How to fix the (social) web
I just had the most amazing idea (according to my standards, that is. YMMV): This is how we fix the social web
For starters, let's have a look what makes different components awesome:
- Social Networks are great at providing us with a stream of activity from those we deem “friends” or at least those individuals who are interesting enough that we spend time with their output.
- Blogs are a great thing to publish without a central authority or website. Trackbacks enable notifications across different websites in possibly realtime.
- RSS is a great way to syndicate content automatically
- OpenID provides us with a single source of authentication for each user, but still allows for distributed sites.
- XMPP / Jabber does essentially the same as Blogs and OpenID, except for (text-)chat.
Each of these things have a downside though:
- Social Networks lock you in to one provider. Currently, this means either Google or Facebook.
- Blogs usually require a healthy dose of site-jumping around. Also, the comment sections are often messy to maintain or read.
- RSS is as good as your reader.
- OpenID is a bit hard to set up for newbies, and may or may not have security issues.
- XMPP / Jabber is nice to simply use, but has limited functionality when compared to Hangouts for example.
Now, why don't we add these things together? Let's create a functional social-network-layer for the blogosphere. We expand the weblog standard with the following functions:
- More user-centric approach: Allow creators to logically connect all the blogs they contribute to under one person ID. Ideally tie this in to OpenID with cross-site user authentication (for comments and API use).
- Create an “add as friend” trackback notification: When someone adds someone to their blogroll, add in a notification.
- Standardize the rss-for-comments feed url and create an API to allow comments without visiting the site. Make sure that said API can get spam-proofed.
- Create a web GUI that basically recreates the bog-standard social media stream out of your subscribed blogs and their comments.
- This GUI will also allow you to publish content to your own blog(s) and will utilize the API mentioned above so you can comment on other peoples blogs.
- For good measure, throw in an AJAX Jabber client
The result should be a distributed web application that anyone could either use from a hoster or host themselves. The components are all using open standards and thus allow a plethora of other implementations, so everyone can potentially have the GUI they love most. And we won't have any central authority that can willy-nilly change things and break everyones use-case.
Granted this is a very rough draft, but so far, I cannot see anything wrong with this idea...
I also write about roleplaying games in english und auf Deutsch!