Toward federated services
Toward federated services
Posted Sep 11, 2014 8:23 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148)Parent article: Toward federated services
One of the biggest selling points of social networks is finding people. People use facebook to find old schoolmates, someone they got in contact during work the year before or the people they have just met at the party. "Standard" social networks give you a single universal pool of people to search (in the billion order of magnitude). "Standard" social networks also make searching people very easy and actually pro-actively suggest people to connect to by looking at connection graphs.
So far, the federated systems that I looked at could only search users within the local basin of the individual server. You will could not use them to find someone who you met the year before while on holiday even if such user was on a node of the federated system. Furthermore no individual server could have a view of the connection graph around you to be able to suggest connections. This is a big obstacle to the growth of large connection graphs and a userbase sufficient to reach a critical mass.
Has this changed recently or since I tested?
Posted Sep 11, 2014 12:22 UTC (Thu)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 17, 2014 7:53 UTC (Wed)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link]
Which is terrible. Sometimes I remember someone's first name only. Searching Facebook prioritizes people with mutual contacts which we're likely to have and hence I can find the person. If I had to use an email or some arcane Grognard-y identifier, my contacts list on Facebook (or LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) would be quite a bit smaller.
I've searched people by company they work for, first name spelled right, first name spelled wrongly, and various other qualities. That needs to work with any new federated system. Otherwise the federated system is a step down in social functionality compared to the current systems.
This doesn't mean that the federated system has to support this search feature but rather that there needs to be a search engine that collects data from any public federated server, same as how Google isn't the sole provider of the Internet but Google.com tends to be pretty key in actually using the Internet for many of us. I'm not sure how'd you would implement privacy features like "only friends and friends," though.
Toward federated services
Toward federated services