Here are some highlights from the keynote.

Ransom Love is talking about Social Networking and is showing Geni, FamilyBuilder, WorldVitalRecords - especially their Facebook application 'We're Related'. All of these companies have open and collaborative technology, use social networking and focus on family relations and because of that formula are extremely successful.

Guesses there are 70 billion records in the world and they have 6 billion records and 3 billions images in the 'vault.' Over half of all children have no official record of their existence. What they currently have will require about 24 petabytes of storage. Records in the vault are stored by contract not owned. Therefore they must work with others. They want to collaborate. They want a free flow of data into open repositories and want to work with commercial entities and non-profits to help encourage world wide genealogy.

They are moving away from acquiring information to providing access to information. Moving away from producing products to building a platorm. Moving towards becoming open and sharing information. They are developing APIs and standards to help other organizations succeed.

They have been known as the Genealogy society of Utah but have changed the name to FamilySearch to represent their broader global focus. Also, lets them work with commercial and non profit organizations.

Volunteers currently produce more than 1.7M names a day - that is a total, given that records are entered through a double blind system not that many names go in. Want to get around 300,000 people involved over the next few years.

Their webservices will let you link into richer content to records stored in the family tree. A couple of years ago guys from the Internet Archive came to our conference at Utah State and talked about the massive amount of data they are storing. This included wedding videos and other home videos. Flickr lets you upload photos. Youtube lets you upload videos. It would be interesting if you could build a mashup that let you store digital artifacts in existing systems and link that into family search. The thin layer that makes that possible would be interesting. As a side note BYU's great inappropriate content filter just blocked access to the Internet Archive. Lame.

Chris Messina lays out his vision and the particular functionality associated with it on his wiki. Automattic picked up Buddy Press, and the code is still available on Google Code. For historical reasons here's a thread on the WPMU forums about the activity around Buddy Press>. There is another social plugin for Wordpress called Xiando that hasn't gotten a lot of attention.

We are going to do our part and contribute as well.

As part of an effort to build a social network for Teachers Without Borders we came to a realization that it would be hypocritical to create a network filled with borders. Thus, we began thinking about how escape the social silos that constitute most social networks and bring the focus back to the individual. That focus led us to blogs which now leads me to the actual details of how to build a network around individuals.

I think it goes like this:

