Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (April 2012)
Summary
A big month all round. April saw over 2500 people attend the WWW conference, in Lyon. An excellent wrap-up from Yves Raimond, is available here. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, the keynote is still available online.
“One of the main messages from the panel is that structured web data is already mainstream – Yahoo! reports that 25% of all web pages contain RDFa data and 7% contain Microdata. ”
Communications and Outreach
Our google page launch, was well received with 59 likes, so far. Thanks to everyone that has helped or contributed. Jürgen Jakobitsch has challenged us to reach 120 circles by the end of the year, so, keep spreading the word!
The Read Write Web CG blog is now syndicated out planet rdf, which is a chance for a wider linked data audience, to see what’s going on in the RWW.
Community Group
The CG welcomes new participants from MetaSolutions, Institut Telecom, University of Leipzig, Seoul National University and the University of Florida. I know that some of the new members are top experts, in the payments and online currencies field, so it’s great to have that expertise on board!
The wiki has been updated in some areas. As with most wikis, small incremental changes seem to work best. We have a new page covering several Social Systems and a stub page used to collect Screencasts. Additionally, the Global Square (occupy movement) have told us are keen to use RWW standards in their upcoming drupal based social project.
Applications
The big news this month is that the first RWW interoperation, between hetrogeneous social networks was achieved, using the semantic pingback protcol. Congratulations to Andrei Sambra (My Profile) and Kingsley (Openlink Data Spaces) for reaching this big milestone. In the coming weeks, we hope to see more social networks join the system via pingback, including work being done on bergnet and tabulator/data.fm, and hopefully many more!
Great work from the team behind My Profile for putting this fantastic new RWW social system live. The source code is also available on github. For those that have not yet seen it, you can sign up here:
https://my-profile.eu/profile.php
Although My Profile is WebID based, it should be pointed out that the universal nature allows it to be extended to almost any login method. The philosophy of using HTTP URIs to describe things, that has served Facebook and others so well, is just a staring point, rather than, a closed loop.
The system includes, (FOAF) profile creation and edit, personal wall, subscriptions, private messaging, public wall, certificate generation, friends list and lookup, federated login using your own FOAF, an application platform, cross platform messaging and much more. Do check it out!
Last but not least…
A picture speaks a thousand words. Kudos to Sarven Capadisli for this innovative use of his WebID in the DERI cafe!
