Sta nascendo una sinergia notevole di intenti, tra un microblogging open source e decentralizzato, e il prototipo semantico che sto usando, SMOB, che avevo iniziato a mostrare qualche post fa.

Identi.ca e’ il nuovo Twitter in mano agli utenti, basato sul codice di questo progetto open, Laconi.ca.

Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.

If you register for an account, you can post small (140 chars or less) text notices about yourself, where you are, what you’re doing, or practically anything you want. You can also subscribe to the notices of your friends, or other people you’re interested in, and follow them on the Web or in an RSS feed.

Il mitico Dan ha unito gli intenti e lanciato il sasso nello stagno, come suo solito, in modo mirabile:
-> Be your own twitter: laconi.ca microblog platform and identi.ca

Riprendo al volo, la parte tecnica:

It is also federated. While there is support for XMPP (an IM interface) the main federation mechanism is based on HTTP and OAuth, using the openmicroblogging.org spec. Laconica supports OpenID so you can play without needing another password. But the OpenID usage can also help with federation and account matching across the network.

Laconica (and the identi.ca install) support FOAF by providing a FOAF files – data that is being indexed already by Google’s Social Graph API. For eg. see my identi.ca FOAF; and a search of Google SGAPI for my identi.ca account. It is in PHP (and MySQL) – hacking on FOAF consumer code using ARC is a natural step. If anyone is interested to help with that, talk to me and to Evan (and to Bengee of course).

In due parole: tutto standard, ma non sono solo parole.
Si parla di standard, quelli veri.
Tutto interoperabile.
Pronto per essere gestito in forme impensate.

Ricordo che, tempo fa, avevo chiesto a chi gestiva Planet RDF come mai non c’è un archivio pubblico e gestibile dell’aggregatore: la risposta era nella mancata presenza dei diritti e delle licenze legate ai contenuti dei singoli blogs.

Oggi ogni post può avere la sua licenza, comprensibile anche dagli agenti automatici, dai programmi quindi:

Laconica encourages everyone to apply a clear license to their microblogged posts; the initial install suggests Creative Commons Attribution 3. Other options will be added. This is important, both to ensure the integrity of this a system where posts can be reliably federated, but also as part of a general drift towards the opening up of the Web.

Dall’ultimo post, Federico aveva notato quanto fosse importante tracciare i propri commenti nell’immensità della blogosfera, magari senza dipendere da un servizio esterno, o almeno non del tutto.

Questa storia fa al caso nostro.

Imagine you are, for example, a major media content owner, with tens of thousands of audio, video, or document files. You want to know what the public are saying about your stuff, in all these scattered distributed Social Web systems. That is just about do-able. But then you want to know what you can do with these aggregated comments. Can you include them on your site? Horrible problem! Who really wrote them? What rights have they granted? The OpenID/CC combination suggests a path by which comments can find their way back to the original publishers of the content being discussed.

Il dilemma di gestire in forma decentrata i followers e chi si segue?
Il vero valore aggiunto di Twitter, di fatto.
Bè, sembra non sia un problema.

Laconica installations allow you to subscribe to an account from another account elsewhere in the Web. For example, if I am logged into my testbed site at http://foaf2foaf.org/bandri and I visit http://identi.ca/libby, I’ll get an option to (remote-)subscribe. There are bugs and usability problems as of right now, but the approach makes sense: by providing the url of the remote account, identi.ca can bounce me over to foaf2foaf which will ask “really want to subscribe to Libby? [y/n]“, setting up API permissioning for cross-site data flow behind the scenes.

E come la mettiamo con SMOB e la mia installazione?
Ci stanno lavorando per unire gli sforzi.

A close cousin of this design is the work from the SMOB (Semantic Microblogging) project, who use SIOC, FOAF and HTTP. I’m happy to see a conversation already underway about bridging those systems.

E la chiusura di Dan ve la lascio da leggere, sul post originale.
Splendida come visione e sensazione.

Il resto, per avere un quadro completo, nei link sottostanti.
Altrimenti mi dilungo troppo.

Per dubbi o perplessità sono qui.
Come sempre.

Riferimenti
-> Be your own twitter: laconi.ca microblog platform and identi.ca
-> SMOB, SIOC and Laconica?
-> no twitter, but identi.ca
-> Exploring the federation
-> Identi.ca Implements Twitter API
-> Twhirl + identi.ca + XMPP
-> RSS 1.0 and RDFa
-> Twitter’s business model emerges?