rawjeev's randoms

Towards a Decentralized, Non-Propritery Social-Network

Imagine a world where you just need to maintain one online profile and the same profile information is valid on Face-book, Orkut, LinkedIn, your blog or any other site on the Internet.

Imagine you don’t need to befriend your friends time and again on each social networking site.

Imagine you have access to a Social-Graph irrespective of where the nodes may be; some friends from Face-book, some from Orkut, and some are independently hosting their profiles on their websites.

Hard? It Shouldn’t be.

We have a universal mail-address (one can send a mail from Gmail to a Yahoo Id without a problem).

Open-Id has given us a mechanism to use a single user-id & password for use across multiple sites.

And Now FOAF has the potential to do that to social graphs.

I do not wish to discuss FOAF in detail here because, there is already enough about FOAF available out there (see: links at the end).

Very briefly however, FOAF is a vocabulary that can be used for describing people and their relationships. You can create an FOAF Profile in XML format in which you can describe yourself and also point to profiles of your friends.

Here is my FOAF profile visualized:

In the visualization above you can see people I know (under the “Knows” heading). The last person in the list, libby, is a link and it leads to Libby Miller’s FOAF profile. Interesting isn’t it?

Some creases that need to be Ironed out w.r.t FOAF:

Trust: How can you trust that the FOAF profile shown above really belongs to me?

Privacy: How can I make some sensitive information in my foaf-profile like Date-of-Birth, email-address etc accessible only to people I trust? (I have SHA-1 encrypted some sensitive information in my profile but, that’s not a solution)