Continue on the social blog ideas and the prototype design/implement. (Last thoughts on white board: “Social blog ideas…“)

Since it’s a prototype, I set some goals and non-goals:

Goals

• Simple, just be able to verify the concept and test the user experience is enough
• Easy to try for any blogger ( so previously planned to develop a  wordpress plugin may not be a good idea), a simple online service site, the easist way to try is copy/paste a code snip to blog side bar.
• Copyleft source code available, any one can download and play around.
• Not tied to any blog platform (if this idea can be proved, people can implement for different blog platforms)

Non-goals

• a  full product or service

I plan to implement the prototype with ASP.NET’s latest ASP.NET MVC framework (if public preview version of ASP.NET MVC can be released soon as ScottGu said.) Of course, such an open idea may be looks like cooler if it is implemented with LAMP solution, however I need to learn ASP.NET these days. :)  Since it’s open, it doesn’t matter what language and platform it is implemented.

The prototype will contain 3 modules:

• Social Contacts

This is core part of the social blog, it’s basically a simple personal contact management module.

• import contact method from external sources, and more import method could be able to extended easily. 
• Based on the above import contact feature, it can scan a URL and find if any meta data can be imported
• Of course, user will be able to manual input data to it

The social contacts module can output/export its data for external modules or applications.

• It can be easily generate a widget trough a kavascript,
• or provide a page or HTML snips which include microformats ( to allow other application, or another instance of “social contacts” to import.
• It should support an API for advanced usage

It should also be able to:

• provide an interface for the owner to operate (add, edit, remove)
• provide a pingback interface for automatic notification (if others add this user)

In the prototype implementation, I will make the prototype support multiple users account, however each user account will work like stand along instances, they will only communicate through web interfaces.

* Social Aggregator

Simply speaking, social aggregator is like a special RSS aggregator, there are already many social aggregator services, so I will not spend too much time in this part. Maybe I will just use a simple server side RSS aggregator to proof the concept.

The different in my idea is, this social aggregator:

• Get feed information from “social contacts” module. 
• Support a “filter” with a configurable interface

Maybe I  will explain this part later in another blog.

Social aggregator is not a core module in social blog idea, it should rather regard as one “application” sit on top of social blog architecture: it use data from “social contacts” and generate output.

* a Firefox extension

A firefox extension may be implemented to improve the usability.  It will looks like the “microformats” bookmarklet or ff extension.  It can be configure with “social contacts” API (and account information) to make users much easier to add “friends” during they browse the web sites

This module is a plus for making user experiences better, but it’s not a MUST-HAVE module.

Social Contacts:

Social Aggregator:

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