Connecting Social Networks

using open standards

Ralph Meijer

Mediamatic Lab

Ralph Meijer

• Based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• Formerly at Jaiku: backend developer, open standards
• At Mediamatic Lab since November 2007
• Active in the Jabber/XMPP community since 2000
• XMPP Council Member
• Co-author of the XMPP Publish-Subscribe Extension

Social Networking Service

• People

• Works

  • Social Objects
  • Comments
• Connections

anyMeta

• Things

  • Person
  • Article
  • Event
  • Picture

• Edges

  • Knows / friend of
  • Author of
  • Participant

Federating Social Networks

• Identity
• Establish cross-site relationships

• Exchange information on social objects

  • Discovery
  • Subscription
  • Notification
  • Representation

Open-CI

• Network of known sites (not fully connected)
• One account
• Cross site interaction
• Shared search facilities
• Outside participation great-to-have
• Open standards

• User interface:

  • Easier dialogs
  • Less confirmation
  • Smart defaults
• Currently 5 sites

Federating anyMeta using Open-CI

• Cross-site logins using OpenID
• Local non-authoritative copies of things
• Edges to non-local subject: edges to local copies
• Edges from non-local objects passed along with object
• XMPP Publish-Subscribe subscription to thing
• Notifications on changes
• Discovery via <link/> elements in HTML
• OAuth for authorizing new edges from remote sites

Cross-site connections

Exchanging social objects

• Atom
• Selected edges as <link/> elements
• Richer representations can be pulled in later

• HTTP based feeds:

  • Unnecessary polling
  • Latency
• XMPP publish-subscribe

XMPP

• Generic XML routing platform
• Most known application is IM: Jabber/GTalk/LiveJournal/...
• RFC 3920 (XMPP Core), RFC 3921 (XMPP IM)
• Mesh of servers, clients connect to one server
• JIDs: ik.nu, ralphm@ik.nu, ralphm@ik.nu/Home
• XML Streams, Stanzas
• SASL, TLS
• Numerous extensions: disco, forms, vcard, pubsub, jingle

XMPP publish-subscribe (XEP-0060)

• Topic: node
• Opaque node identifier
• Nodes hold items with (again) opaque identifiers
• Publishers
• Subscribers
• Notifications
• Personal eventing: nodes associated to a user's JID

XMPP in FSN

Integrated XMPP, pubsub service

What if I can't do XMPP?

No XMPP

• Limited web application model or restricted environment
• CGI model execution
• No long-running processes
• Not able to initiate sockets
• Blocked ports

HTTP Gateway into XMPP Publish-Subscribe

• HTTP binding for XMPP over BOSH (XEP-0124)?
• Atom Publishing Protocol
• Limited, dedicated functionality
• Allow site to create (local) nodes, publish data
• Allow site to subscribe, unsubscribe, get items from remote sites
• Notifications
• HTTP Interface into Idavoll

XMPP in FSN

Separate XMPP, pubsub service

Receiving a notification

<message from="ralphm@jaiku.com" to="stpeter@twitter.com">
  <event xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub#event">
    <items node='b4a50f3a-6a85-4c8a-b359-7d41d52c99be'>
      <item id='ab7704b8-cb17-4eab-965c-1f434ef5a95d'>
        ...
      </item>
    <items>
  <event>
<message>

Receiving a Jaiku

<item id='ab7704b8-cb17-4eab-965c-1f434ef5a95d'>
  <entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
    <title>Explaining connecting social networks
           at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008</title>
    <id>tag:jaiku.com,2006:presence/18111517<id>
    <link>http://ralphm.jaiku.com/presence/18111517</link>
    <updated>2008-10-22T09:25:09+01:00</updated>
  </entry>
</item>

More information

• <atom:content/>
• Enclosures (Flickr)
• Location (Plazes, Dopplr): georss, XEP-0080
• Music: XEP-0118

• Comments

  • Node per social object
  • Item per comment
  • Atom Threading Extensions

Finding and subscribing

• Auto-discovery from HTML page:

  <link rel='xmpp.feed'
        href='xmpp:ralphm@jaiku.com?;node=
          b4a50f3a-6a85-4c8a-b359-7d41d52c99be'/>

• Direct subscription via XMPP
• Via an HTTP interface

Moving, merging people

• Moving the account
• Keeping social objects where they are
• Account overview
• Identity discovery
• Drag and drop

Moving people

• Full access to profile (OAuth)
• Making a non-authoritative copy authoritative
• Changing edges
• Delete node + redirect to new node
• Local data outside thing/edge data model

Merging profiles

• Provide authentication
• Choosing between profiles
• No per datum choosing
• Making an authoritative thing non-authoritative
• Changing edges

Future

• Launch of moving/merging of accounts
• Agreements on best-practices
• Exchange of non-public things
• Closer integration for better access control
• Distributed discovery of identities

Thanks