PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network

prostoalex writes "When Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zaibatsu and Tribe.net just don't cut it, meet PeopleAggregator, an open-source, PHP-written, FOAF-based social network. There's the site and there's the source in case you decide to launch your own. I found out about PeopleAggregator reading this interview with Mark Canter on Read/Write Web today." I wish such sites would provide profile-conversion tools to encourage jumping ship from one to another.

Comments

*cough*

[DarkHelmet]

Slashster

Slashster is an Open Source PHP / Mysql based FOAF.

Congrats to PeopleAggregator for making Slashdot though. Dunno why my site didn't make front page... Heh.

Nerdy friend connection?

[dealsites]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc...??

I hate to admit it, but I imagine most of these social-network people are the nerdy type. Not that I'm saying that's bad, but most of us probably already have some nerdy friends. Why not get out and meet people in real life to havae a well-balanced friend social network?

Although the open-source project is cool.

--
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Future ideas

[Trejkaz]

So true. And whereas this was an obvious Slashdot Effect joke, there is some insight hidden behind the idea.

Obviously the concept of a social network site where the entire network has to register with one site is going to be doomed to failure in the end.

The first problem is that in order to build a social network big enough to fit everyone interested in being registered on the network, you need a cluster big enough to store every user on the Internet. By my guess, Orkut is the only one with access to this kind of cluster size, because it is hosted by Google.

The second problem is that as soon as you have two social network sites, you have a problem where someone wants to be on both sites. Then you add a third site and you have a problem where that person wants to be on three sites. How many social network sites are there now?

This is the same problem we already see with instant messaging, and is why the newer, more sophisticated IM systems such as Jabber allow the servers to intercommunicate. You can be on whatever server you want, and have contacts on your list who are on whatever server they want.

So here is my idea: distribute the social networks. A user joins the server they want, is allocated a user id which is user@domain.com, analogous to a Jabber ID, and they can add people to their network who exist on other servers.

Communities would work similarly with community@communities.domain.com, people join a community by registering their user ID on the server which hosts the community. For instance, the Slashdot community might be slashdot@communities.slashdot.org.

Now, if all these communities can export FOAF and RDF and agree on how to do any other kind of data manipulation, any program can easily merge cross-site data together to form larger networks if they need, and the work won't have to be done by a single server, it can be done on the client at the user's leisure.

And more importantly, the solution will actually scale.

Who's with me?

Learn to Dance

[handy_vandal]

What ever happened to people meeting at the mall, bars, concerts, school, etc...??

I'll second this.

I'm a nerdy, basically shy person myself.

Learning to dance saved my social life -- talking ballroom dance here, swing and waltz and foxtrot.

Women go for that stuff, trust me on this one. The fellow who knows how to waltz has got it made. You get to approach strangers, make conversation with them, lead them onto the dance floor, put your hands on them, your arms around them ... move them rhymthmically around the dance floor ... and they love it.

Paradise!

-kgj

too many social networks!

[boomka]

The idea behind social networks is that in theory, when everyone participates in a social network, you can easily find people through your connections.
But once you have so many networks (and the craze is only starting) then even in theory you can't have all your friends on the same network.
At least I know can't possibly be active on all of them.

I think what networks are aspiring to do is unachievable because their scope is so small. We already have our social network, it's called Internet and it is successful because there is only one Internet.