unknown
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
A nice article.
In the social graph you have nodes and edges.
How you name the nodes is the less important thing when you are building a
traditional site. But how you name the nodes becomes critical when you are
building a federated system.
If people name nodes differently, which is what has happened to date,
there's no real possibility of federation.
Programmers want to program, but I always say that naming is the hardest
thing we do.
Some systems that got naming right are: the internet via the URL, the web
via HTTP URLs, git via the git identifier. What's notable about these are
that they are strong, unambigous an universal. A git identifier on github,
is the same on gitlab, is the same on your local machine. Sounds easy, but
the only people that really have done this even reasonably well on the web
are facebook, drupal and maybe wordpress.
FTA:
" According to the announcement of their Federated Social Web Summit in
2010, federation (in the context of social networks) is “*letting people on
different social networks follow each other”* ... So for the W3C,
federation can be achieved through standardization of data formats: the
precise connection between nodes and server is less relevant."
This is not an accurate statement.
Firstly he's confusing one particular community group does not speak for
the W3C. Community groups are there to incubate ideas, and if those ideas
are liked, they get voted as RECS by the 400 or so member companies.
Nothing in the FSW ever got that far.
The W3C, from what I have seen, first and foremost advises people to name
things well and scalably. Then to use robust protocols for communication.
It's natural to want to invent your own, but the challenge is to persuade
everyone to use is. The advantage of HTTP is that most systems talk it
already, so it's developer, client and server friendly.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1252
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 4 April 2013 13:00, hellekin (GNU/consensus) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:***@gnu.org" target="_blank">***@gnu.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/" target="_blank">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/</a><br>
<br>
In this article, Stijn Peeters looks at the evolution of the concepts of<br>
centralized, decentralized, federated, and distributed networks. An<br>
interesting read to figure out where we currently stand.
In the social graph you have nodes and edges.
How you name the nodes is the less important thing when you are building a
traditional site. But how you name the nodes becomes critical when you are
building a federated system.
If people name nodes differently, which is what has happened to date,
there's no real possibility of federation.
Programmers want to program, but I always say that naming is the hardest
thing we do.
Some systems that got naming right are: the internet via the URL, the web
via HTTP URLs, git via the git identifier. What's notable about these are
that they are strong, unambigous an universal. A git identifier on github,
is the same on gitlab, is the same on your local machine. Sounds easy, but
the only people that really have done this even reasonably well on the web
are facebook, drupal and maybe wordpress.
FTA:
" According to the announcement of their Federated Social Web Summit in
2010, federation (in the context of social networks) is “*letting people on
different social networks follow each other”* ... So for the W3C,
federation can be achieved through standardization of data formats: the
precise connection between nodes and server is less relevant."
This is not an accurate statement.
Firstly he's confusing one particular community group does not speak for
the W3C. Community groups are there to incubate ideas, and if those ideas
are liked, they get voted as RECS by the 400 or so member companies.
Nothing in the FSW ever got that far.
The W3C, from what I have seen, first and foremost advises people to name
things well and scalably. Then to use robust protocols for communication.
It's natural to want to invent your own, but the challenge is to persuade
everyone to use is. The advantage of HTTP is that most systems talk it
already, so it's developer, client and server friendly.
==
hk
--f46d04016be1fc163e04d9870d54hk
Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1252
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 4 April 2013 13:00, hellekin (GNU/consensus) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:***@gnu.org" target="_blank">***@gnu.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/" target="_blank">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/resources/articles/what-is-a-federated-network/</a><br>
<br>
In this article, Stijn Peeters looks at the evolution of the concepts of<br>
centralized, decentralized, federated, and distributed networks. An<br>
interesting read to figure out where we currently stand.