XMPP and One Social Web

An earlier post outlined key enablers for a people-centric, real-time web including:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example. 

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies including:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

With this as context, it is interesting to see the work of OneSocialWeb that describes the following as their mission:  

"The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration."

Here's a recent presentation providing additional detail

OneSocialWeb presentation at FOSDEM 2010

View more presentations from Laurent Eschenauer.

Comments

[julien]

I think XMPP and PubSubHubbub both have their advantages and disadvantages, and eventually they will both co-exist. At Superfeedr, we've mapped one into the other as "transports" for Atom and (soon!) activity streams feeds.