[tech, lj] Distributing LJ

[siderea]

Ever since the Strikethrough of '07 -- actually, ever since I realized that LJ was something of an attractive nuisance of basket in which to store eggs, way back when -- I've been thinking about how one would go about turning LJ, the software, from a client/server model to a peer-to-peer model. That is, how to make LJ distributed

Comments

[jducoeur]

Sher -- I've been messing with this one in the back of my head for a couple of years now. A few random comments, off the top of my head

[sethg_prime]

Related: Dare Obasanjo, "A Proposal for Social Network Interoperability via OpenID

[siderea]

Thanks for the pointer. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about it.

But I must say: All this "But the reasons this doesn't happen are all business ones" thing has me puzzled. There was no business reason to write a Unixoid OS and give it away for free, either. Nor to write a free [fill in your favorite OS project here] either. Yet, somehow, programmers decided they wanted such things and went and wrote them. Gee. Whodathunk.

[eichin]

(this is not as edited as it should be, and probably has more aggressive a tone than the material deserves, and I apologize for that, but only weakly because I'm posting it anyway :-)> There was no business reason to write a Unixoid OS and give it away for free

[sethg_prime]

I think all he means is that the big social-networking sites are big (or aspiring-to-be-big) businesses, and they currently have no incentives to bring down the walls around their gardens--just as, when the Internet was something that only geeks used, AOL had no incentive to make it easy for its users to talk to Compuserve users.

If a workable system for aggregating social networks is developed and various open-source systems implement it and smaller sites take advantage of it, then the big boys will eventually cave in and adopt it, for the same reason that AOL eventually caved in and connected with "the real Net".