One thing I’m particularly interested in is synchronisation of profiles across multiple blogs and social networks. The fact is people have lots of different interests, and while they *may* have a central place to manage their data from, it’s also likely they see several of their online “homes” as important as each other. A decentralised list of ‘rel=”me”‘ places could all talk to each other, so if you update your “About me” text on one site you could choose to sync it to all your other profiles. Same with user statuses, if you want to say you’ve just discovered the perfect sandwich you don’t want to have to type that several times in several places.

A lot more thought needs putting into that, but the potential for this whole area is very exciting.

Les Squires Announces New Web-based Community Building Platform
March 31, 2008 by Thomas H. Greco

Please see this FYI

http://beyondmoney.wordpress.com/

http://podim2008.ning.com/

David Wiley posts about fully distributing the social network. This basically means empowering blogs or other personal Web sites to make the …

The similarity to what you’re describing is that there’s practically nothing stored in Plaxo, except maybe the friend network – all content and submissions come from other sites that people use. Time will tell what happens when OpenSocial widgets start appearing in Plaxo…

I think the idea of maintaing your identity in a central location is the long-term goal. I would prefer to use my identity to assert who I am against services instead of recreating identity at each. One of the things that bothers me about the current model is the need to recreate my social network each time I explore a new environment … as an example, just the other day I wanted to try out Pownce and to make it meaningful, I had to beg a handful of friends to join and add me. If the model were different, my identity would be asserted with Pownce, my network would come with me, and the only new thing is that my identity would now contain an attribute that let me into Pownce. Does that make any sense?

At any rate, a few weeks ago on the ETS Talk podcast we discussed this topic and tossed our the idea of trying a 30 test — to se if we could stop with all the other social networks and use only our blogs as the center piece to our online identities … I haven’t gone down the path yet, but I reading your last couple of posts has given me a nudge in that direction once again. At any rate, I am watching what you are doing closely … I think you are getting close to the right approach.

You’re spot on in wanting more and more WPmu/WP widgets and plug-ins to make the site more inclusive. Vox.com does a lot of this pretty well, but then ends up failing the user on a number of the more basic functionalities and features.

But re. OpenID does this mean that self-hosted blogs must be OpenID providers?