I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

Bye, Bye RSS. A format controlled by no one. Now Google is going to force us to change to a more Google compatible format, which means Atom. At least Dave Winer thinks so.

Dave has gotten a bad reputation lately by the pundit, but he has a point this time. When Microsoft was able to control the file format everyone used, guess what, Wordperfect and Lotus Smart Suite are used only by the lonely few. Well it might happen that way again with RSS.

With the purchase of Feedburner by Google and Google Reader becoming the most prevalent feed reader, Google has become the largest feed consumer. With that much power it would be easy for them to make incompatible changes to the current feed formats to improve their products at the expense of everyone else’s. Despite how much all the other feed users complain, the fact is they will have to re-code their applications or risk losing access to a large market segment.

Gives us something to think about.

Tags: RSS | Atom | Feedburner | Google