Really tough for me to write it in English… but I am working hard…post the draft out and hope to get some feedback…
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Social Blog: turn blog into a decentralized social network
Robert Mao
Abstract
Social networking has been proved to be one of the most important type of Internet service however today’s social networks are lack of openness, lack of port abilities, users get sick of involved into too many similar but separated networks. In this paper we discussed a decentralized architect that turn user’s blog into a social network based on open standards, with this approach, user will be able to create, store, manage their profile, social graph on their own site and be able to sharing data among different sites. A prototype will be given as the proof of the idea and also be used test the acceptance and the usability.
Keywords
Social network, blog, social network portability, decentralize, Microformats
Introduction
Social networking service is becoming red hot in the last five years, there are already too many social network sites, e.g. Friendster.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Linkedin.com, Orkut.com, Xing.com, Mixi.com, etc., however more are coming. There are also sites that provided specific services but also offering build-in social network features, e.g. Flickr.com, Del.icio.us, Youtube.com, etc. More and more site creators realized the importance of offering those “social features”, so it’s not a surprise that they will become a standard part of future web sites.
Today’s social networking sites have several common problems:
1. They are not open, each of them is like a stand alone “walled garden”. When users come to a new social networking sites, generally they have to enter their profile information again and declare their contacts (friends) to establish “relationship” again, there is no standard way to share data from existing services;
2. Users have very little control on their own data, users’ information (profiles, contact lists, activities, etc) are stored in many different sites, some are duplicated, some are missing. It’s also hard for users themselves to control their own data. Some sites even does not allow user to delete their account;
3. People have already been bored of registering and re-declaring relationships in too many different sites which have similar social features. There will be a high demand from the users side to make join different social networks easier and control their own social data better.
Facebook platform provided some kind of openness to third party applications, however it means every application need to be based on facebook platform, that obviously not possible. The recent released Google Open Social API is also trying to define a standard API to enable gadgets be able to run in different facebook alike web platforms, unfortunately, Social Open does not bring anything new in openness of a social network.
There are already some pioneers discussion on the “decentralized social network” and the “social network portability”, there are already some researches, papers, experiments, prototypes available. There is already a few common viewpoints:
1. It’s not a good idea to build another centralized service to solve today’s problem, and actually it’s almost not possible to build such one-rule-all super service;
2. Existing standards, protocols, formats, solutions etc. will be used as possible instead of inventing brand new things.
3. It should be user centric and keep the minimal impact of the user experience, users are not really interested to understand those concept of decentralize, portability etc.,
Blog has become very popular in the last few years, blog already have great social features, bloggers have established implicit social networks through blogrolls, links, comments and trackbacks, some blog gadget applications which generally sit on the blog sidebar bring more features. Blog is a great success example for providing online decentralized personal service. However, the social features come with blog are implicit and since blog is more specific on content publishing the usability for those social elements are not well designed.
We are introducing an approach which add some features into a blog, and turn the implicit social features into explicit ones. By adopting existing open standards, such as Microformats, this approach will be able to interop with existing third party software or service.
Existing social features in blog
(this part will analysis the social feature in today’s blog system, blog add-ons, and also compare the blog against the social networks to see what blog already offered and what blog lacked, TBD)
There are already many social network elements inside a blog.
· Blog roll
· Outbound links
· Comments
· Trackback
Why not email?
(this part will discuss why blog is better and why email is not, since email also have many social features. )
Future base stone social network features
(this part will describe what we foresee of the future social network)
Social blog: turn blog into social network
(this part will describe the architect of social blog)
Prototype
(This part will describe a protype which turn Wordpress or DasBlog into a social network)
Conclusion
(the conclusion part)
References:
1. Brad Fitzpatrick, Thoughts on the social graph, http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/, 2007
2. John Breslin and Stefan Decker, The future of social networks on the Internet, IEEE Internet Computing, 2007
3. Dina Mehta, My blog is my social software and my social network, http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/2004/01/27.html, 2004
4. Microformats, , http://microformats.org/
5. Social network portability, http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability
6. XHTML Friends Network, http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/
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