Some positive feedback since my earlier post on Inside-Out Social Networking – thanks! In particular the following have been brought to my attention:
- Data Sharing Summit in California on the 7-8 Sept appears to be addressing just the same issues. I’ll keep an eye on the wiki there.
- That was kicked off by Marc Canter’s open letter to Social Networks encouraging them to consider opening up the data. He uses the word ‘vendor’ to describe the Social Networks.
- Marc Canter also operates BroadBandMechanics which is – as far as I can tell – an organisation which specialises in retrofitting social networking to existing sites. They have People Aggregator, a collection of pluggable components that can be brought together with APIs and as widgets, to form the basis of a Social Network system.
- There’s also a Social Networking Portability Google Group.
- Armand du Plessis has commented about his site, identitu.de which is an OpenID provider that with XFN information on top, extracted from Facebook. “…but support for other social networks and metadata like hresume exchange are in the pipeline.”
- Brad Fitzpatrick has written a piece about bringing the ‘social graph’ – a mapping of all social interactions that is currently sat in silos in individual Social Networks – into the community. “the goal is to build the guts that allow a thousand new social applications to bloom”.
- It seems Ning, a network building tool, allows members to export their friends as FOAF. Very cool.
I’m going to try and keep up a collection of resources relating to this subject, althoough it’s well worth keeping an eye on the Data Sharing Summit (above), since most of the work and keen minds seem to be collecting around that at the moment.