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The no network social network

The 2007-01-25 at 17:20 by Loïc d'Anterroches filed under News.

I need to confess, I am using a social network. I know it is bad, I am giving my details to a company and have not even a control over my data. I know it is even worse because today we have the tools to make a global independent self regulated social network.

If you look at a social network today, you will see basically that it provides you with an identity and links to other identities. It does not provide really more than that. Today, we have standard and open ways to provide both identities and links/relations between them:

• OpenId provides identity.
• FOAF provides the relations.

Now, imagine that your weblog tool like is providing a plugin to generate for you one identity as an OpenId provider and multiple FOAF for your relations.

This could be done like that:

• http://yourdomain.com/ is your OpenId provider.
• http://yourdomain.com/foaf.rdf is the file providing your relations.

Now the trick is that the foaf.rdf file is in fact a dynamically generated file depending on the user looking at the URL.

Here is a little scenario:

• In your OpenId provider interface you select the URL of your friend Linis as being a friend. You add it to your group of friends.
• Your friend Linis is logged in with its OpenId provider (his URL) and access your foaf.rdf file.
• Your software managing the foaf.rdf file sees that the user looking for the file is in fact your friend Linis. So the foaf.rdf file is generated with the list of your other friends you want to share with him.

Another case:

• You have an anonymous person coming or someone looking at your foaf.rdf file logged with an unknown OpenId provider.
• Your software dynamically generate a foaf.rdf with only the basic relations you agree to share with anybody.

If you look at this system, it is simple to implement, it is decentralized as you fully control your data, it relies on defacto standards easy to implement (you have also a lot of free implementations available) and it is following the spirit of the web.

Now, go, do it!

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