Distributed Social Networks: The Digital Home [CONCEPT] John Wright's Blog

Photo: Stuck in Customs

A few days ago an analogy regarding social networks and their future crossed my mind. The analogy is “The Digital Home” as a distributed social network platform.

The idea is that big social networks are kind of like massive communes where you have your own room (for instance my room on twitter is http://twitter.com/wrightlabs). You operate on these social networks primarily on their terms. As we’ve seen with Facebook, changing privacy policies and settings on their site, they have the ultimate say in how the platform changes and what you can and can’t do. Leadership in how you “live” on Facebook (and other social networks) is centralized and decided by Facebook management. Another thing about big social networks is that, once you are on it, you are limited to that one social network. If you sign up for Facebook, you can’t interact with your friend who is on Twitter and vice versa. Unless you have an account with both networks and then hook up some kind of connection, but even then it’s too cumbersome and probably wouldn’t work that well. You really need to be part of the same network or “commune” to network and interact.

But the “digital home” idea decentralizes all this, instead of you being a part of a commune living within it’s walls, you own your own home (or site). This home would in most cases be your own domain name (I plan to make mine http://ijohnwright.com). Similar to how you don’t allow just anyone into your physical home, you would have privacy controls to keep strangers out of your “digital home” or allow people in to certain rooms. If you have family/friends that would like a room in your “digital home” you could give them one if you choose so it may not just be you living at your home (which is essentially your domain name).

The benefit is that you own it all, but with all this comes the responsibility of maintaining a home. Paying the hosting bill, if/when the site goes down, running in and fixing it etc.

If your home is on one domain name, then this “digital home” will need a way to communicate with other similar homes on the web to be a “distributed social network”. I mean if my friend on another site updates his “room” that I have access to with some pictures, it needs to show up in my stream. If I can only see whats going on and interact within my digital home, then it’s not a distributed social network. So we’ll need a distributed social network platform or open protocol that all these digital houses use to connect together. There are already many technologies that could be used to achieve what I’m describing. It would take packaging them together or reinventing them into an Open Social protocol (I’m not referring to Google’s).

Apparently I’m not the only one who has been thinking along these lines.

Since I first started thinking this, we’ve seen Diaspora launch in a rather historic fashion. The fact that some dudes about to graduate from NYU can kickstart their career in such a fashion is evidence that a lot of other people are embracing the distributed social network concept as well.

Also, I just heard Matt of WordPress giving a similar analogy while being interviewed by the Scoblizer at Big Omaha. I’m glad to hear Matt is thinking like this because when I originally came up with the idea, Matt’s WordPress software is what initially came to mind.

Doing a little bit of searching for this I found the DiSo Project which I’ve heard of years ago through Chris Messina. Now I know exactly what DiSo is

So I guess the distributed social network idea is nothing new but maybe now it will really start to gain some traction. It’s good to know many are working on this. I think the project that will win the most adoption is the one that makes it simple and straight forward concerning privacy and how to set it up. These are two big challenges but I’m sure someone will solve them.