Open Letter to the Diaspora Dudes
From The Socknet
Dear Diaspora Dudes,
The idea of a distributed social network has been a long time coming, and many people have tried it. It looks like you've finally caught the world's attention. Congratulations!
I'm not sure how much development you've put into the idea yet. You've got a good start.
I've been working on the same problem under the name "The Socknet" for about a year with the help of a few friends. The Socknet is a protocol to provide users with cross-web friendships, messaging and service indexing. It is conceived as a way of offering users fine-grained control of web presence, as the next step after OpenID, and as the last social network.
Before I began organizing the Socknet protocol, I looked over the web and I found the same thing that I'm sure you found: several projects without much steam behind them. It looks like you've found the steam. I'd like to suggest you put it behind the Socknet protocol.
More than the lack of steam, I found that the protocols out there were under-developed, or they just didn't meet all the requirements of a truly people-powered service. Many were too restrictive. The Socknet is fully developed and the protocol is complete, though implementation always leads to tweaking. It's designed around loose enough rules so it can grow to meet unexpected needs. The specification is online at http://socknet.net/.
I'm building the first Socknet provider at http://foolishmortal.org/. It's in the alpha-stage and approaching beta quickly. All the code is kept at http://sourceforge.net/projects/foomor-socknet/.
If you want to accelerate your progress, the protocol and the code are available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike. You won't be disappointed.
Good luck,
Dan Kuck-Alvarez
St. Petersburg, FL
dankuck@gmail.com
- Digg: http://digg.com/software/Open_Letter_to_the_Diaspora_Dudes_The_Socknet
- Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380566
Note: This wiki permits anyone to comment in the discussion tabs.
