Open–CI blog
Open–CI, Open Community Infrastucture, allows people to declare relationships and create works across different services. Such services work together as equal partners in a federation based on open protocols and formats.
This page is the main point of entry for the effort to discuss, develop and document the protocols, formats and software enabling a federation of social networks.
OpenCI: The current state
How OpenCI combines technologies to create a federation of social networks
OpenCI, Mediamatic's Open Community Infrastructure, is an umbrella-name for a set of specifications which use Open Standards to create a federation of social networks.
The article on the technology behind OpenCI already explains which technologies are being used "under the hood". However, it does not go into detail of the specific features of OpenCI and how these technologies are used to empower them.
This article will outline the distinct features of OpenCI and will, for every feature, link to the specification document describing that feature in detail. The OpenCI specification also collects all these documents.
This article is based on the presentation about the current state of OpenCI, given at a workshop at Hyves, on February 6, 2009.
Open-CI currently implements the following features:
Federating Social Networks
What was it for?
I'm pretty tired of the fact that every time a new social network shows up on the internet, I end up picking a new user name, a new password, having to reconnect with all my friends, having to write a new profile description and having to upload a new profile picture. I'm pretty tired of copying my content from site to site, and I'm pretty tired of having to look at 5 different places to find out where, when, what, with who and what did it look like.
Don't get me wrong, I <3 the internet. I love all social objects and am completely addicted to all the services that dish them out to me. But still, somehow this should should be able to be made better.
Luckily, I'm not the only one who thinks this. People have been working on bringing all kinds of things together, by working on things like OpenID for cross-platform authentication, OAuth for server to server authentication and OpenSocial for finding common ways to talk to social networks. At Mediamatic December 2007, we organized a workshop on Federating Social Networks, especially to exchange thoughts on how we can better u...
Federating Social Networks
on XMPP
When you decide to visit a website in your favorite browser, you type an http address. That address points to a server, and your browser opens a connection to pull the site off that server. Once the site is fully loaded, the connection closes.
When you decide to fire up google talk and talk to a friend, your XMPP server finds the address associated with your friend's (jabber) ID and opens a connection to him. This connection stays open, so when you type something, you don't have to wait for his chat client to decide to check whether you posted something. You send it to him directly.
HTTP can also do some kind of persistent connection, but it's hacky. HTTP servers are not made for persistent connections, and they don't scale. HTTP persistent connections also lack addressability: it is unclear which user is connected to an http connection, while users connected to an XMPP server need to authenticate with their jabber IDs.
PubSub: don't pull, push!
Using XMPP, we don't only have to send chat messages. In fact, we can send whatever we want: vcards, audio, flickr enclosures. We want to use XMPP to send XML stanzas containing our anyMeta things from server to server. To do this, will use a ...
MarcSolving Social Network Fatigue
Social Network sites open up to applications, but how can we make the network our own again?
A social network site is a website where we share some common interest with other people. That interest can be your personal life (Facebook), your professional career (LinkedIn), your sport, your hobby, or just a single conference (Picnic Network).
All these networks have one thing in common: they are walled gardens, islands that force their users to rediscover their friends and re-explain who they are.
At Mediamatic Lab we are exploring methods to connect all those islands, creating an archipelago where you can travel from island to island.
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Joined -
Found in Lijang, Yunnan - province of China
Social Networks Should be Fun
A common interest is what fuels most sites. It brings people together, it leads to discussions, creativity and close relationships between people. Groups, hobbies, clubs, it is the glue of society. Social networks bring that glue to the internet, make it possible to interact from our homes to interact with the very same people we know from the sport field, that conference or some photo we shared online.
We have more than one interest. We might have more than one career. And we definitely have more than one group of friends. All those groups will most definitely not be present on one sin...
We are proposing a range of existing technologies to enable the federation of social networks. Some are quite new, some are well established. Here I give a short overview of the technologies and how to work together in creating a personal network.
We are not the only ones interested in integrating our content. So far, we've started looking at various possibilities- for users and servers signing on to (federated) social networks, for publishing, aggregating, exchanging and subscription to content, and for better ways to describe content and meta-content on the social networks.
Authenticating People: OpenID
To avoid having to create a separate login and password for each social network, we have been integrating the decentralized log-in system provided by OpenID for user authentication into our CMS anyMeta....
