On 31 January 2013 11:56, Nick Jennings
<address@hidden> wrote:
Hi everyone!
My name is Nick Jennings, and I'm working on the Sockethub
project[1]. I was invited by hellekin to join this list, and am happy
to see discussion on this rather broad topic of social interaction on
the internet. I read over hellekins brainstorm post[2], it hits on a
lot of important topics and I think provides a pretty thorough
overview of the situation as a whole, from a users perspective.
My goal is for Sockethub to solve some of those problems directly,
specifically in regards to protocol independence, and provide a piece
of the puzzle to help app developers solve the other problems
mentioned, specifically 'support free' 'asynchronous and synchronous',
and the concepts covered in 'memory, identity and privacy'.
Just to give a quick overview of how Sockethub is being implemented.
It's a WebSocket server which communicates using JSON objects based on
activity streams[3] as it's protocol language. In your JSON object,
you specify a 'platform' (which would be the method of communication,
Facebook, Twitter, SMTP, XMPP, AIM, MSN etc.) and a 'verb' (which is
the action you want to perform, 'post', 'message' etc.). Then an
object containing the data to be sent, and related details. Examples
covering discovery, messaging, posting, and subscribing are provided
in a rough draft of the api_protocol[4] (which is still very much
subject to change/improvement).
With the help of Niklas Cathor and Michiel de Jong, we're making
great progress toward having working examples for XMPP, Twitter,
Facebook and SMTP, and hope to have a slick messaging app as a demo in
the next few months (with Jan-Christoph Borchardt at the helm for the
design).
So, there's a basic introduction. I'm very interested to hear what
people think, feedback, questions, criticisms and code contributions
all welcome! We don't have our own mailing list, so most of the
nitty-gritty dev-talk is handle via. github issues, so be sure to
'watch' the project if you'd like to become more involved.
Hi Nick, great to see you here :)
Why limit this to activity streams over JSON? Surely the system should be independent of the serialization for a true polyglot approach.
Also note that there are many serializations that are patent and royalty free that can do this job, activity streams is not one of them.
Cheers!
-Nick
[1] http://sockethub.org
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/consensus/2012-12/msg00006.html
[3] http://activitystrea.ms/
[4] https://raw.github.com/sockethub/sockethub/master/doc/api_protocol.txt