1. Rich Profile in your blog
   • Ability to add all the fields associated with your typical social networking platform. This could be done in a folksonomic way. Let users add whatever fields they want and allow communities to converge on an ontology. Perhaps there could be a microformat standard for this.
   • We'll get to what a community is in a bit, but different communities have different needs and would require variable metadata. For example, Teachers Without Borders would likely need to gather information about teaching skills, volunteer efforts, translation abilities etc. Let each community request this specific information from members, but store the data in each member's blog. The primary goal is to center each individual's activity around the space they own rather than lock it up in a data silo.
   • Everyone is building identity aggregators these days. That is stupid. Why should I gather up my data into a silo where some big company can benefit from my efforts. Instead gather the bits into the user's own little part of the internet. If you want to gather up your data gather it up into a space you control.
   • Once the data is gathered up you can then control pass it back out to your friends. This won't be hard as your friends will be stored locally.
2. Friends
   • A blog roll looks an awful lot like a list of friends and XFN and FOAF let you express relationships, something Facebook doesn't let you do. This part of your social network is obvious.
   • Create a friend request widget so that someone that finds you can initiate a relationship. Clicking the button would request a url to their blog. Behind the scenes your blog would contact their blog, discover what it can based on their profile and aggregated identity and report back to you. You would be notified of the request, provided with the other user's information and then have an opportunity to describe your relationship with that person.
   • A first pass at this would leave everything public, but features could be added to control your interactions with your friends so that your boss doesn't see pictures of you and your buddies from college. Chris Messina has a handle on that idea using OAuth
3. OpenID
   • Your blog becomes your OpenID provider. Whether this is through delegation or by your blog actually being able to act as a provider I think is an open debate
   • OpenID becomes palatable because when you make a friend request on someone else's blog it asks you for your blog url which just happens to be your OpenID. The interaction is natural rather than the odd login experience you currently get with OpenID that confuses most users. (I tried using OpenID and nobody understood that they needed to enter a url for their username. Normal users have a hard time getting that.)
   • OpenID lets you establish the initial connection with another user or with a community. During the interaction the two blogs exchange authentication information which will let them request data at a later time based established relationships between the blogs.
4. Trust
   • Spam is a problem so when somebody makes a friend request they enter their url and login to their blog using OpenID. After that two blogs exchange data. If the person making the request is already trusted by someone you trust or is trusted by a community you trust then you would see their request.
   • It is possible to scan through networks and find out if the person is trusted 5 or 6 levels. This would work kind of like the DNS system where if one system doesn't know the IP address they ask the next guy. Might have to be careful on this one though so that you don't end up with bots constantly scanning your friend's friends looking for people to trust.
   • If a user belongs to a community you trust they would float to the top.
   • The bots that want to be your friend could then float to the bottom, or an Akismet style system could be setup where users contribute to the list of known bad guys
5. Stream of Consciousness
   • Since your blog now has all your friends setup it is easy to watch the data coming into their profile and suck that into your blog. You would go to your blog to see what your friend's are up to or the stream could be feed back out to a reader.
   • Each entry in the stream could have a discussion attached. The discussion could then be fed back out when your friend's harvest your blog. Think it as a distributed forum.
   • A share button would share things you find with your friends. You could even add a bookmarklet that dumps interesting crap you find on the net into your blog which would then be fed back out to your friends.
   • Applications are merely Wordpress Plugins that interact with the stream. Riding in the MS 150 and need donations? Install an app and have it post a message to your stream. Want to poke someone? Add a plugin, the poke shows up in their stream and they can click to add the new plugin. Granted this would take a bit of work as the plugin would have to be installed, but we'll figure it out.
6. Chat
   • A dream feature for me would be a chat that understood my relationships. At night only my wife and video game buddies could see me. During the day I could shut down friend chatter while I am at work. No longer would I have to maintain 6 IM accounts. (Why hasn't anyone done this?)
7. Community
   • For the guys who are already popular community is not a problem. People flock to them. For a new blogger the question becomes how do I get people to read what I write? If you are into SEO the question is how do I get links? There are a lot of great writers on the Internet that are not A-list bloggers.
   • Make the A-list irrelevant. Outside of the geek community many people don't care about the top bloggers. My wife wants scrapbook information. My dad is looking for motorcycle junkies. I would love to be able to push a button an have a short term community that lets me and a few other guys work together for a few months. Student study groups may not live beyond a semester but are extraordinarily valuable during their lifespan.
   • You sign up by adding your blog
   • A community will be made up of bloggers that apply to join. If a user wants to join but doesn't have a blog Wordpress MU will provide one if the community is built on this platform.
   • The community will aggregate posts from users and filter on tags, editor's opinion or collaborative filtering based on how the community creator sets it up. Think millions of Diggs with the community in charge.
   • Even without a WPMU install you could spawn a community from your blog - handy for the throw away groups where we only need to collaborate for a short period of time.
   • New members who write well would find their way to the top of the heap so it is no longer difficult to get attention from people who matter to you.
   • Since the community is sucking in posts from its members it can connect users with one another based on existing friend relations and based on the content generated by each person.
   • A new community must be trivial to create
   • If the community needs profile specific meta data it can request that data when the user signs up. The data is added to the user's blog and then harvested by the community. This information would be namespaced by the community url and therefore unavailable to other communities. I'm still thinking through that process.
   • Use Lucene to index incoming data and make recommendations.

This is what I have so far - at least that is what I have distilled from the pile of drawings on my desk. I will be interested to see how much of what we want to do overlaps Automattic's efforts with Buddy Press. If we overlap I am hoping they get done first so we can use that . We will also be watching the DiSo project closely. This is a great opportunity for the community to build and individual and collectively own the social graph.

Let me know what you think.

However, I like the idea behind Digg. It is the same idea that made Slashdot successful. (I am a Slashdot refugee as well). Get lots of people together and let the share what they think is interesting.

