Federating Social Networks

ActivityStreams in action

Ralph Meijer

Mediamatic Lab

Social Networking Service

• People

• Works

  • Social Objects
  • Comments
• Connections

anyMeta

• Things

  • Person
  • Article
  • Event
  • Picture

• Edges

  • Knows / friend of
  • Author of
  • Participant

Federating Social Networks

• Identity
• Establish cross-site relationships

• Exchange information on social objects

  • Discovery
  • Subscription
  • Notification
  • Representation

A Open-CI network

Cross-site connections

Activities

• Posting an image, article, etc.
• Updating something
• Commenting
• Friending
• Liking
• Tagging
• Sharing (on Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• RSVP-ing
• Registering an RFID tag

One Activity

• Timestamp
• The action
• The entity performing the action (actor)
• Objects involved
• Objects acted upon
• Plain-text description

Notifications

• User overview
• HTTP feed
• Send e-mails to involved parties:
  • Actor
  • Owner of objects involved
  • Others?
• Non-local entities
• XMPP Publish-Subscribe

ActivityStreams

• http://activitystrea.ms/
• Extension to Atom Syndication Format
• Verbs: URIs
• Actor
• Object
• Target
• Common properties:
  • Title
  • Link
  • Object Type

One Activity Disected

• Timestamp: 2011-02-05 13:58
• Verb: post
• Actor: Ralph Meijer (type: person)
• Object: FOSDEM 2011 (type: event)

New verbs

• facebook-connect
• iktag
• commit
• link-to: what predicate?

Interactive Installations

• ikCam (self/group portrait)
• ikPoll (RFID polling/voting)
• Physical I-like-it
• Write-on-Wall
• Automatiek (Buying historical artefacts)
• ikMic (interruption mic)

Back channel

• Aggregating PubSub and other sources
• Publishing to PubSub node per channel
• Twitter Streaming API
• anyMeta Statuses
• ikTag applications
• Activity Streams
• XMPP client / Web Server
• Twisted, Wokkel, Nevow, JQuery

Compound Activity

• ikCam photo with one or more people:
  • Post image
  • Link location
  • Link event
  • Tag people
  • Make people contacts
• Linking activities
• Atom Threading Extension

Actor

ikPoll Agent likes iTea

• Agent users
• Special credentials: liking, friending, etc.
• Acting on-behalf-of
• Filtering
• Display

Thanks