Acronym Soup

Acronym Soup

A bluffer’s guide to Social Web standards

Dan Brickley

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

• the nice thing about standards


XMPP/Jabber

OAuth

OAuth-WRAP

FOAF+SSL

OpenSocial

DAP

W3C Widgets

hCard

XFN

Salmonpubsubhubbub

GRDDL

RDFa

Open Microblogging

Social Graph API

Atom Publishing Protocol

Microformats

Text

FOAF

RSS1

Atom

ActivityStreams

JSONTuesday, March 9, 2010

Other nice things

• Extraordinary potential for impact

• Interesting people and problems

• ‘Interesting’ timescales (CSS ’96, RDF ’97...)

• Figuring out how it all fits together

• So how do SocialWeb specs fit SemWeb?


Semantic Web & Modesty

• Immodest goal: describe everything

• Modest approach: share that work

• Describing stuff is our core business

• others do authentication, UI, APIs, ...

• how to keep track of ‘those others’?


Memory tricks

• Who made it? people / companies / org

• “Like x but made by y” (OpenSocial)

• For situations like y (eg. “trusted access to private photos for t-shirt printing site”)

• “the Password Anti-Pattern”

• Another name for x (XMPP = Jabber)


Composition and analogy

• XMPP uses XML for Instant Messaging

• OpenSocial uses OAuth for trusted access

• FOAF+SSL uses SSL for authentication

• OAuth-WRAP is like OAuth but using SSL

• Microdata is like RDFa made by microformatters

• XMPP as middleware: SOAP meets IRC


Quick example

• Open MicroBlogging (OMB) is a draft spec to federate Twitter-like services

• It uses OAuth

• StatusNet (opensource software, company)

• StatusNet previously ‘laconi.ca’

• Flagship site: identi.ca (lots of FOAF too)


Find reasons to care

• With OAuth, I can authenticate Twitter uses and access their stuff & act as them

• With OpenID, millions of users can login by proving they control URLs

• what are the business and UI reasons they aren’t doing this more?

• Link to trust/provenance on SemWeb?


• With W3C Widgets, I can write apps in HTML/.js that run on mobile handsets

• (..ooO “like iPhone but standardised?”)

• and with W3C DAP APIs, I can request access geo, addressbook and calendar descriptions of their life

• With OpenSocial I can run similar code as a Hyves or LinkedIn add-on, with trusted access to Portable Contacts addressbook


Trustyness

• with the Google Social Graph API, I can ask who uses XFN or FOAF to say “http://www.youtube.com/user/danbri is me”

• and check if the claim is reciprocated

• at Web scale, parsing RDF/XML with Redland Raptor toolkit

• (RDFa might be harder - but why?

• ..oOO(so if x was an openid, and x=y...?)


http://www.youtube.com/user/danbri




Data flow

• with the Atom Publishing Protocol, I can publish content on thousands of blogging sites

• if I have a user’s username and password

• what if I could negotiate an OAuth token instead?


Tips

• Make time to experiment and hack

• And participate in blogs, mailing lists

• You absorb info quicker when you know the people, attitudes, culture of a project


Acronym Soup

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