Further Social Software Thinking

Following my post about a combination of LinkedIn and Plaxo, I had an IM chat with Martin about where the best place to keep your identity and related information actually would be. Martin was adamant that it should not be server based: it’s your identity, after all. My main concern was a) not everybody has a personal website; and b) how on earth does your average user go about generating FOAF? (Actually, does anyone know how to generate FOAF? ;-))

I started wondering out loud about how such a thing might work, and it seemed obvious that some sort of p2p system would be in order.

Following from that, I read this post by Marc Canter about Huminity getting funding, and then this post by LoÔc Le Meur, which have conflicting viewpoints about the best way to manage all of this.

As I said in my first post, to get the best value from this, people who know you shouldn’t have to manually update your information everytime you move house or change job. LoÔc wants different levels of protection for information (which seems reasonable); and Marc doesn’t want his network/identity tied to an individual device.

Jeremy Allaire has talked before about using an IM-style buddy list to offer different levels of protection, and Blogware has just added this feature to their system.

Here are some early thoughts from me: where do I keep my digital business card, and the vast majority of my contact’s details? In my mail application, which is tied to the desktop. Marc’s image of being tied to the desktop misses out the fact that many modern desktop apps are designed to be run with a network (to wit: iTunes). So why not use one of the new generation of information clients such as clevercactus or Chandler as a platform to build an intelligent contact manager (uh, sorry, I mean social software)?

What do I mean? Well, a desktop app can provide web services too, right? And the <cloud> element of RSS 2.0 seems to provide SOAP meets RSS functionality (or push-me-pull-me, if you like)

So, our intelligent contact manager (ICM) starts you off with a wizard, to walk through the creation of your FOAF file. It might ask you for a few friend’s websites and try to auto-discover their FOAF file, or maybe we’ll publish FOAF hyper-links on our business cards. In this way, the ICM starts to build your network.

Then, ICMbot runs in the background, and starts following the FOAF links on out from your friends, further developing your network. Additionally, the P2P element of the ICM provides a way to search for people or contacts in companies that you might already know and have lost track of, or you just want to find a way to get in touch with them. Once you have found their information, you can start figuring out how to get to them via your network.

iSync-a-like functionality will then make sure that your phone, PDA, website, CRM tool and whatever else is kept nicely up-to-date without you having to worry a hair on your pretty little head about it.

The important thing is that all this happens without the user knowing anything about the underlying acronym soup!

Finally, Marc talks about people having Friendster parties—by which he means that people at parties gather round a PC and look at each other’s connections. Well, wouldn’t it be even cooler if you could do that from your phone? It would now know all your connections, you could scan the location with Bluetooth and see who else you could connect to (and it would also store those links for re-syncing with your mail app when you get back). Imagine how that might actually be useful at trade conferences, rather than just messing about in the kitchen at a party…