The Great Interoperability Surge (or lack of)

I just noticed facebook can munch on my RSS feed and thus deliver my ravings via facebook without having to resort to the Live Journal cross poster (which is currently broken) and then use the live journal connect application....

It's a start I guess. My little vision goes along the lines of people using whatever the hell they want to use to store their rants, raves and probably embarrassing photos, allow their friends to do the same and whatever kind of data-sharing cohesion that exists between sites happens by standardised protocols.

I suppose you're thinking why?

Or at least I hope you are.

MY answer goes like this: I don't want to have to use facebook, livejournal, myspace, bebo, wayn or whatever flavour of the month social networking tool in order to communicate. I really don't want to have to maintain profiles and friends lists in more than one place. I especially don't want to have to join a new site just to get some information that you may think it important that I know.

By using a site I control, I get to choose the exact terms under which my words and photos are published. I get to control which adverts are displayed on what passes for a homepage. The list goes on.

How? Well RSS provides a way of notifying both end users and other sites of broadcast content. You can click the icons on my site to access whatever feeds are set up.

OpenID takes another big step. You can associate a login on my site with your OpenID which may well be attached to your Google or Live Journal account. Then your comments on this site are unmistakably yours and may well be link back to your site... I can doe the same, logging in to LJ or dead journal, a wordpress site, someone else's drupal blog and when I interact with someone else's site I can be identified as me.

Where's this going? Well imagine being able to post a photo of a night out on your favourite night out up on your site, tag it with the IDs of the people in the photo, your friends notice you've put new photos up via your RSS feed, they talk about it on their chosen site, sending a trackback at which point your site can display a list of all the conversations about the one photo, and it doesn't matter who has Facebook, who has myspace, who would rather handle their lives though software they chose, not software that was forced on them by peer pressure.

Then there's the little things. Imagine everyone being able control how their contact information appears. Some people hate SMS messages, others are addicted, some like e-mail, some want to use ICQ, others still love their landline, or their voip line that follows them wherever they go. Look at my contact page. It tells you so much you couldn't put into a web form. But it's not perfect how it is. I'd like to be able to import a list of OpenIDs I'd give extra information to, like my address or phone number. Doable. I'd maybe like to host a section of a site planning a surprise party for someone, and have the right list of people told about it, and the victim of the party would be disallowed from seeing it... So many things that could be done. A Drupal module here, a Wordpress plugin there, a Facebook app somewhere else and everyone could choose what functionality suited them. And then the hackers* can assemble whatever arcane weirdness they want on their own site. The death of {I wish my social network manager did /this/}.

It could be so good.

It could be.

Or is could be a mess of not quiteworkingness. It all depends on who joins in the interoperability fun and who demands their walled gardens. It depends on spammers not being able to exploit things massively. It depends on {guess who} not deciding to enhance the behaviour of some protocol so it only works on some sites. It depends on it not turning into a software patent mess.