When we stopped talking about “blogging” and started talking about “social networks” the only real innovation was that Myspace and then Facebook and others exposed your contact list to your contacts. That’s it, that’s all, that’s the catalyst for the social media revolution – sharing contacts.

My first step in leaving Facebook is collecting all of my friend’s contact information. I couldn’t send most of them a letter if I wanted to. I haven’t maintained a proper address book for a long time; now my contact information is spread across a wide variety of apps where my data is owned by some third party that provides me the service.

I couldn’t find a piece of open source software that did what I wanted, so I wrote my own address book software and shared it on Github. At the time of this blog post, I’ve only had a couple of weeks to work on it. There are enough bugs that wouldn’t recommend anyone other than a Laravel developer to try to use it.

Currently, the app allows your friends to create a contact card with an email address. Once verified by email, your friend can share their contact details with you such as their address, email, birthday, websites, and social media accounts. They will also be able to see your contact details. Future features will provide tagging so than you can group your contacts and restrict what contact details you share with which groups. This will allow you to share your home address with you friends and your business address with your colleagues. On top of this platform I also hope to build a google map integration so you can see all of you contacts on a map at once, a list of upcoming birthdays, the ability to merge accounts should you accidentally create two, proper admin tools to modify shared data, and some other stuff I’m not thinking of.

Most excitingly, I want to make this app federated. If one of my friends decides to run a copy of this app, I will be able to have my copy of the app sync their contact card with fresh data served by their copy of the app’s api. Boom, really simple federation.

Apparently, step 2 of leaving Facebook is coming back to this poor forgotten blog and writing some posts. Or perhaps that’s just part of step 1. Either way, I expect to continue to blog about the process of removing Facebook from my online experience. Truth be told, I’d like to take as many of you with me as I can.

The post Leaving Facebook Step 1: Address Book appeared first on zasKoda.

What I would like to see happen next wouldn’t be as “easy” as our current batch of social networks. Because it’s not easy, I don’t expect the idea to ever take off. Still, I would like to see it happen just as much.

I would like to abstract the friends list concept entirely. This would also require abstracting the identity concept entirely (see OpenID and Sxip). Anyway, the concept is such that you manage a mast friends list somewhere. This would contain considerably more complex information than what most social networks offer now. It would allow for grouping, would show number of hops between you and another person, and would allow for public/private view management. Above all else, it would be build such that you are not locked into any one platform. If you build a personal home page, you could write an app that enables your social network. If you installed a piece of popular web software for content management on your personal site, it would include plugins to activate your social network.

Basically, what I’m getting at, is removing the social network from the walled garden of a service provider. Now instead of having a profile on a service, you have your own website that you can develop as you see fit.

I think that this concept will eventually happen in one form or another. It’s taking a while for the identity management stuff to catch on so I’m sure it will be a long time. I’ve thought about the problem in a few different ways and I’m not sure what the best method of solving the problem would be. Maybe it’s built on something as simple as defining relationships in your anchor tags.

Just thinking out loud about this one. If anyone knows of projects of this nature, please let me know.

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I did all of this with open source software. It’s all free. I couldn’t do this 5 years ago. Sure, I could run a server on open source software, but the desktop just wasn’t there. Next month, Ubuntu should make their next release – a version they plan to support for many years to come. It should be one of the most complete, stable, and user friendly Linux distros around.

The entire desktop experience is about to leapfrog the Windows experience thanks to XGL. Granted, things might shift when Vista finally lands – but when will that be?

So… here I am… looking at this business plan… wondering – “Can I do all of this entirely on open source software?”… The mere challenge is motivating.

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