Compost food scraps and recycle the rest.
Buy local.
Use alternative modes of transportation.
Reduce meat and buy local, humane sources.
Talk with elected representatives (and fellow citizens) about issues.

What do you do to help and what more should we do?

I don’t know how to sound anything but alarmist when it comes to the environment and climate change.  In my short life, I have seen massive changes.  It seems a little absurd to deny that irrevocable changes are being made by our presence on this planet and I don’t know anyone anymore who does deny.  So that leaves what to do about it.  I think that each person should make conscious efforts to change their behaviors.  However, I think without definitive leadership from the federal level with sweeping changes impacting the status quo (read: funding and law changes), we won’t change course much.  All the incentives are in the wrong place.  But maybe people talking will get the ball rolling.  Here’s hoping.

So here it is: http://code.google.com/p/openluau/

I have commited some code but it is all pretty rough. If you are interested please A. check it out, B. comment, C. contribute. I could definitely use a helping hand.

Consider when a user wants to befriend another user. What process happens here? I think doing the simplest thing that could work is just declaring rel=”friend” using XFN. Something on the complicated end could be like Facebook where you request friendship from another user and that user then has to agree to make the link. Users can also describe some information about the friendship that they both have to agree to. Finally, when one user terminates the friendship it is mutual.

But what makes sense in open, distributed environment? I’m not sure, hence this post.

Here are some classes of relationship-making to consider starting with the lightest:

Declaration

Just publishing the relationship, in FOAF, XFN, etc. A lot of people are talking about tools that can pull in and use this data.

Notification

This is having a some way to ping the person you are claiming friendship with. In my original conception, I wanted to use OpenID to verify that the URL for the friend is valid. I realize this is bending OpenID a bit from its original purpose. The use of a new openid.mode and attributes could make this work.

Reciprocity

This is what Facebook does. A friendship is a mutual relationship claimed by two parties. Could be implemented to similar to Notification with OpenID, except that the friend receiving the request could turn around and check the originator’s OpenID.

In all of these, I am assuming people are made first class, i.e. identified by their OpenID URL. Folks have been working on technologies that tackle these problems more formally, but they don’t work in the tools widely available yet.

Personas

I am also trying to figure out how personas fit into all this. By persona I mean the profile you present to that contact. This requires a heavier linking I think. Again, in my conception this could be passed with attributes. A nonced URL could be passed to be fetched by the other friend that would contain the persona presented by the first friend.

OAuth

Another thing to consider is the new OAuth which might be more appropriate for some or all of these features.

Also OAuth promises to make Facebook-style apps a lot more easier to develop.

By closed I mean that the information that you add to the system (biological and relationships) is not usually exportable. Additionally, if a friend a has an account on another service that implements similar functionality, it is not currently possible to add that friend without having them join the network you are on. These sites do this to keep you being exposed to their ads. Not allowing you to add remote friends forces friends all to join the same network causing a snowball effect in a peer network– it is essential to the growth of these networks.

So a few weeks ago as I succumbed to joining Facebook, I grumbled about having rode a friend-join-wave to friendster and orkut previously and then never really using them again. I predicted that Facebook will eventually suffer the same fate as some new site du jour coming down the pipe takes its place.*

Everyone is now suffering signupitis. Some people have have attempted to solve this by having each new service you sign up with pull in your basic info in a microformat. This does not thrill me because these sites still benefit from my info and my relationships. You could possibly become paranoid when you think about how all this information about you could be abused by a government or major corporation.

I propose the following: An open source profile server implementing a protocol for friend notification and profile exchange.

Individuals need to be addressable (read: identifiable) so OpenID is a natural fit. There is even a way to pass attributes along with an OpenID authentication which will be formalized in the next spec release.

To befriend someone, all you need is their OpenID. Then you use the OpenID process to verify the friend passing along attributes that request friendship. Next time the friend logs in to the profile server that they have an account on, they can grant or deny the friendship. If they friend chooses grant then their server reciprocates the request to the friend that originated the confirmation.

Then profile data and relationship data could be transmitted (according to preference settings) to the friend in a microformat or in FOAF. I am leaning towards FOAF because its been around forever, it is a good first stab (not perfect, e.g. naming), and it is RDF so maybe the Semantic Web prophecy has some chance of becoming a reality, all hail the prophet.

Next steps after that would be making an open standard for allowing apps a la Facebook a.k.a “deep integration“. Maybe even starting with their API so that all the existing apps would not have to be rewritten much.

The stakes on this is huge. OpenID is about to explode on the internet and this is just an obvious development after that. This open model puts the power the relationship and profile data back into the users hands. Profile servers can evolve and compete on features, not network size. The entire Internet is one unified social network– just like we thought before these sites tried to convince us otherwise. There is no business model behind this yet that I can see. (If you figure one out, please email me.) I will have a prototype released this week in rails. Watch this space for updates.

Walled gardens no more. Oh yeah, and no more signups.

* Facebook had to do something like an Apps API that allows them to scale functionality past what they could have done themselves. It looks more like a act of desperation than innovation to me now. Every App now made adds value to Facebook and they get the revenue from it.

We placed the order on Wednesday and it arrived on Friday from Shanghai which we were really impressed with. Now that we have a functional computer, I feel our lives getting more organized already.

Back to work.