What is interesting and exciting to me as we look at building on open source community solution is the opportunity to let users break out of a community when the larger group moves in a direction that no longer interests a minority. Say community one is built on an open source platform. As the community grows one group tends to become powerful and take over the community. This is fairly typical. Most moderation tools although democratic in intention actually facilitate this coup. The choice of other members is to just deal with it or leave. Except that in this case if the social platform is open, easy to install, easy to use and easy to hack they can form a new group within minutes.

Many of these subgroups will of course fail, but some will succeed. Success will depend mostly on the migration of users from one group to another. The question is how does one spread the word about this new community?

One option would be to connect the parent community to its spawn. If the owner of the original community is smart they would recognize the impending migration and instead of building a wall prevent it they would provide the new home world. Tired of the 5 or 6 categories Digg has? Simple, add a new category on that site and see if anyone follows you. I know that there are loose connections of Digg users that try to Digg each others stories to get them to the top. Instead of creating new algorithms to force these guys into Bury oblivion embrace the community that is forming and give them their own space to communicate and share. Then if something becomes popular within that group that content can be pushed out to the other communities it is connected to - the original parent community or other communities that members have formed relationships with or the other communities that are linked into the member blogs.

The next evolution is to use the social network that forms between diverse users and communities to distribute content. Information flows through the connections between communities but more importantly between the connections that members have established in their individual spaces. Even though the community might have a front page, that wouldn't be the primary target. Instead the best content would flow directly to individuals for whom the content is relevant. Lower the signal to noise ratio, provide what is relevant and what is important right now and a new network forms that will make us wonder why we ever put up with anything else.

Anyway, as we were talking it made me realize that it would be helpful if we could connect everyone working in this space so that we can share ideas and collaborate. My first thought was to use Prologue a Twitter like Wordpress Template. I think the template provides an interesting way to keep track of what people are up to. However, in thinking more about this I really don't want yet another site to go to.

How do we fulfill both goals? How do I share ideas, but escape creating another website that I will forget to go to? Bits are cheap and don't fill up landfills. How about a disposable community? What if I could go online to say Wordpress.com and click a few buttons to create a new community? Then I send out an email invite to anyone that I want to have join me. They click the link in the email and instead of creating an account they add their blog. Now when they go to post they see a widget in their sidebar that says 'Communities'. Whenever you post just click the community you want your ramblings to be delivered to. When you want to read the latest from your new found group of friends you just have a page on your blog that pulls in all that data from the community. Comments would show up on the blog posts. Interesting stories could be sent to a wiki that is part of the community or stored in a group bookmark account on the community site, or on delicious, or on magnolia, then distributed out to the member who could then decide if they wanted the links sent out to their delicious account (or magnolia or wherever).

When the group is done with their activity they can shut down the group or leave it up for archive purposes. All of the discussion relevant to each individual would be archived in their personal blog anyway since all the content is delivered to their space on their internet. Throw a Google custom search on top of that and you have a way to keep track of the goings on in your life and across all the communities you belong to without ever leaving the safety of your own blog.

Now I go back to being a Wordpress fan boy. I think one of the big reasons Wordpress is so successful is that not only is it open source but it is open source that is easy to skin, hack and extend. It is a platform that provides some really great functionality, but the real power is that it empowers experienced and inexperienced hackers alike and gives them a powerful place to begin building something that fits their needs.

Wordpress is hackable. Communities have specific needs. Build the basics that are required to fit those needs and then let each community build their themes and plugins. In all likelihood the vast Wordpress community will build thousands of templates and plugins that meet their needs and the needs of the thousands of communities that spring up around the first truly open source community platform.

When Open Social started up I felt like I needed to go sign up for a MySpace account so that I would be ready for when the next big thing showed up. So far Open Social feels like that high school party the nerdy guy threw and two or three other nerdy guys showed up but come Monday morning it will be the joke of the high school. I turned off email alerts for MySpace because I grew tired of the offensive bot spam. I tried playing with Orkut because that was the first platform that supported Open Social. Orkut feels like the Twilight Zone. I tried Twitter for a while. It is a cool service, but I forget its there unless I am bored and the only thing handy is my phone and I want to post about my boredom. How's that for boring.

