Bill Wishon's News and Views

Here’s my idea for the day, “Distributed Open Social Networking” free for anyone to take and implement.

Take wordpress or similar self publishing platform and add a few features to it to make it into a distributed social networking platform.

• Make it easy to “add Bill as friend” from the DOSN enabled homepage so that when someone’s viewing your site they can add you as a friend to their DOSN enabled site.
• Create a common “app framework” similar to facebook’s app framework.
• Make arranging the site a simple drag and drop interface like iGoogle or Facebook.
• Provide a common template for “About me” (school, gender, pic, favorite lists etc…)
• Create a status update concept that is propogated to all friends (potentially ping each friend when the status updates and provide a status RSS feed)
• Through the app framework you could monetize your popularity yourself by placing ad “apps” on your page.
• Use the existing blog post and comment mechanism as the blog / wall

That’s it.  Maybe it exists, I dunno I haven’t gone looking for it yet.

One of the advantages would be that you own your own data, and you get to choose what platform to use so long as it complies with the open specification.  No more choosing what platform to use.