Is there an open standard for relationships/contact lists on the internet?

I don’t know of any standard specifications that let’s you do what Prodromou suggests. The microformat XFN and the semantic vocabulary FOAF, both mentioned by Prodromou, are not standards but only specifications that are still drafts (imho). It might be coming though and there are plenty of services and tools that use FOAF, and I suspect XFN as well.

You might find these interesting to read, they are about FOAF and openID:
* We Are Opening the Social Graph
* whitelist
* FOAF and OpenID: two great tastes that taste great together
* Property: foaf:openid
* FOAF Plus OpenID

I’m pretty excited about openID having been added to FOAF as a property, since it gives a hopefully better way of indirectly identifying a person than using the mbox property.

There’s a vocabulary for handling trust with FOAF called Web Of Trust that you might find interesting to read up on as well. WOT will basically be used to encrypt personal content with an encryption/authentication key (GPG/PGP) so not everyone will be able to read your phone number or personal email address, I don’t recall if that was mentioned by Prodromou as well. Here’s an article on how to do this with web 2.0: Modeling ‘Web of Trust’ with Web 2.0. I used to know of a better article but I can’t find it right now. I’ve seen some stuff about using SSL for secure authentication when dealing with FOAF profiles but I don’t really know much about it.

May I suggest a read about APML as well? It is a specification for creating an attention profile, e.g. the stuff you are interested in. It is in a way related to the FOAF property foaf:interest.

Hope I didn’t bore you. ^^

Draft specification would be good enough, I could at least get started with something that probably won’t divulge too far from whatever might be thought of in the future.

Too bad you don’t know of any such specification, but the links you posted sound very interesting (not boring at all!) so I’ll have plenty to read up on now, thanks!

I was wondering, have you found anything more on this? Also, have you read anything about how the opensocial-initiative relates to this? Is it competing with openID, or are they using it in their implementation?

Yep, I read about all those links you posted, and it’s a very interesting application, even though it’s not exactly what I’m looking for.

I’ve also done some more digging on this subject (by searching for “distributed social networking” I managed to find some more), and found Noserub, an app that does about the same as what I had planned (though a bit differently, so I’m going to go ahead with my thing anyway ;-)), and the way it handles friend requests. Unfortunately their documentation is really sparse.

However, NoseRub doesn’t do friend requests as well, but it’s given me some new insights on how to use FOAF ;-)

As for OpenSocial: I looked at that in the past, but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. In fact, it’s absolutely not what I’m looking for. What OpenSocial allows you to do is to load widgets (like Facebook applications) onto a site that supports OpenSocial. Thus, you could insert a contact list application, but that would be hosted elsewhere, and if you want to add people to the list those people will need to use the same application (and OpenSocial) – unless, of course, that application also supports a standard like the one described by Evan. Thus, it would still be centralized – I want it to be application-independent :).

Noserub will be interesting to look into and thanks for the search keywords.

How close to Prodromou’s suggestion will your implementation be? I’m curious about what exactly you have in mind.

Distributed social networking sounds very interesting indeed so I will be interested in seeing what you come up with. Do you have a blog or micro-blog (twitter) where I could follow your progress?

I do have an Identi.ca account (Vinnl), but I don’t really update that. And there’s my Identoo (Noserub) account, of course :P

I suppose the most useful page to follow would be my project’s Ohloh page where I post micro-blogging updates once in a while, but there aren’t many interesting things on that yet.

I believe I had thought of something to implement this but have unfortunately forgotten it again (I mostly think of those things while in bed and then I don’t feel like getting out and writing it down :( ), but I suppose I’ll come up with something again. Perhaps I could use trackbacks or something…

Hey, I’ve read about Pivip before. Good initiative! Seems like quite the undertaking though, but good luck with it. I’m following your project on Ohloh and I added you to the networks you mentioned.

Heh, I have that same problem! Now I usually have a pen and notepad next to my bed. :) I didn’t look at their code yet but maybe the DiSo project could give you some inspiration?

You might be way ahead of me and have already read this but I found some stuff.