There are countless other services I have signed. Long after I am dead my name will live on in the databases of the one or two successful social websites and decay with me in the hundreds of dead companies that burned venture capital like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

I am tired of data silos. I am tired of trying to keep up with every new site that comes along. I am tired of someone else owning my place on the internet. This is my place. This blog is me. Anyone who reads this I am sure will think I am strange that I mix my personal thoughts in with my programming frustrations. I don't care. I write this for me because I own these bits and by hell they will do my bidding.

I am currently working at The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning as a Teachers Without Borders Fellow. That is a long title, but it has given me the opportunity to consider what it means to truly work without borders. I think humans thrive on borders. Borders keep people out and keep people in. For me a border is a mnemonic that brings up images of a refugee escaping the evil influence of communism by dogging bullets as they scale the Berlin wall. That's what they taught me in seventh grade. Of course they also told me about how the United States never does anything evil. Huh. Borders make me think of the giant fence the United States is building to keep out the people that do a lot of the hard work in this country. Borders make me think of the DMZ between North and South Korea.

Sadly I think we are comfortable with borders. For some reason people like it when other people are kept out or held in. It makes us feel safer. I makes us feel special. We are we and they are them.

Big companies like that. The borders they build keep people in and make them ripe for 'monetization'. Gmail and Orkut were originally invite only. Facebook required you to have a University address. These constraints no longer exist but helped establish a perimeter of coolness. These tactics are no longer needed. The border is invisible. The border is built from our friends and network. They don't own those networks per se, but they own the technology that makes it easy to manage that network. It is hard to cross the border. No guns are needed to keep people in.

What's a fed up, ranting, liberal, nut job to do?

It's time to bring the world to me and to you and to everyone else that is tired of data silos and social network with sketchy user agreements. Social networks exist in the real world without technology. Technology just makes it easier to manage the network. The next revolution is coming and it will kill the big silos. Probably.

One of the largest and oldest (in internet terms) social networks is that of the bloggers. Blogging is not the domain of super geeks. Non technical people do it. My wife does it. My parents could probably pull it off. Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad have brought this opportunity to the masses.

Blogging or writing rather is an individual activity made better through group feedback. Within the blogosphere there is a network, but so far it has been implied rather than being overt.

That is changing. Today Ma.tt posted that Andy Peatling the guy who created Buddy Press is joining Automattic to work full on Buddy Press. A few days ago Rashmi Sinha wrote an 'Open letter to Matt & Toni: Three ways for Wordpress to become more of a social network'. The DiSo project is targeting Wordpress first in an effort to create an open social network. An interview with Chris Messina about the project can be found here.

I am not at the level of any of these individuals, but going back to my space is here, on this blog, I think my social network should revolve around me right here.

So how do I pull my world to me, but at the same time connect out to larger communities while prevent my information from becoming trapped in a social silo? The answer begins with open source software which leads me to Wordpress.

We have been playing around with Wordpress, with plugins and themes and with Wordpress Multiuser. The first part of any social network exists within this platform. What you learn about me here on this blog is far richer than what you will find on my Facebook, Myspace or any other profile. My activity is here and so one of the most significant components of any social network - the profile already exists. Now, since I don't advocate unplugging from the larger Internet ecosystem what is needed are plugins that pull my data from all the places I live on the Internet. I know there are a few plugins to pull from delicious etc, but what I am envisioning is FriendFeed. A plugin that can pull my data from any and all services I use. For richer interactions the plugin will use the services specific APIs. For other systems use Atom or RSS. These services will be available to my 'friends' via an opml file. For simplicity put a 'friend request' button the the blog. A successful request will result in an exchange of opml files between my new friend and I. Now I can watch my friend's delicious, flickr and twitter accounts via my blog. The content could be fed to a public or private page for the world to see. Add commenting to each of these entries. Let the comments float between blogs so that they show up for anyone participating in the conversation. Think of the Facebook news feed, but on your blog.

Another plugin would let me manage my relationships with my friends would let me specify who shows up in my blog roles and would be exportable via FOAF. That information could be used to establish trust - ie my friends probably trust me and if I am trusted by a friend of a friend then when I post on another guy's blog I am automatically trusted and we keep the spam bots out. This method works for Twitter and I think it could work on an open network.

