Open Social Networking
I’ve been starting to mull over whether there is an alternative to social networking than the current set of closed networks that exist in technologies such as Facebook, MySpace and so forth.
One could argue that blogging, RSS and so forth is a start of this. You can see a view of all your friends blogs in an instant. But you don’t have private information, calendars, media, moods and so forth.
I’m starting to think that there could be some way of having this all open. So, when you log into a "client" (which could be desktop, add-ons to an existing engine or whatever), you get that information from friends. Likewise, you can create private data from that client, and then choose which friends you’d like to share it with. Each person/node would have data, and the whole thing would be co-ordinated via web services feeds. So, when you log in, the "client" would poll each friend and get RSS information as well as other changes they’ve made since last polled.
RSS
Haven’t read it in any detail, but someone in Germany is working on developing something like it:
Blog:
http://noserub.com/blog/
Wiki (unfortunately mostly in German at the moment):
http://wiki.noserub.com/
Seems to be going into the direction you are thinking of, at least to an extent.
I just added a walkthrough for NoseRub: http://noserub.com/blog/archives/7-NoseRub-0.2alpha-walkthrough.html
I also think that we already have all our friends data somewhere accessible through RSS. And it does not make any sense, that you have to create your social network over and over again.
Privacy is a big issue, of course, but currently I concentrated on decentralising the social network.
If you have any feedback, I would be glad to hear it from you.
This is where all the schemes fail - they assume people wish to release this info. Many don’t and I ifnd Facebook personally intrusive.