Demand for Decentralized Social Networks
Dec 4th, 2007 by Aswath
Many people have put forward the benefits of decentralizing social networks. Some of the more prominent ones are Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer. Today I came across a post by Jens Alfke where he argues in favor of decentralizing social networks. Actually he goes in step forward: “… I believe that implies that a very Facebook-like social network could be built as a distributed architecture that didn’t rely on a central server or organization. It might not even look that different; you’d just notice (or not) that, as you surfed from one friend’s profile to another, the domain name in the address bar changed.” He goes on to suggest the benefits of decentralizations. And he concludes with, “I think we may be at a tipping point now — people seem to be increasingly aware of the problems that centralization brings, and in their aftermath I keep running across discussions of how it should be possible to do this stuff without pesky corporate overlords messing it up.” I could not agree more. EnThinnai is our attempt on delivering on this objective. He also makes another interesting observation. He notices that Facebook “has no visible identifiers for user identities.” He opines that since Facebook is a social network, there is no need for universally unique identity. It is enough for the identity is uniquely resolved within each user’s social graph. Since EnThinnai is a distributed network, it goes one step ahead – it allows a user to assign names for each of the buddies. Thus I am “Dad” for my daughter, “Hubby” for my wife and “Pointy Head” for that person. The names have only local significance, but universal identity is maintained by OpenID.
[…] a social network with its skin inside out” and he called the project DiSo. As I mentioned in a previous post, others have expressed a desire to have a distributed social network as well. Based on the comments […]
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