The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the body developing and setting standards of interaction on the internet, has established a group to help incubate the Social Web. The Social Web Incubator Group’s final report on the current situation is now available on the W3C.org website.
The report contains some interesting characterizations of the developing Social Web and it is definitely in favor of a decentralized approach. It also enters into a lot of detail about available standards and draft standards that could be applied to this growing new part of the web. Here are a few excerpts. Anyone really interested in the technical details should consult the linked document.
Abstract
This document is the final report of the W3C Social Web Incubator Group. This report presents systems and technologies that are working towards enabling a Social Web, and is followed by a strategy for standardizing this work in order to ensure the Social Web is open, decentralized, and royalty-free. This report focuses on work that permits the description and identification of people, groups, organizations, as well as user-generated content in extensible and privacy-respecting ways. This report describes a common framework for the concepts behind the Social Web and the state of the art in 2010, including current technologies and standards. We conclude with an analysis of where future research and standardization will benefit users and the entire Social Web ecosystem’s growth. We also suggest a strategy for the role of the W3C in the Social Web.
Overview
The Social Web is a set of relationships that link together people over the Web. While the best known current social networking sites on the Web limit themselves to relationships between people with accounts on a single site, the Social Web should extend across the entire Web. Just as people can call each other no matter which telephone provider they belong to, just as email allows people to send messages to each other irrespective of their e-mail provider, and just as the Web allows links to any website, so the Social Web should allow people to create networks of relationships across the entire Web, while giving people the ability to control their own privacy and data.
The Social Web is not just about relationships, but about the applications and innovations that can be built on top of these relationships. Social-networking sites and other user-generated-content services on the Web have a potential to be enablers of innovation, but cannot achieve this potential without open and royalty-free standards for data portability, identity, and application development.
The Problem of Walled Gardens
The importance of the Web has always been its open and distributed nature as a universal space of information. Until recently this space of information has been limited to hypertext web-pages without attention being paid to social interactions and relationships. This was not a particular fault of the Web, in fact but a result of a certain focus of the early Web on documents. However, these kinds of activities are currently restricted to particular social networking sites, where the identity of a user and their data can easily be entered, but only accessed and manipulated via proprietary interfaces, so creating a “wall” around connections and personal data, as illustrated in the picture below. This current dismal situation is analogous to the early days of hypertext before the World Wide Web, where various systems stored hypertext in proprietary and incompatible formats without the ability to use, globally link and access hypertext data across systems, a situation solved by the creation of URIs and HTML. A truly universal, open, and distributed Social Web architecture is needed.
The Social Web Vision
People express different aspects depending on context, thus giving themselves multiple profiles that enable them to maintain various relationships within and across different contexts: the family, the sporting team, the business environment, and so on. Equally so, in every context certain information is usually desired to be kept private. In the ‘pre-Web world’ people can usually sustain this multiplicity of profiles as they are physically constrained to a relatively small set of social contexts and interaction opportunities. In some ways, social dynamics on the Web resemble those outside the Web, but social interactions on the Web differ in a number of important ways:
- the kinds of profile exhibited by a single person are not controlled by the same constraints and so are less limited in scope, and so may include profiles for fictional personae
- the set (number) of people with whom interactions are possible is not limited by distance or time. The Web allows for users to user connect with a vast number of people, which was inconceivable only a few years ago
- a person can explicitly “manage” the relationships and access to information they wish to have with others and with the increasing convergence of the Web and the world outside the Web is also leading to increasing concerns about privacy as these worlds collide
Anyone should be able to create and to organize one or more different profiles using a trusted social networking site of choice, including hosting their own site that they themselves run either on a server or locally in their browser. For example, a user might want to manage their personal information such as home address, telephone number, and best friends on their own personal “node” in a federated social network while their work-related information such as office address, office telephone number, and work colleagues is kept on a social network ran by work. Today current aggregator-based approach exemplified by FriendFeed are but a short-term solution akin to “screen scraping”, that work over a limited number of social networking sites, are fragile to changes in the sites’ HTML, and which are legally dubious.
The approach we endorse allows the user to own their own data and associate specific parts of their personal data directly to different social networking sites, as well as the ability to link to data and friends across different sites. For example, your Friends Profile can be exposed to MySpace and Twitter, whereas your Work Profile to Plaxo and LinkedIn, and links between data and friends should be possible across all these sites. Traditional services can utilize these features, so that your “health” profile can be exposed to health care providers and your “citizen” profile exposed to online government sites and services. In this world of portable social data, both large and small new players can then also interface to profiles and offer seamless personalized social applications.
Much more detail in the actual document: