When I think about the future world of federated social networks I
definitely see XMPP as only one component and do not look it to solve
all authentication/authorization/transport issues. That said, XMPP
has this built in 'roster' piece that is hard not to see as a
federated replacement of the per social network buddy list. The
problem is that this buddy list wasn't meant to be a decentralized
buddy list so the issues I bring up of authorization haven't been
worked out. Unless we're saying people should not be thinking of
rosters as controlled buddy lists.
But neither servers support OAuth. So real life: right now, flickr
would host the pubsub nodes and could use the friends and family
settings plus the connections he already has to keep the whitelist.
This is what I thought at first, but I'm trying to think ahead towards
a time when I don't have to maintain buddy lists and permissions on
each social network.
Another idea which avoids Flickr needing permission to auth against my
buddy list is somehow to let Flickr auth against the node itself.
ie. I have authorized specific people to sub from a particular node
and given Flickr affiliate permissions to publish to that node, but
I've also given Flickr permission to authorize people against those
authorized to access that node. This actually solves a number of
problems (though I know there is currently no way of doing this).
Makes sense though right?
Thanks,
adam
On Jul 9, 2008, at 4:18 AM, Joe Cascio, Jr. wrote:
I tend to agree most with Pedro Melo in the sense that XMPP can
simply be the transport mechanism and that the "higher" functions,
if you will, of authorizing and subsetting followers can be done in
an enclosing layer.
This has several benefits, including being able to gang or
parallelize (yeah, that's not a word :) xmpp servers to distribute
load from power-users and popular sites or to provide transparent
back-up if your main XMPP server goes down.
I think it's inadvisable to look at microblogging as only what XMPP
provides, for instance using xmpp resources as the user-visible
identities.
JoeC
