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A peek at Distributed Social Networking

December 3rd, 2008

One of the overview ideas about OpenID is that it gives you a place that you can call your own. It’s a URL (a web address) that gives information about you to other sites that you decide to share that information with. For instance, you can use your OpenID to sign in and make comments on this and certain other blogs, to sign into other services, and to represent yourself (and if you choose to make it public, what you’re doing).

The idea behind distributed social networking is that, like Facebook and MySpace and other social networking sites, you should be able to connect with your friends; but unlike those sites, you aren’t required to create an account on each one of your friends’ other services.

Here’s a great 15 min. video from pixelsebi that explains it.

Distributed Social Networking – An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

Coaching moment: In the past, and still to a large extent, web sites want to “own” us and our data. But think about this: their data is merely a point in time, and unless we choose to update that service, their data about us often gets stale and goes out of date. What if we controlled what companies knew about us? There is certain data that might be required for requested transactions, but what might you want the world to know about you?

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