Hi Umashanthi, Thanks for your interest in Roller and GSOC.
On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 12:53 PM, Umashanthi Pavalanathan <[email protected]> wrote: > I am interested in doing this project as I have been posting to the list > during past months. > > This is the project description mentioned in [1]. > Enable Twitter-like Activities (aka status messages) with following, > followers, optional 140-character text limit and other Twitter features as > time allows. This could be done via new table Followers, which allows users > to follow each other, a new Manager for querying this table, and which > stores Activity as blog entries but using a different category scheme so > that they can be omitted from standard blog feeds. It's not 100% clear to me that activities should be stored in the same table as blog entries. We need to consider the pros and cons of each approach. > Provide a theme and blog template macros for updating status and for > displaying your Activities, > Friends Activities, All Activities and combinations of those. > This is similar to what was suggested in [2]. But a major part missing. > Implementing Open Social API. In order to implement the OpenSocial API, a web application first needs to have some social data in the form of user profiles, user relationships (i.e. groups, friendships) and user activity stream. Roller does not haven all of those things yet and adding them will be a significant project. That's why I suggested "simple social networking server" as a project, but left out the OpenSocial API part. I thought that combining "make Roller social" plus "implement OpenSocial" might be too big of a project. > I agree with the description about having the Twitter-like activities, > followers, status updates, implementing followers table, manager for > querying the table and storing the activities. This all can be done > extending existing Roller code base. > But the final idea of friends and friends activities need some Open Social > features(In which case Shindig can be used). > My question is: will it be feasible to consider 'followers' as 'friends' and > implement it using the followers table or will it require to integrate the > whole open social features (Person, Activities, Messages)? Yes, if we use a Twitter-like follower relationship we will be able to expose relationships as OpenSocial "friend" relationships. OpenSocial does not really define what a "friend" relationship is and different social network implementations work differently, sometimes friendships are called connections, followers or contacts. Sometimes asymmetric follow is allowed and some times friendships relationships must be two-way. > I am really interested in implementing this feature to Roller and would like > to take GSoC as the opportunity to work on it. > > Please be kind enough to give me your suggestions, thoughts and any comments > regarding this. > > Also I would like to know if there is anyone interested in mentoring this > project. > > I am sure that the Roller community will help me in successfully completing > this project. I suggested this idea, so I am interested in it too -- but only if we can come up with a good proposal for implementation. Thanks, - Dave
