SocialWeb - the view from FOAF
Dan Brickley

Origins...
- exploration of the Web as originally designed
- a linked information system, describing people in the Web

Q: Who has read http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html ?
The \"Personal Skills Inventory\"
Personal skills and experience are just the sort of
thing which need hypertext flexibility.
People can be linked to projects they have
worked on, which in turn can be linked to
particular machines, programming languages, etc.
Tim Berners-Lee, March 1989

We built one.

Linked RDF in 2000-1

Values...

Choice...

Expression...

Movement...

Association...

“...just the sort of thing which need hypertext flexibility.”

“Name contains too many capital laters.”

“Name is too long (max is 20 characters)”

Price of
decentralization
• What happens when your homepage is
hacked?
• and you’ve used it as an openid?
• What happens when your site is hacked?
• and you host a popular schema?
Embarassing, but these are my problems today.

Questions
• How can we build a decentralised approach
to describing people, topics, and the things
they make and do...
• ...while retaining advantages of formal
standards & careful review?

OAuth
• security advisory yesterday.

What can you do with
danbri.org?
• ask the Google social graph API!

It’s on the machine-
readable public record!
http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/otherme?
pretty=1&q=danbri.org

Social Web meets TV?
• from Mobile Widgets Camp yesterday
• if my friends have widget-capable phones
• and the phones know we’re friends
• how can their widgets control my tv?
• How do contact and permissioning APIs in
W3C mobile widgets relate to those in Web-
site widget platforms? (opensocial etc.)?

W3C Social Web XG
• A place to share problems, record plans
• Build collaborations, review each other’s
work
• Figure out how it all fits together

Image credits: Tim Berners-Lee, Ian Davis