OpenPersona.org

On the suggestion of Alexandre Solleiro, I had another look at DiSo to see how it relates to OpenPersona. I passed through the website a little while back and I came way with the impression that it was project for building some social networking widgets for WordPress. Well after spending some more time looking trough the WiKi and and mailing list, I still come away with the thought that DiSo is a blog centric model of social networking. I’ve been told that is just a starting place but I don’t see any talk about models that move beyond the blog. I think that is a great idea and I hope that it provides a great mechanism for active bloggers to use their blogs more effectively as the center of their social networking activities.

My concept of OpenPersona is meant to appeal to a very wide range of users. I actually see OpenPersona as a broad communications tool that could incorporate existing communications patterns such as email, blogging, micro-blogging, group discussions as well as more general publishing of “content”, whatever that might mean. I’d like for my mother to find it useful and easy to use. This is not blog centric, it is communications centric, blogging being just one type of communication format.

I may be making distinctions between DiSo and OpenPersona that don’t exist. I may be just coming at the same problem from a different direction. I really think that this is the case. So I’m going to follow DiSo and look for opportunities where I can contribute and where OpenPersona can benefit.

So why do we net yet another social network? What can OpenPersona do that the existing social networks can’t do, especially in light of OpenSocial and DataPortability.org?

Well OpenSocial is basically an open standard for allowing “social networking application” developers to develop one application that will work on each of the supporting social networks. As far as I can see, it doesn’t allow these applications to bring users together across network borders. You are still stuck with just interacting with the people within your network. It does make the job of application development a lot better but does nothing for the users other than potentially providing a richer set of applications, especially on the smaller networks.

DataPortability.org has exploded on the scene in the last couple of months and has gotten a lot of support from prominent players in the social networking world. In some respects that may be a problem. It seems that a lot of these players may feel that DataPortability.org is against their interests but have joined to dilute, derail or slow down the process. It also seems to be trying to incorporate a very broad range of technologies. I keep expecting to see the announcement of the inclusion of KitchenSink 2.0!

The one thing that I don’t think that either OpenSocial or DataPortability.org addresses is the possibility of an individual being able to run there own set of services that interact with the rest of the world. OpenSocial and DataPortability.org seem to be more aimed at allowing all the existing big players to work together to some degree. I want something that’s more like what a blog was in the early days. People were creating their own tools or using one of a large number of hosted systems to generate a website. They added RSS fees for syndication purposes. In time, most bloggers used the big name tools but it grew out of grass roots efforts. Even today, it’s fairly easy to create a blog that’s under your own control. This blog was setup in about 20 minutes using Typo on my own server. I’d like to see that kind of potential independence for Persons.

It is quite possible that DataPortability.org might ultimately hone in on the same ultimate functionality that I’ve had in mind or OpenPersona, in which case, I’ll jump on board too. My idea is to keep it as simple as possible and to not add technologies because that’s the cost of getting someone on board. I actually quite like the Dave Winer approach of creating the minimal set of tools to get the job done and to get the idea into use as quickly and broadly as possible.

So I’m just going to dive right into a “brainstorming” process for OpenPersona. You should see a mixed discussion of design principles, requirements, architecture issues, comparison with other initiatives and the utility of existing open technologies. I am hoping that a discussion will result but at a minimum this open development process will at least provide me a mechanism to refine my ideas and to provide a journal of process.

The concept of a Persona online has been on my mind for several years but was only a couple of days ago that I’ve finally gotten up the gumption to write publicly about it. In short, a Persona is a representation of an individual online. It’s the attempt to gather of all aspects of what we do online, bring it together and keep it under our own contorl. Within our online Persona, we can access to information about us and what we create in precicely the way that we want. There is a lot more to the idea of Persona but that’s a good enough start.

So for my Persona to be able to control my data and allow it to be exposed in a controlled manner, we need to define some standardized way for our personas to be able to interoperate. That’s what OpenPersona.org is about: The attempt to create just enough of an open platform to allow Personas to communicate and for various application developers to be able to build on that platform. As is the mantra lately (and a good idea), it should leveraging existing open standards as much possible.