Distributed Social Software

February 4th, 2004

Ran across this paper on some ideas for distributed, peer-to-peer social software. It’s a very nice overview of some of the main ideas and benefits of a decentralized model for social networking, and also touches on Semantic Web topics. Interestingly the author has hit upon many of the major themes in Radar Networks’ platform — which implements the functionality that he proposes and more.

Related Posts:

  • http://www.gradman.com/blog eric gradman

    From http://www.radarnetworks.com/:
    Radar Networks, Inc. is a software company that is pioneering the next layer of the Internet — the Semantic Web. Our software products help people, groups, organizations and communities manage and share information in a new way. The company was started by Lucid Ventures and is located in New York City. We are presently in stealth-mode.
    You seem to have the inside scoop. Care to share?

  • http://planetp.cc/ Paul Hughes

    I wanted to say first how nice it is to have discovered you through Orkut which in turn brought me to this highly intelligent and refreshing blog. My time each day is limited for news, so it is with delight that I’ve added your blog to my aggretator.
    After using Orkut now for a couple of weeks, it brought me back to the promising potential of a p2p social network. From Orkut’s outage again today, a p2p solution would scale better. More importantly I think a p2p solution might better enable more control over our digital identies and perhaps (and I’m being optimistic) create the necessary infrastructure for more customer powered digital indentity for e-commerce issues among others. Doc Searles, David Weinberger and Eric Norlin had lenghty debates about this about a year ago. My feeling is the more decentralized and customer centered the better.

  • http://novaspivack.typepad.com Nova Spivack

    Thanks for the nice comments! A decentralized open social networking standard would be a good start. There’s no need for all these separate, incompatible social networking systems — each containing the same people. It’s social overload. We have developed a p2p app for next-generation social networking — but have not released it yet. It’s just a piece of what we are making…

  • http://home.pacbell.net/chipl/SocialTheoryDevelopmentPortal.html Tom Loeber

    I came across a specific equation described network idea in 1976 that I believe could be the basis of a global sharing and coordination system. It has led me to develop a general mathematical model of society which when applied to analysis of social evolution appears to show that something at least very similar to what I have envisioned appears likely and desirable. The inductive reasoning applies known information theory and general systems theory to suggest that maximizing sustainable information carrying capacity through maximizing ergodicity is necessary for any social network to achieve utility and persistence. It incorporates a scaling derived from the total population of humanity riding upon a delphi processing technique to formulate periodic (monthly appears feasible) representative structures on the basis of prediction of consensus decisions within small reiterated interactive conferences and allows a degree of anonymity that increases as the number of participants increase. Current aspects of existing P2P sharing and collaboration software suggests that the idea may be quite feasible. You can see more of the idea including self-similar fractal digraphs at http://home.pacbell.net/chipl/SocialTheoryDevelopmentPortal.html
    Criticism and support is welcome.