This guys is really into distributed social networking as well so you might keep an eye on, or collaborate with, Sebastian Küpers. I enjoyed reading hos opensocial-tagged blog posts.This post of his about integrating a Wordpress blog with Noserub is not what you are looking for but it might be interesting nonetheless.

More stuff:
* The Social Web: Creating An Open Social Network with XDI
* Putting XRDS-Simple in Context
* DiSo project’s google group
* DiSo ma.gnolia group

Are you going to use XFN or FOAF, or are you looking for something else? It’s easy to deal with XFN but I think I’m partial myself to FOAF via RDFa, not sure why I just feel that is the way to go since it seems to have more potential.

Heh, yeah, I was already subscribed to the DiSo mailinglist ;-)

I came across Kupers as well, but there was too much noise on his blog to subscribe (I’m subscribed to way too many blogs as it is). This post, however, is quite interesting, yet poses a problem I’m experiencing myself: as opposed to a conventional social network, here the user has to log in over and over again for each decentralized profile.

XFN is already implemented, I’m planning to support FOAF as well and perhaps in time RDFa, too, but I’d need to read up a bit more on how that works.

And yeah, Pivip is quite the undertaking, but using the right tools makes it a lot easier. Plus, this is the first project that I really put my shoulders under and have consistently been working on for a while (I need to push my code online more often).

Heh, well I posted just in case. :)

That was an interesting post. It is a difficult problem he describes and I wish I had a good solution for it… openID providers should distribute friend lists among themselves so when a user log in, Pivip can simply ask your own provider, or itself, what relationship you have to the visitor, something that can be described somewhat in FOAF i believe. On second thought.. that would be just as painful as DNS propagation.. nevermind. :/

Cool, XFN support is probably essential. RDFa is a way to ‘embed’ semantic information (rdf) in your xhtml, just like you do with microformats. I’m supersold on the concept.

You know what..? I just realized that the FOAF, SIOC, DC etc networks out there can work like typed links in proper implementations. It’s almost like the web is moving towards the version that Berners-Lee had originally intended.

Btw, I think it would be awesome to have a Pivip-like plattform that combined FOAF and DC for academic networking and research. Maybe Pivip should be modular in a way that allowed it to be profiled like Drupal? ;)

Hell yeah, I’d love to have a semantic web with all the advantages that come with it ;-)

I’m not sure how Drupal would be profiled, but Pivip is extremely modular, as in “almost everything is implemented as a module already”. You just have to upload a module and activate it in the administration panel and there it is, able to do about anything.

As long as applications and platforms that utilize semantic features are made it will create enough awareness for it to take off faster.

The profiles for Drupal are just a configuration file or something that tells the system what modules to activate depending on if you want a blog or maybe a game community.

Maybe such a profile could tell the core of Pivip what microformats and ontologies to use? I haven’t really evaluated the idea so maybe that information should be kept in the modules.

Ah, right… So you mean one would need the ability to (de-)activate certain microformats and ontologies? What would be the use case for that? (Privacy?) Currently I was just planning to support as many semantic standards as possible :P

Just to have less code running. On Drupal I will de-activate modules that I don’t need, just to save on cpu cycles if I can and lessen the risk of bugs appearing. A bit tired right now so this might be a very unnecessary feature. :)

Hmm, well, currently, there’s a “Contact List” module that also includes rendering XFN and FOAF. You could disable that, but that would get rid of the contact list as well. I might see if I can abstract those out into other modules.

That might be useful if you have a module for sharing documents that would rely on FOAF and DC. But honestly such a module might rely more on DC and SIOC. Heh, maybe there is no need to abstract out the microformats and ontologies. I’m just ‘overly enthusiastic’ about structure in implementations, incase some scenario comes up that had never been thought of.

You should have a mailinglist or something for this and invite the proper folks. If you don’t already.. Lots of experience out there that you could tap into.

Yeah, currently I’m mostly trying not to come up with anything new – I’d rather promote existing standards.

Speaking of which: this subject has come up on the DiSo mailinglist, which has really gotten my hopes up of being able to leverage existing standards to support this over multiple projects. :)

That makes sense.

I applied to join the group so I can keep up a bit with their ideas. And yes, that did seem to have potential.