Distributed Social Networking Could Provide a Major Boost to Online Labor Organizing

Since the issue was raised in the discussion following last week's post on commercial social networking services, it seems like a good time to look into a new bleeding edge alternative to services like Facebook and MySpace called distributed social networking.

However, it's much tougher to talk about a technology that is still just coming into existence than a more mature technology that's been around awhile and proved its worth; so hang on to your hats, this post is going to be a bit of a wild ride.

So, to recap, many people and organizations love the ability to keep track of all their friends, family and colleagues on existing social networks. They like being able to meet new people with similar interests, too - with the added bonus that these people can hail from anywhere in the world as internet use continues to grow.

But a growing number of users of Facebook, MySpace and similar large social networking services don't like the fact that all the personal information they post to their social networking pages is controlled by large corporations - who may or may not treat it with the respect it deserves. They also don't like the fact that these services - with some recent exceptions - don't interact with each other. Which forces people to subscribe to multiple services to stay connected with all the people they need to connect to. That's precisely the reason this blog suggested that everyone get accounts on Facebook and MySpace last week - rather than one or the other. Still, it's understandable that that strategy can only work to a point. Once people's friends start appearing on those two services plus LinkedIn and Plaxo (and microblogging networks like Twitter) and so on, it becomes impossible for most people to keep track of their presence on all of them.

Labor activists and people representing other progressive organizations have another reason to dislike social networking services ... the mere fact that corporations run the services is a problem in and of itself.

For these and other reasons over the last couple of years, various developers have begun to propose that open standards be developed for all websites that would allow them to perform the same functions as the commercial social networking services, but without the corporate middleman.

That means, in relatively plain English, that social networking functions like being able to track what your friends are doing on their websites will become an accepted coding standard like the html that websites are built on. The code will be freely available for all to use, modify and distribute - even if an individual or company owns the rights to it. Web businesses will not make money from the standard itself, but from creating aggregating services like Google that will allow people to search for other people to network with as they currently can on Facebook and MySpace. Or from helping people customize their social networking presence and so on. But not from controlling the social network itself or the code it is built on.

If such standards catch on, and millions move over to them, it will mean the end of Facebook, MySpace and other major social networking sites. Or at least a significant change in the way they do business.

However, implementing an accepted open standard - or more correctly, group of open standards - that will be easily useable by millions is more easily said than done. And there is a clear inability of the still small number of groups working on the problem to join forces, or even to focus their work in similar directions that might stall the progress of an open standard for a long while.

There are 3 distributed social networking efforts worth mentioning at the moment, and many smaller fragmentary efforts that may never get off the ground in any fashion. They are generally spearheaded by small companies and/or tight-knit communities of developers that grew out of conversations about the cracking the problem of building an open standard.

The first is DiSo, a group that is creating distributed social networking plugins for existing content management systems - starting with WordPress, but soon to be available for Drupal and Moveable Type. Aimed largely at the blog market, DiSo is bundling microformats (a type of open standard based on small easily adapted applications) like hCard (an "open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places" with contact cards) and Open ID (a distributed ID system that allows you to securely sign into multiple sites using your website's address as a username) into a WordPress plugin that makes any enable website part of a distributed social network.

This is a smart approach because there are hundreds of thousands of websites built with WordPress. If a large percentage of WordPress users get the DiSo plugin, they will quickly form one of the largest social networking communities in the world. So then, instead of WordPress sites linking to each other through just their blogrolls, they will also link to each other the way individual Facebook or MySpace pages do. And since WordPress is an easy and robust content management system used by many creative people, the spread of DiSo will be viral and be quickly ported to other communities running other content management systems.

The second effort is Elgg. Perhaps the hippest group from a labor perspective, Elgg is aiming to allow anyone with a PHP-MySQL based website (most websites in existence) to create their own social network. Sort of like Ning - a heavily-funded startup by the guy who cashed in on Netscape - but based on open standards just like the other contenders covered here. The first full release was just launched a couple of weeks ago and is available for free download and configuration to all comers. Elgg users have the choice of making their social network fully connectable to all other Elgg-based networks, or creating their own mini-Facebook only open to their friends, family and/or co-workers. A big selling point of Elgg is that it is released under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License -which is the best out there from this corner.

Finally, there's NoseRub. Probably the purest application of distributed social networking technology since the German team working on it is aiming to create an open standard that will work with virtually any website, but will not make users create their own social network. Instead it will enable their website for a truly distributed social network. Built to run, like Elgg, on the popular PHP-MySQL backend, NoseRub can be ported to other programming languages under the MIT License - a free software license originally developed for X windows systems. NoseRub, too, is a package of microformats like OpenID and FOAF (Friend of a Friend, a "machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects.").

Clearly this stuff is highly technical and a lot for the average Communicate or Die reader to absorb; so let's break it down.

Distributed social networking technology will allow websites run by labor unions, members of labor unions and allies to build powerful online social networks that will help us take our online organizing efforts much further than they can currently go.

If each of our sites is the equivalent of a contact page on Facebook or MySpace, and can do all the things those services can do and more, we will have a networking tool that will allow us to reach millions of people on an ongoing basis in an effective way that is not controlled in any way by the corporations we are often at war with.

This technology is not quite "ready for prime time" yet, but it is very close now. Any readers with some minor technical chops and control over a website and a server should think about experimenting with projects we've mentioned, and try setting up their own test of distributed social networking. We'd love to hear about any results.

We're planning to run such tests ourselves here at Communicate or Die, and when we do, we'll be sure to let you all know.