FedAll2010/Announcement

StatusNet Inc. and other social software developers will hold a one-day summit on July 18th, 2010 in Portland, OR, to coordinate the development of the federated social web. Participants in the invite-only meeting will discuss their current work on connecting social networks and plan future cooperation.

"Federation just means letting people on different social networks follow each other," says Evan Prodromou, CEO of StatusNet Inc. "There are dozens of businesses and Open Source projects working on the problem of social network federation. We want to make sure that people are working together so a robust, heterogeneous network-of-networks can emerge."

Social networking sites are very popular, but few of them allow cross-site relationships between users. Concerns about privacy issues, and growth of social networking software inside the enterprise, have focused attention on the issue of federation.

Invitees to the event include StatusNet, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others. "We're focusing only on committers: people and organizations who've put code on the table to make federation work," says Phillips. "In the future, we'll need to coordinate marketing and promotion of the federated social web, but this event is about making code work."

"The participants in this event have been developing federation tools for a while," says Prodromou. "We hope that the improved interoperability that will come out of this meeting will let early adopters and social web thought leaders begin using the tools. This is the point where we breathe life into a federated social web."