12 Dimensions/Architecture

Architecture

Object-oriented Sociality

"[There is a] profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term 'social network' by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as 'a map of the relationships between individuals.' Basically I'm defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality' following the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. I'll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don't.

Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.

In my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects.

For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centered sociality, see the chapter on 'Objectual Practice' by Karin Knorr Cetina in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Theodor R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001: Routledge.)" (http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html)

Federation and Interoperability

By providing the federation and interoperability of platforms and web services, OMPlanet aims to make an ecosystem not fallible to attempts of exploiting or manipulating it for personal benefit, to centralize and misappropriate resources for vested interests of few shareholders.

Federated networks are designed upon the same principles of confederation. In simple words: in a federated environment there are many service providers from different domains for similar types of service but they are all interconnected and it is possible for the users to interact across the platforms. Everyone is able to choose his/her preferred platform to access his/her web service (e.g. social network) which is in turn interoperable with other platforms.

Public Web Services

However preferable it is to have such platforms interacting in federated or peer-to-peer manner with decentralized management and all data in distributed servers and DBs, it is too complex to make it possible without using some global centralised services. For example to make available services such as unique ID generation, user authentication, offline messaging, sharing access to public/protected data, etc., centralized public web services and centrilized data storage is necessary.

Considering these limitations, the OMPlanet ecosystem will also hold public client-server based systems. The necessary services and servers will be transparently maintained by community volunteer efforts. Explained in P2P logic there needs to be enough super-peers that are willing to host some part of server functionality and light-weight peers who are only users in the environment (e.g. users accessing via limited mobile devices).

Below is one of the early stage sketches of the ecosystem that represents real world dimensions interacting with OMPlanet public web services.