We plan to close the Vancouver Facebook Garage with an open Q&A session moderated by Boris Mann (Bryght - Community Content Hosting) discussing the Future of Facebook.
Are open (portable) social networks (formerly known as online community sites) the future? For some insight we have invited and confirmed Johnny Bufu - local Sxipper and tech lead for OpenID at Sxip Identity infamous for promoting Identity 2.0.
Q: What’s your take on Facebook? Are you on Facebook?
Johnny Bufu: I’m more the observer type and have only recently signed up on Facebook. Many of my colleagues however use it heavily.
Killer apps on the Internet are I believe those that fulfill best the needs for interactions allowed by this medium. As the Internet is becoming ubiquitous, an increasing part of our social life is now moving online, so the online social networks are in my opinion the next killer app.
During the last few years we’ve seen attempts that tried to discover the rules and needs associated with this new form of interaction, and I think a point has been reached where more mature solutions can be identified. Facebook seems to be a better one in this direction.
That being said, Facebook needs to move to a more user-centric approach towards the identity data they store. They are only somewhat open, but could be more open. Currently they don’t allow the APIs to be used to pull the user data out and use it somewhere else.
Q: Tell us about OpenID? What is OpenID?
Johnny Bufu: OpenID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. It also gives the users a good level of control over the identity transactions they’re involved in.
Q: How can OpenID help Facebook become an Open (Portable) Social Network?
Johnny Bufu: OpenID offers a good identity layer solution for an open and portable social network. OpenID is simple, open, decentralized and scalable, all essential features that together are not easy to find with alternative solutions.
Extensions and protocols built around OpenID such as the attribute exchange in OpenID 2.0, which we coauthored, can also help with specific problems that need to be solved by the social networks.
This is a big part of our Identity 2.0 vision, and what our CEO Dick Hardt has been advocating along with others like Marc Canter for years. They recently did a panel at the PICNIC conference discussing portable social networks and OpenID.
Q: Are there any alternatives to Open ID or any missing pieces for an open future for Facebook?
Johnny Bufu: Brad Fitzpatrick, the original creator of OpenID, has spent some time thinking on the general “social graph” problems, and has recently summarized his thoughts in an article titled “Thoughts on the Social Graph“.
In short, I believe that the principles and design goals that stand behind OpenID represent a good direction for the online social networks to follow. If they are to be successful, they need to be:
- open: so that today’s fragmentation between various implementation can be solved
- decentralized: so that no one entity can control too much of it, and people can trust the system
- scalable to a global level: so that there’s no imposed limit.
Thanks Johnny Bufu for your time. Think different? Join the discussion on the Vancouver Facebook Developers Forum
or join us at Vancouver’s first Facebook Developer Garage.
with a link to your “What’s the Open Web?” posting to the Open Web Vancouver 2008 Twitter.