GSoC Ideas Page
dcheng edited this page Mar 1, 2011
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- Interoperability between OneSocialWeb and Ostatus: OneSocialWeb is a protocol for federated, decentralized open social networking built on XMPP and focusing strongly on privacy. It makes communication as real-time as instant messaging and as universal as e-mail. OStatus, on the other hand, is an HTTP-based stack of protocols for the same purpose but focusing on public activities. Some work has already been started to achieve interoperability between these two leading solutions, the aim of both is to enable an open alternative to walled-garden social providers. Collaborating in this area of the project would require the participant to investigate on protocols such as xmpp, webfinger, pubsubhubbub, salmon, oauth, amongst others. Development is in Java.
- Protocol extensions for OneSocialWeb: A number of extensions for our social networking protocol are required. Development is in Java for Openfire.
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Exposing the capabilities offered by a OSW-enabled server can be achieved by implementing Disco (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0030.html).
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When a user's inbox has a large number of items, result set management over xmpp in order to retrieve them becomes necessary. Implementing RSM (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0059.html) would allow us to present to the user a more friendly experience of their otherwise unmanagely large timeline.
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Other XMPP extensions.
- ** User search and discovery across networks:** How do we find people to connect to in a federated network of providers? Searching by email, name, etc. becomes trivial with a centralized approach, such as Facebook. Even when Webfinger provides discovery of user information based on a single identifier (e-mail like URI) there will always be the need to search using other fields regardless of the protocol (osw, ostatus) plus, allowing the user to discover federated social web contacts based on your friends in existing networks. Deliverables are the design of a search protocol and a reference implementation in Java.
- ** User Experience: Work on development of web and mobile clients for OneSocialWeb:** Our work-in-progress web client is built using Google Web Tookit and uses a BOSH implementation to communicate with the XMPP backend. Connectivy issues remain, as well as low latency, probably due to the BOSH implementation and many features still need to be implemented, taking into account usability and ease of set-up for privacy and access control rues. Our Android client needs much work to optimize performance on different kinds of networks (2G, EDGE, etc.) and solve lost connectivity issues. Requires Java and (preferrably) Android skills.