[Privsec] (no subject)

[Ralf Bendrath]

Garth Graham schrieb:
> The following article from the Toronto Globe and Mail recommends open 
> standards for social networking functions as an antidote to the 
> "irritations" of things like Facebook.  It hadn't occurred to me before
>  reading it that social networking is an important dimension of 
> "user-centric digital identity."  But, since identity is defined in 
> social relationship, obviously it should have.
Yes, that has been a central argument in many debates around these "walled
gardens".

> Because it will block the kind of "walled gardens" the article refers 
> to, achieving user-centric digital identity as an extension of Internet
>  Protocol is utterly critical to the Internet's survival.
That is still open to debate, I'd say.

> But it's one of those  issues that's so highly specialized that hardly
> anyone is paying attention to it.
Nah, ID management /is/ becoming a bigger and more widely discussed issue.
OpenID has already hit the front page of the business section of "USA
Today". We'll have a workshop on ID management this at the IGF in Rio in
November, where the question of walled gardens or open protocols is on the
table.

> Does anyone know who is working on open standards for social
> networking?
There are projects like "Fried of a Friend" (FOAF) and "XML Friends
Network" (XFN) that could be seen as doing this. But they involve heavy
privacy problems, as there is no granularity in who can see which
relationships.

Best, Ralf