Hello everyone, I'm posting my view on the proposed idea "People search server" for the Google Summer of Code [1]. Being able to search for people and groups among different websites supporting the ostatus protocol is a must for the network to grow and evolve as a distributed open source social platform.
The search server could read feeds from sites about new registrations, updates, etc. Feeds are parsed and saved in a local database by a daemon (besides the RDBMS, a noSQL database can be used for increased speed and better structure of the data). A Django or PHP powered website can provide to the end user a simple, clean interface to search for people and get a direct answer from our local database. Like when you search in identi.ca a subscription button will appear for the user to add their statusnet identifier, so they can subscribe to their user/group of interest. Spam bots submitting feeds, or searching, can be easily blocked by integrating recaptcha [2] but more sophisticated techniques would need something better (does spamassasin already have rules for microblogging? :) Spoofing will be an interesting field for research. Using GPG keys -for the techies- or a "web-of-trust" -e.g. promoting users that have many subscribers to the search results- could be interesting approaches. As an extra: A crawler can be build to automatically find ostatus compatible websites -carefully avoiding spam- and add their user registration feeds to our aggregator. Please let me know what you think about this proposed implementation. Best regards, Giorgos Logiotatidis About me: I'm currently doing my masters in Computer Engineering in Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. I have a strong programming background with low and high level languages and I have worked as a web developer in various projects, coding in PHP and Django. I'm a strong supporter of the idea of an open source social global social network and I want to work to implement it. You can find more info on my linkedin webpage [3]. [1] http://status.net/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2010#People_search_server [2] http://recaptcha.net/ [3] http://nl.linkedin.com/in/glogiotatidis _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
