In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

In his talk Mark says:

There are three components within Plexus. First and most important is the social graph, a database of connections known as the ‘Plex’. Each of these connections, like a business card, comes with a list of connection points. These connection points can be outgoing – ‘this is how I will speak to you’, or incoming – ‘this is how I will listen to you’. They can be unilateral or bilateral.

….

The Plex is only a database. To bring that database to life, two other components are required. The first of these is the ‘Sharer’. The Sharer, as the name implies, makes sure that something to be shared – be it a string of text, or a link, or a video, or a blog post, or whatever – ends up going out over the negotiated channels. The Sharer is built out of a set of Python modules, with each particular sharing service handled by its own module. This means that there is no limit or artificial constraint on what kinds of services Plexus can share with.

Conversely, the third component, the Listener, monitors all of the negotiated channels for any activity by any of the connections in the Plex. When the Listener hears something, it sends that to the user – to be displayed or saved or ignored according to the needs of the moment. Like the Sharer, the Listener is also a set of Python modules, with each monitored service handled by its own module. The Listener should be able to listen to anything that has a clearly defined interface.

When Plexus starts up, it reads through the Plex, instancing the appropriate Sharer and Listener objects on a connection-by-connection basis. Everything after initialization is event-driven: the Plexus user shares something, or the Listener hears something and offers that to the Plexus user.

In essence Plexus gives everyone control of their social graph. They own and control the database which contains their personal relationships and connections. They can run it on any of the devices they use to communicate, or they can entrust it to someone else to run it in the cloud, so they can access it how they please.

The idea of an open, distributed social network is something I’ve considered and hoped for for many years. A time when the discussion of open social networks was particularly prominent was just around three years ago, in mid-2007, the topic of open social networks was a hot point of discussion. I wrote about it and captured some of the conversation on open social networks on my blog at the time.

For example, Wired said:

While we’ve largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large. We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards.

Anshu Sharma wrote:

It will be a game changer – a new Facebook or Google that will challenge the closed networks by offering a good enough service that is as good as MySpace or Facebook but is entirely open.

The most prominent initiative in the space was Marc Canter’s PeopleAggregator, based on the long-standing Friend of a Friend (FOAF) protocol, which I first wrote about in 2004 in a survey of the social networking space. Unfortunately PeopleAggregator has not taken off.

Over the last few years the dominant feature of the social networking space has of course been the rise and rise of Facebook and Twitter. Calls for open social networks were barely heard in the frenzy.

Now the backlash is stronger against Facebook and the extraordinary power it has gained, as people are beginning to realize what they have given up by entering into the maw of the giant.

Diaspora* has gained massive attention by offering an open alternative to Facebook, famously raising $200,000 on crowdfunding site when they were looking for only $10,000. It is under development and hopefully will be running in the next months.

However while Diaspora* is open, it is not a truly distributed platform. Plexus is an example of a distributed social network in which its participants fully own their own data and social participation, and can connect with any platform they choose, including existing networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Plexus may prove to be a solution that many are hunting for, and take off rapidly as a protocol and platform. Perhaps others will offer alternative ways to give people back ownership of their social networks. Or possibly the vast majority will remain happy to live beholden to those who control their social data.

Certainly I hope the time for open distributed social networks is here.

Image courtesy of Superfeedr post on Federating PubSubHubbub

But this post isn’t to talk about that as I feel many have covered this topic very well. My interest really got piqued when I started to see many people get excited about a new project called Diaspora that was announced last week. This Facebook incident became the catalyst for a group to create in their words “an open source social network”. This team created a site with some basic information about their goals and asked for 10k in donations to help them get started. Word of their endeavor spread like wildfire and got a good dose of fuel when Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account and announced giving a $100 donation to the Diaspora team. They have raised over $176k as of this writing.

It’s nice to see the attention that the Diaspora project is getting and specifically the plight of creating a decentralized and distributed open source social network. Unfortunately I don’t think that this team is the proper group to head up such an endeavor and I’m not alone with this sentiment either.

Chris Saad wrote a piece that captured my thoughts and feelings the closest. His post describes his personal experiences trying foster adoption of the DataPortability project and the roadblocks he encountered along the way to provide the real-world challenges the Diaspora team will face.

He takes the Diaspora spotlight as an opportunity to highlight what really needs to happen with this statement:

I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.[Regarding Open Standards]… We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.

Alex Wilhelm over at TheNextWeb took a different approach by breaking down the reasons why Diaspora is not the answer. Stating that their system will be too complex, points to why it won’t easily guarantee the privacy concerns that fueled the project, and questions whether people would be willing to pay for it. But ultimately he sees their endeavor as a positive one and wishes them the best of luck.

Lastly Jason Fried over at 37Signals took the brutally honest approach and calls their recent attention a curse. He points to the fact that they have now raised too much money, the spotlight is on them much too early, and the expectations are too high.

I agree with all 3 of these posts. I have watched Lifestreaming services progress for over 3 years now which in many ways have attempted to achieve what the Diaspora team is trying to do. I think having a system that allows us to tie together multiple web services we pick from a menu to post content in an aggregated fashion and tie in friends across these services in a seamless way is the end game.

Many talented teams have tried and failed at this with the closest team to do it being FriendFeed. I was one of the first users of FriendFeed and followed the site’s development and growth very closely. I made it a point to try and read all news written and listen to interviews with their founders.

The Facebook situation reminded me of several times that I recalled FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit discussing the need for an open and federated system to take FriendFeed to the next level. I remember when I attended his panel at SXSW in 2009 where he discussed this along with folks from Microsoft and the soon to be suitor Facebook.

I was able to dig up and re-listen to this Gillmor Gang podcast I remembered featured an interview with Paul Buchheit where around 7 minutes into the podcast he says the following:

“I think in the long term if what we are building here [referring to FriendFeed] is actually as important as we believe it is, it’s going to need to be an open and federated sort of system where there is multiple participants.”

It was a few months after this podcast that Facebook came in and bought FriendFeed. It almost makes me think that not only did Facebook want to acquire the talent from FriendFeed, but also diminish any further possibility of them making progress on an open and federated social network.

So where does that leave us now? Well I still think that as much as I and many other folks like the freedom and ability to totally customize your own social network in the way Lifestreaming services allow us to, it’s just currently an impossible task to simplify it for the mainstream. As bad as it may seem to have all the features and functionality controlled by a single entity like Facebook, it’s the simplicity, integration, and elegance that captures the mainstream and I’m sad to say it’s going to be a long time if ever before an open standards federated platform can be built in a meaningful way to compete with that.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue working towards this goal and I’ll be the first to be a cheerleader for those working on this endeavor. In fact ever since the Diaspora team has been gaining notoriety, I’ve been trying to swing the attention to the similarly focused OneSocialWeb project which I think is much more deserving of the spotlight. It was created by the proven development team of the very popular Storytlr Lifestreaming service which they released as open source to turn their attention to this project. You can read my post with information about their project to learn more.