Branding the Federated Social Web

Attendees

• Maxwell Salzberg
• Chris Messina
• Steve Ivy
• Evan Promodou
• ...

Notes

• Currently using OStatus brand... but who's the audience? Are we aimed at individuals? Businesses? Enterprises?
• What if we got a million people to add the "FSW" brand button to their site...
  • What promises are we making with a federated social web brand?
  • What expectations are we trying to set?
• Is it premature to try branding this work, especially before the protocols are finished?
• How do we get people involved? What is the user benefit?
• We need to offer easy handles for the press...
  • What story do we want the press to write?
• Defining language for talking about this stuff... "federated social web" doesn't mean much to people... (should it?)
  • "What's your ID?"
  • "What's your WebFinger?" (ugh)
• "What's your profile?"

Another approach would be to pivot social plugins/"set-aside real estate" based on asserted identity (from browser or XAuth or the user). Perhaps less ideal, but if the plugins were developed to be the same size as the most popular plugins, they could just be swapped in at run-time from the user's identity provider.

Question: how do we get people to "join" or to "connect" with this "movement"?

How do we put this in understandable terms...? "You can get your YouTube from within Twitter", "You can get your blogs from within WordPress", "You can get your X from within Y."

What kinds of new apps can we enable?

Federating Within Verticals as a Starting Point

Perhaps federation should start small and purposeful - as in federating photo sharing sites or among open source code communities like GitHub, Gitorious, Google Code, and StackOverflow — solve the problem for ourselves first and demonstrate the value.

• Purpose: force us to be clearer about the value of this work by demonstrating it, rather than talking about it.
• Benefit of social networking comes from shared context, rather than creating generic social environments.

This might be the best possible context for promoting-by-demonstrating the utility and purpose of federating social networks.

Verticals with potential:

• Code hosting sites:
  • Google Code
  • Github
  • Gitorious
  • Stack Overflow

These sites also have interesting features regarding community reputation.

• Photo Sharing sites:
  • Flickr
  • SmugMug
  • Zoomr
  • etc.

These sites present an opportunity to explore going deep on a particular kind of content (photos/video/comments).

Others?

What might this look like?

1. SmugMug, Zoomr, etc, decide to implement a federated social protocol along the lines of OStatus or similar.
2. Other sites in the vertical follow suit - allowing their users to interact with users on the other sites increases loyalty, good will
3. Theoretically you now have a small federated network - sites can whitelist each other for the puposes of focus
   • A SmugMug user can choose to follow a Flickr user, and they can pick SmugMug from a dropdown (Follow flickr.com/chrismessina from [SmugMug, Zoomer, Picassa] )