Let’s Integrate Our nReduce SN Projects!

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(copyied from HipChat) Sorry if some of you already know my pitch, but it bears repeating:

Those of us who are doing a social network all have the same basic challenge: getting users to sign up and avoiding the impression of being a ghost town.

I think if we connected our social network projects (only where it makes sense of course), we can have our users interact across sites and together we can build a big shared userbase nreduce is perfect for this, together we could start something new: social networks that are no longer walled gardens.
anyway, let me know what you think.

My project, Hubbub, is a reference implementation of such a federated protocol. I’d be happy to help out individual projects and maybe even contribute some code to your project in order to make this happen.

You can reach me at udo.schroeter@gmail.com

Metro-Style App Icons

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Syncfusion have published a huge collection of free Metro-style icons for everyone to use, even for commercial applications. Check it out: Metro Studio Icons.

And while we’re on the subject of icons, there is always the excellent Noun Project to speak of. Sadly, there is no verb project, because most of the time icons in applications are probably intended to convey actions not concepts.

A Lesson about the Importance of Owning Your Data

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Ehsan Akhgari writes about what it feels like have your Google account taken away from you for no (knowable) reason by an uncaring corporate machine that keeps all your data hostage.

I’m a heavy GMail user, too. In fact, I depend entirely on Google for email. Yes, losing my account would suck beyond belief: it’s the one uniting point of all my online stuff. But at least the email data itself is easy to back up externally. While losing access to the address itself would be highly inconvenient, it’s actually quite easy to keep my actual email messages and import them into another service. Google Plus users would not be as fortunate.

Facebook: a Parasitism Project?

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Richard Stallman, never one for subtleties, posits on an MIT mailing list:

Facebook is an international parasitism project.

I don’t know the details of the development projects
so I won’t try to estimate how much good any of them might do.
But it is clear they could have done this in some
other way, instead of Facebook. In other words, the question
of comparing the good of these projects against the harm of Facebook
arises because someone made an snap choice.

If people involved now complain and say, politely, “I’m staying
away from Facebook”, next time they will think about the question
and they will do it in some other way.

This is certainly in line with his beliefs, but is it really necessary for him to spam people having a discussion on a totally unrelated subject?

Spec: Voting and Sharing

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Voting

One thing frequently happening on any social network is voting. Be it in pre-digested forms such as “liking”, “plus-one-ing”, “faving” or whatever. Many social networks also include the option to have freestyle polls within posts – and Hubbub had this capability from the early prototype on (even before this was possible on Facebook at al, yay!). Essentially voting takes place by an extended text message. The message text itself is the vote, and the message is further marked as being a vote like this:

	vote=I like this
	parent=[ID of message being voted on]
Sharing

Besides voting, sharing is the other big mechanism of social proof a message can have. For this, the share field is applied to a text message:

	parent=[ID of message being shared]
	share=[ID of message where the share occurred]
	author=[ID of the sharer]
	url=[optional, URL of the share]

In this context, the text field can be a short excerpt of some kind though clients are not obligated to display it. To notify a server that content has been shared, the publish message is used.