Distributed Social Networking Schema

I'm not a fan of the interfaces and outputs of the Myspaces and Facebooks. Vox is a bit bloated and slow but seems to work. Would rather have an independent choice for setting up personal information. Who knows how Rupert Murdoch uses all that data he has at his fingertips. And if I wanted to move from one transient service to the next, I just have to start over and find new people on the new network. And I have to use their bloated templates. It needs a more generalized structure. So here's the idea, plausible or not: a social netowrk based around a set of XML files that you would independently host. You would be responsible for putting together a page of your neighborhood (in Vox parlance) by parsing the feeds of your friends, their comments, your weblog, and anything else you wanted. You would also have feeds of your content available for others to pull in and parse as they see fit. More specifically, there would be a master feed for each site that would break down the available feeds (weblog, friends, comments, etc.). And those feeds could then be pulled in and parsed and used as seen fit. The hassle in all this is that people would need their own independent CMS systems to create the feeds. Something Movable Type would handle, but getting people to agree to the same schema and setup isn't easy.

—October 24th, 2006

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