Friday 16 November 2007

The web2.0 stack

There has been considerable activity on standards around the web2.0 software stack in recent weeks, and this year's conferences had had little else to talk about. Here's my take on the current state of play:

To start with there's my lifestream published with Jaiku - my digital footprint which encompasses blog posts I'm sharing (google reader), comments I've made (coComments), sites I've bookmarked (del.icio.us), location and presense updates. This information gives a view on my attention and is ideal for marking up with APML for intelligent reuse around the web.

Then there's information I want to publish and synidcate out such as events I'm attending (upcoming), places I'll be (dopplr), photos I've uploaded (flickr), blog posts written (blogger), videos uploaded (YouTube). This is more static information, content I've created, which is generally feed based through standards such as RSS or iCal and can be proxied through services such as feedburner to overlay analytics.

To pull all this together I need a concept of identity (OpenId through ClaimId) and cross site authorisation (oAuth).

Finally I want to share all this with my social graph, which I need to define with microformats such as xfn and hCard, deliver the content to container sites such as social networks through Google's recent OpenSocial and make it platform agnostic with widget apis such as netvibes' UWA. This is the standards coalface where the apis are still being cut, a few months from now we'll see the first fruits of this work as the major social software players being to support these standards.

This slew of technologies and web applications almost fits together into a portable digital presence spread across the net and integrated with my social graph. With a bit of hard work its with us today, and tomorrow it will extend even further onto my mobile through Google's Android.

Exciting times for web2.0 developers.

1 comment:

Chris Saad said...

You are exactly right - well done :)

We have started www.dataportability.org to ensure developers can reference this design and build from it.

Cheers,

Chris