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Introduction
White papers will be posted here explaining the bigger dream SNSAPI is pursuing and how we reach the current practical problem. Design choices of SNSAPI is also discussed in the white paper. It is a supplementary document to the Sphinx generated docs and in-code comments. Hopefully, we can use it to align the understanding of the community and explore in the same direction together.
- Author: Pili Hu and Wing Cheong Lau
- Date: July 2013
There are a lot of problems associated with centralized Social Networking Services (SNS), e.g. potential loss of accounts, poor privacy controls, etc. Many developers and researchers all over the world now agree that decentralization is the future of social networking. People from many communities have proposed different solutions to address the problem. Despite their attractive features, only a small portion of those solutions managed to jumpstart and only a few of them grow to near million level of user populations. Based on this obser- vation, we envisioned that migration is actually the grand challenge of all. The loss of links (social connections with existing friends) is preventing former centralized SNS users from moving to decentralized services (either stand-alone distributed social services or federated social services). To address the problem of migration, one urgent task is to enable flexible and programmable cross-platform socialization. Towards this end, we build a lightweight Python- based middleware to unify the interfaces and data structures of heterogeneous SNS. Unlike most prior works, this middleware is user-oriented. With zero infrastructure support (no need of server setup, database setup, etc), users can readily manipulate their social channels in a programmable fashion. After sharing our view on the future of social networking, we will briefly introduce the architecture of the middleware and demo two sample applications.
See the paper: pdf
The Vision of SNSAPI written when the project was initiated.