Social networks inspired ideas
From LiquidPubWiki
Social networks inspired ideas
There are currently a lot of very interesting ideas which are worth considering in order to help enriching the project with more useful features, beyond the main ones.
Use openID for user authentication
OpenID is a web oriented single-sign on system, which aims at allowing users to log on to different web sites through a single digital identity. It's based on well known technologies, and is becoming quite widely widespread.
{Some detailed explanation of how OpenID works}
It would also not be very difficult to implement, and even to become ourselves an OpenID provider.
Publish site functionality for use by everyone
Some part of the services offered by the system should be available for external developers, so that they could be reused and integrated into other applications. This would make the project become more popular and more important, as the services it offers become more and more used. Many, if not every social site already offer programmatic access to several of their features.
It would also greatly benefit the project if the social features (e. g., friends list, messages) could also be incorporated into others social networks as external tools: this would give the user the ability to use his preferred social network as reference page, and, even if it is not our one, to access our tools and services nonetheless.
There are various technical methods to provide such services: for example, via Web Services, or through a RESTful approach.
Adopt OpenSocial
OpenSocial is a common set of API for interacting with different social applications on different web sites. Nowadays, many social application sites offer a set of APIs to help developers incorporate their features into their own web application logic: but every application APIs set differs from the other ones, making therefore integration uneasy and complex. This made the case for (at least trying to) develop a common set of interaction interfaces for a common subset of functionalities a social application is likely to expose.
OpenSocial is sponsored and brought forth by Google, and has been already adopted by a growing community of social application web sites (like hi5, orkut, MySpace, Ning and many others).
Exploit mashups
A mashup is web application which combines two or more existing information sources into a new one, thus devising new ways of using the same informations. A mashup can therefore become a powerful way to compose new web applications by leveraging the features of already existing ones.
We could exploit mashups in many different ways: for example, we could implement a tool which shows graphically, on a map, authors wherabouts, together with time-related informations (conferences, events, etcetera), to help users organize their travels more easily.
On the other hand, one could think of re-publishing the same functionalities we offer, but with a different presentation (like, Flash instead of tradional (X)HTML).
Allow for users to create groups
Users should be allowed to create groups of “friends” or other related people: this feature is very common among social networks sites (certain ones, like Facebook or Linkedin, are literally based on this), and could also be useful for our users. They could, for example, see other users online status, their ranking as authors, and so on.
Hiring center specialists could also exploit this feature to create list of candidates for a certain available position, thereby facilitating selection tasks.
Enable flexible collections and classifications
Just like many social sites which are about publishing and sharing contents with others, like Flickr or YouTube, it would be beneficial to allow users to construct collections of objects available on the systems (typically, research papers). Together with user custom collections, the system will provide some built-in, general-interest collections (e. g.: most rated, interesting, etc.).
Ranking based on users evaluation could also be introduced: this would become the mechanism for interesting documents to gain more visibility, as they would float to the top of either users and also built-in collections, making them easier to discover.
Permit favorites sharing
Sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia are built around the concept of letting users share their favorite sites URLs, and to discover interesting new ones by choosing among those alredy selected by someone else.
The same principle could be used here, to allow the users to discover interesting documents by looking inside others users favorites list.
Pay particular attention to licensing questions
Expecially when publishing user's authored content, in order to avoid any sort of legal problems, one has to be very careful in defining clearly, before any such content is published, who is the owner of the published items and whether anyone has any rights to be exercised over them. For example, Wikipedia requires that users contribuiting the free encyclopedia with self-produced material to license it under the GFDL license (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights): this implies the user has to give up some of its rights about his own productions.
Similarly, Open Source Software development teams usually collect Contributor License Agreements from their developers prior to accept contibutions from them.
Exploit advertisement
Some social networks base their revenues on the use of advertisement systems: advertisers pays the networks because they believe direct marketing to be more effective than generic, “broadcast” advertisement. It happens that each user is targeted with messages which, according to his preferences, best suite his or her needs and therefore would likely arouse interest about the messages topic.
This form of targeted marketing could be exploited in the LiquidPub context to let information about interesting topics be notified to interested users: the system would infer what user is interested in which subject by taking advantage of its knowledge base about the user himself, including everything the user has published on the site, plus its “social history” and self-published details about himself.