As you collect friends you build rings of trust. Enable your blog as an OpenID provider - why do a need an external server for this?. Why shouldn't my blog url be my OpenID url and enable provider capabilities via another plugin. Now your blog url gives you access to any website that accepts OpenID and to friends blogs. When you log into a new blog or site the relying party could then ask your blog who trusts you ie who is in your friend list.

The next step is to build communities. I realize this is kind of like building borders, but if the community software is open source then if you grow tired of the community it is easy to split off and form something new. I have had an internal debate about how to build this piece. I would love to use Ruby on Rails for this task, but I think it makes a lot of sense to use Wordpress Multiuser to build the community piece. Doing so means that new members that don't have established blogs can easily create a new one. If they decide that they are ready to start their own blog then all they need to do is take their data and move it to another Wordpress Blog. Freedom. The function of the community would be to aggregate stories from its members and then provide interesting methods for discovering those stories. It would provide a mechanism for finding others with similar interests. I think that one big complaint of many bloggers and one big problem faced by all website is finding others with similar interests and then moving into a state where some kind of relationship exists. By providing a mechanism for discovering others in the same area of interest the community would facilitate interlinking of members which benefits new and old bloggers alike as quality, meaningful links are the currency of the internet.

Again the community would be fed to my blog. My posts would be sent to each of the communities that I belong to and filtered via tag. Only send Rails posts to the Rails community and Php posts to the Php community. We wouldn't want to start a holy war. This is the eduglu that Brian Lamb has talked about many times. We tried it with a project called Ozmozr but had a hard time because we tried to feed all data into one system. Niche communities wouldn't have to deal with nearly as much data as they only harvest and keep the posts that are meaningful to the group. 90% of the rest would be thrown away. Interesting topics could be kept in a wiki. Use that same space to collaborate on group projects that involve more than one author, or create more sub-blogs - thus the WPMU install - that let users create carefully constructed content. David Wiley recently showed that courses could be created using a Wordpress blog. Authors could write books the same way. The opportunities are extraordinary. There are some very cool Mediawiki integrations with Wordpress or if you want to get drunk on Automattic love then use Bliki.

Each community will have its own home page and own place on the internet. New members would use that to discover the group. They would join the group by adding their blog or by creating a new blog on the WPMU instance.

Each user will manage most of my interaction with the group on their own blog. Links that provide my social interaction on my blog couldn't be kept in sync with an RSS reader via opml or styled to look cool and kept on my blog. I and all my friends would automatically interlink and would be able to participate in meaningful discussion.

If the community is such that walls or poking is required such functionality could simply be added via another plugin. There will be no need to really on another application framework like fbml. If you can write a Wordpress plugin you can create an application for this social network.

I think this method of social networking is subtle, but has greater long term impact. I am excited to see Buddy Press find its way to Automattic. Hopefully we will be contributing some meaningful plugins soon that implement the ideas outlined here.

The world is becoming open. Die silos. Die.

Over the past week I have had some time to play with the Facebook APIs. Before I became a Facebook fan I could not figure out why anyone would use the stupid thing. Quite frankly before my friends started showing up in the system there wasn't a good reason. Facebook really depends on the network to be meaningful to an individual, but I digress.

So I am playing with Facebook in a number of context and now my head is exploding with all the possible cool apps you can build when you don't have to figure out profiles and how to build user accounts and networks etc.

I don't know if it is the intention of the Facebook guys, but it really could be a kick butt authentication system. Sure, it isn't open and you depend on Facebook, but then I doubt many end users will care. In the current generation there are a whole lot of facebook users and I think they might smile kindly upon you if they could just use their existing Facebook account to log into your website. Take it a step further and integrate your site as a plugin into Facebook. If your website can take advantage of social networks the integration is natural and should bring you more traffic.

Now lest you think I am a Facebook fanboy.

I don't think this is bad.

I think it means that over the next decade social software is going to become more pervasive. There are a lot of successes in the Web 2.0 space right now, but I think they are only the beginning. Future tools will help us communicate and collaborate in a global way.