[HN Gopher] OpenSocial Specification
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OpenSocial Specification
Author : ecliptik
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-01-11 18:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rektide wrote:
| this was such an exciting time. there was such hope for
| distributed, secure social protocols. for interoperability,
| intertwingularity. we'd seen rss become powerful & loved,
| innovation like Wave (totally excellent off the wall great leaps
| & bounds), Buzz, & others seed the idea that more was possible,
| that we could expand how sites & users worked together across the
| web in a secure fashion.
|
| OpenSocial was to be totally next level modular web. being able
| to build composite sites, sites built of tech from all over. we
| could enhance our experience on a site in ways that no site
| operator had pre-determined. It was going to be a totally new
| freedom for users.
|
| this was really the climax of so much of the aughts, such hope
| vested in it.
|
| however development felt like it went really really slow. time
| kept ticking. the API centric days of the web kept seeming to
| grow further off all a while, while this set of protocols felt
| under-developed under-supported; using the reference stack was
| something I tried a couple of times & never quite latched on to.
| i don't think alternative stacks ever came about, even though I
| feel like this was a protocol-centric approach.
|
| a lot of this reflects my own likely deeply embellished memory.
| OpenSocial felt like it represented a lot of hope for a web that
| could emerge, a culmination of a lot of what was happening on the
| web, in fancier form, distilled. and it feels like the turning
| point where that- to me- far better web failed to really
| materialize, failed to become a thing. there were still a couple
| more years of good API based systems being the norm/expectation,
| but the wind was running out of the sails, each fief of the web
| collapsing back in to it's own. Google Plus launched 2011, not
| long after OpenSocial was underway, and until it's demise it
| never shipped an API for writing a post. you had to use their
| client to do almost anything. this was a ghastly shocking turn,
| back then, something that was almost unbelievable. now a days,
| clients like Signal &al, this is de-jure, the norm. systems are
| only what they were designed for you the user to get.
|
| i think of opensocial semi-regularly. at the time it felt like
| the first big ride out for the "open web", like the beginnings of
| a new frontier. it is with enormous & sadness & disappointment
| that i report, here, a decade latter, that it feels like the last
| & final ride out of the spirited, hopeful, connective open web,
| that things only ever got worse after.
|
| one last little side note, one of the main people i associate
| with OpenSocial, Dave Recordon, was just named Biden White
| House's Director of Technology:
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/01/06/2129251/open-source-...
| paulgb wrote:
| Oh man, Wave brings back memories. I'm still a little sad it
| wasn't given more of a shot --- the idea of an open ecosystem
| of widgets sharing state using an OT (or similar?) backend is
| still something we haven't seen done well, but in theory it
| could allow some pretty neat things.
|
| It just didn't scale well, at the time. I wonder how it would
| do on a modern browser --- or whether the backend was the
| bottleneck.
| lindner wrote:
| So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference
| implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5,
| LinkedIn and then Google.
|
| Some little known facts about OpenSocial
|
| - Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial
| containers.
|
| - OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a
| number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed
| on Joyent.
|
| - Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch
| and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...
|
| - MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps
| running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a
| webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a
| project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project
|
| - The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity
| Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest
| Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a
| good organ donor.
|
| Fun times...
| tschellenbach wrote:
| That's some internet history right there. I actually used open
| social back in the days. Of course post Cambridge Analytica
| people now think that open systems and data portability are bad
| :(
| tqi wrote:
| I actually don't think people have a consistent position here.
| For most, whether or not an open system is good or bad is
| largely dependent on how it affects their political group...
| moolcool wrote:
| Similarly, remember the conventional wisdom in the 90's of "To
| stay safe, don't use your real name online"? But today real-
| name policies are in place apparently to "keep us safe online".
| tooltower wrote:
| I was just thinking about this the other day. With Facebook
| popularity in decline, what major social media still insists
| on using real names?
|
| To be fair, I don't read their ToS very closely, so maybe
| they all still require it.
| musingsole wrote:
| If the internet is to be viewed as a utility, anonymity is
| going to be a hard question to address. Today, a water bill
| is used for identification in getting a license. In the
| future, government agencies might just have their own
| tracking cookies.
|
| It's a win-win: you'll get through the DMV line even quicker!
| /s
| davidjnelson wrote:
| We built a really cool enterprise social network with this at
| Autodesk 10+ years ago.
| blargmaster42_8 wrote:
| The best part is that is XML first...to JSON crap!
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