Connecting Social Networks Though Open Standards

Social networks are about people, their contacts and their social objects. Typically, people gravitate towards a number of preferred sites to put and publish (data on) their social objects, but also would like to communicate with the people they know, even on other sites. Many discussions have been and are still taking place to come up with common standards for tying social networking services together and I have been actively involved with several of those efforts.

This talk will talk about the federation model of connecting social networks. At Mediamatic Lab we connected a handful of social networking sites based on our homegrown anyMeta system, using open standards like XMPP, OAuth, OpenID and XRDS. With these, we allow our users to make connections to people and social objects on other sites, but also create new social objects or comments on those other sites. On top of that, we are finishing a new feature that allows people to move their profile to another site, optionally merging it with an already existing account on the new location.

I will show how the different protocols are employed to communicate information about new and changed social objects to other sites efficiently, how to deal with foreign social objects and people records and how security aspects like privacy, authentication and authorization have been addressed. Hopefully the gained experiences can be used to make progress in establishing a common set of best-practices to use the already existing open protocols for federating social networks.