OpenFriend is a set of standards that allows Social Networks to discover any of your friends already on their networks while still protecting your privacy.
The ultimate goal is to standardize and make transparent the user experience between importing and exporting of contacts from various social networks. OpenFriend allows for social networks to implement a standardized way of exporting their contacts and discovering relationships between new and existing users. It also allows for sites to generate documents detailing the relationship between people on different social networks.
First, let's define some terms:
FOAF: (Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. http://www.foaf-project.org/
SNAP: (Social Network Aggregation Protocol) A simple protocol for how a social network or social network aggregator should expose it's FOAF for a user, and accept one for integration.
OFF: (Open Friend Format) A specification for how the site should make its FOAF file.
SNAP/OFF Compliant Social Network: A social network which generates an OFF document for an account using SNAP.
SNAP Proxy: An OFF generator for a user for sites which will not comply to SNAP (Myspace, etc). A series of these will be maintained on openfriendformat.com for popular social networks
SNAP/OFF Aggregator: A site which allows the user to pull in his OFF documents from social networks and build a custom aggregate one. This site can either be run by a third party on the internet or located on a users computer
The user wants his social network to be portable. He signs up for one of many (hopefully) SNAP/OFF compliant aggregators (think of this as if they were OpenID stores). A list of these sites will be maintained on OpenFriendFormat.com. The user will go to the site, login, and tell the site what networks he belongs to. The site will then, using SNAP, download the FOAFs for all those networks. If the networks don't support SNAP the site can hit openfriendformat.com's SNAP proxy to get the FOAF.
The SNAP/OFF compliant aggregator then combines the FOAF and presents the results to the user, allowing them to group them, create "views", make tags, etc. The site presents the user with a URL to generate their FOAF.
Now, when a user signs up for a new social network that is SNAP/OFF compliant it will ask them for their SNAP/OFF URL which will be the URL they made at their aggregator. This is similar to knowing your OpenID at this point. When the social network requests access to this document it will redirect the user to a page on the aggregator's server asking him/her if he/she would like to give access to this social network. The user could set it up so the OFF document is always public to avoid this step. The user will also be able to allow only certain tags be exposed to a social network. The server could also function as an OpenID store, allowing the user to only memorize one URL for his identity.
It's not hard to become SNAP/OFF compliant. All you need to do is publish a FOAF for each user following the OFF guidelines and expose it using SNAP. Neither of these standards is finished yet, but we assure that it will be easy to implement. Once your social network is SNAP/OFF compliant it will allow users to import their friends from your network into other social networks using an aggregator.
As a user, you will now have a (private) set of friends that you can import to any social network or application that supports this standard. Since OFF documents are just a type of FOAF, any website or app that supports FOAF will also work as well. This means that when you sign up for a new social network, it can now be aware of all of it's users on it's network that you know. It could then ask you if you'd like to automatically friend these contacts, making your job of searching the network for your known friends considerably easier.
Very little, but the project has just begun. We have created SNAP/OFF proxies that create a FOAF for several large social networks (Myspace, Delicious, Twitter, Digg, etc). Talk has also begun on the specification of SNAP and OFF.
Lastly, Hi5 has already added FOAF support for every user and Tabber has begun the process of allowing users to generate aggregated FOAF documents for their contacts that they import from several social networks
Yes! We need developers in order to create the stand alone open source aggregator that users can run on their own servers. Developers with experience in web development, RDF, web security, and just general application development are welcome. Although many of the proxies are already written, we could also use help creating some of more. Finally, those willing to help write up the formal spec are very welcome
No one....or...everyone, depending on how you look at it. Everything about OpenFriend will be open source, free in every single sense of the word.
If you want to help out or contribute you can send an email to contribute@openfriendformat.com.