Social Networks are pretty big business at the moment, but one thing about them always bugged me. I have two separate networks, one, my offline peeps, guys I went to school with or worked with over the years, that tend to be using Facebook, and the other group my online-peeps, who I tend to interact with via my blog. The first network is already there, but I wanted a way to make use of the second

What I really wanted was a distributed network that let me use my blog to connect to others, so I planned on writing a plugin to do just that.

My plugin would use WordPress as a base. It would follow the regulatory of linking out, of people commenting on my blog and use these to determine whether a site was part of my network.

Once it decided a site was part of my network it would use WordPress’s XML-RPC implementation to contact that blog and ask to be friends and the blog owner would need to agree. I am assuming that the other blog is also using the plugin.

With the blogs connected (automated passwords having been exchanged) we could now share data, all automatically, about who the author is, perhaps a Twitter-esque networking messaging thing, and possibly share search results of common searches to help define what is going on in the network.

The feature I really wanted was one where each blog would share its own network. This would not be displayed to anyone but where several sites have a site in their network, which you did not have in yours, you would receive recommendations.

Finally, you could automate your blogroll, assuming you have one.

I think this sounds pretty interesting and I was all set to start on it when I found out about the DISo project. Their website describes it like this:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

It is all I wanted and more.

There is a video of Chris Messina explaining the DISo Project at Read Write Web. I suggest you take a look.

Over the past few weeks the talk about using WordPress as a platform has intesified, especially with the release of Prologue. This has really got me wondering how far you use WordPress to replace all those social apps that have become so popular.

If you’ve known me for a while you might know that I have a thing about de-centralised, self-hosted services; I have had ideas in mind for a long time about chaining blog searches, i.e. when you search my blog, it also connects to my friends blogs that I think are related and provides some of their content, and so on.

I have an idealised view that perhaps in future we won’t need people like Google at all, and while that may be just a pipe dream I do think there are some areas where that can be reality.

One of my major gripes with all of the social networking sites is that popularity seems to be the be all and end all. While it adds weight in some areas it also means that the really interesting stuff often gets lost. I have never found Digg to be even remotely useful for example.

By decetralising these services so that you plug into your friends bookmarks, and aggregate those, perhaps the worst aspects of the existing sites will disapear.

Imagine your own version of Digg, featuring links from the people you hold in the highest regard and ignoring the trolls and the unwavringly one sided.

This is obviously a very speculative post so far, but I do intend to explore this area more over the next few months, hopefully with some examples I can let everyone have to play with.