The Hindu : Front Page : W3C’s answer to social networking technicalities

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 29, 2009
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Front Page

Front Page

W3C’s answer to social networking technicalities

T. Ramachandran

Interoperability is the buzzword here

KOCHI: Social networking has caught the fancy of people in large parts of the world. New information technology-driven ways of connecting with people and expanding one’s personal and professional networks and sharing information are gathering momentum. But technical questions are being raised about where it should be headed from here.

To address these questions, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global body that prescribes web standards, took stock of the future of social networking earlier this year at a workshop and came up with plans related to its technical evolution.

There were certain challenges confronting the social networking domain today. For instance, social networking sites are now largely ‘walled in.’

Think of those who use multiple social networking sites of different types to connect with others. A good part of the information that they want to share with friends spread all over these sites could be common. Today, such sharing of personal information across different sites is possible only in limited ways, though new tools are being worked out constantly.

Interoperability and decentralised architecture are the buzzwords here. “A decentralised architecture for social networks would allow the user to choose how many accounts and profiles he or she desires, and to use any of these on any social networks which would support the proposed or user-selected features,” the W3C observed.

A W3C Incubator Group will review and map the data interoperability technologies available, identify gaps and find ways of using these technologies together, supported by an open source implementation of a decentralised architecture. For instance, one of them is FOAF (Friend of a Friend), which has been described as a simple technology for “creating a web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.”

How does all of this look from the perspective of a social networking site? When this question was put to hi5, a prominent social networking site, its Executive Product Manager Paul Lindner told The Hindu, “we welcome efforts to push standardisation as this makes the data that hi5 manages for our users more useful and interoperable [for] our partners. Open data, authentication and authorisation standards will also make it easier for hi5 to provide a richer set of services to our users.” The site had already been implementing several features based on open standards.

The W3C also took up the issue of protecting the privacy of users.Accessibility was another issue facing the social networking world. There was an increasing awareness that the web should be tailored to meet the needs of people with special needs. That is more possible now than ever before.

And all of this hopefully points to a future, in which users will be able to manage and make seamless use of an entire range of social networking sites with tools that are safe and easy to use.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page