BradPace.com

Presented by Chris Messina from Citizen Agency. He went to civicspace to spreadfirefox to flock to citizen agency.

Moving from a system centric type system to a citizen centric model. The web citizen has an ID, provenance, friends, agency (choice is good for everyone).

Aspects of a distributed social network:

• Something that can identify you
• Manage your profile form one place. Push everything out to the web. The web should update from me not the other way around. This makes it easier for the user
• Flexabile permissioning system
• Based on open formats and protocals

Benefits of the distributed network

• Cross pollination of data
• Spend more time updating profile and keeping it up to date.
• Can compete outside of the individual platforms. This increases competition.

Problems with the distributed social network

• How do you find your friends. Facebook does this pretty well but it is hard on the web in general.
• Maintaining a common interface. The further you get out from the trunk the more inconsistant the experience is.
• Interoperability. How do you upgrade?
• Addoption
• Who do you fix and troubleshoot problems
• Identity theft is a problem

Components of a DiSo site

• People, friends and identities. Publish your friends list so you can move it around.
• Messaging and notifications. Too many and people are not reading them. There is no way to prioritize them.
• Limiting and giving various levels of permission. Plaxo does a good job at this.
• Groupings and events. Viddler – join a group. Upcoming. Need openid for events and groups.

What can be done today? Allow users to say where else they are on the web using micrformats (microformats.org) . Use openID. Use oauth.net. Use jabber.

Current status. diso-project.org. or diso.googlecode.com. Creating design patterns and how things should be done (look at flickr photos).