish & Subscribe : changes, implementation
XMPP PubSub gateway : API description and how to use it
OAuth : how to make PubSub secure
Atom : which data do we expect, what should be pushed and what not
RDF : how to represent your data as RDF, which standards to use
Discovery : how to get two sites working together, HTML meta tags and HTTP headers
HTTP status codes : how to get your site play nice with mobile data

PubSub

Major subject is to get your site working with PubSub.

Program

Data

Social Networks Should be Fun

A common interest is what fuels most sites. It brings people together, it leads to discussions, creativity and close relationships between people. Groups, hobbies, clubs, it is the glue of society. Social networks bring that glue to the internet, make it possible to interact from our homes to interact with the very same people we know from the sport field, that conference or some photo we shared online.

We have more than one interest. We might have more than one career. And we definitely have more than one group of friends. All those groups will most definitely not be present on one single website, and probably will have a multitude of different online places where they meet. The website of the rowing club, the website of a cultural foundation, the website of the family.

Here the problem starts.

Social Networks Are Walled Gardens

Creating and maintaining profiles on social network sites leads to a very real social network fatigue. More and more people simply refuse to become member of yet another o-so-cool website. I am one of those people who refuse to become member, it is just too much. And I definitely do not maintain my profiles.

People not maintaining their profiles is a shame. It makes sites less interesting, and gives less incentive to create an active community around a common interest. And that active community was the goal in the first place.

Establis...

In all the buzz around social network portability, this one-day workshop will explore how social network services and Content Management Services can work together in a so-called federation. With a few presentations setting the stage in the morning, the rest of the day we will discuss the different protocols, formats and agreements needed to make such a federation possible.

Topics touched upon include:

• Aggregration of people, their profile information and works on other services.
• Migration and consolidation of people and their works.
• The ability to form relationships between people and works across services.
• Timely and efficient notification of changes.
• Distributed search.

Technologies that are likely to play a role include: Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, XMPP and in particular the XMPP publish-subscribe extensions, OpenID, OAuth, and more detailed descriptions of people and works using RDF, FOAF, vCard, microformats.

1st presentation on explorations to federate social network sites. In the future it will no longer be necessary to re-enter (and maintain) your profile, or make contact with friends for the 2nd, 3rd of 4th time on every new o-so-cool website. The system will do this for you.

This weekend a group of international software makers worked at Mediamatic on protocols and techniques. And we explore how we can work together. David Recordon (Six Apart, San Francisco), Blaine Cook (Twitter, San Francisco) and Willem Velthoven (Mediamatic) will give short reports. And we raise the glass on social networks!

Location:

Mediamatic / El HEMA, Oosterdokskade 5, ground floor, side entrance, Amsterdam