Elgg currently provide various means of authentication which is sufficient for most current needs. However, to help further distinguish Elgg, a feature that will allow ALL Elgg public facing sites to be networked, with permission from the admins but only for specific/approved sites will place Elgg up a notch as I don't think there is anything out there that does that.
Think of this much like an Elgg site as a member. A site can then "friend" another site (one-way trust relationship) and the friend site admin will get a notification which they can either ignore or reciprocate. The river can then flow within these sites, either one way or both ways with the option to allow users to access the friend site from their home site seamlessly.
Thoughts?
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I think as Elgg becomes popular in the education community, collaboration between these learning institutions will be useful, especially with regard to the research community. As the younger generation gravitate away from email and into this new realm of social media, corporate social networks will likely carve its place in the corporate world in the near future. Trust relationships and federated user management is an important aspect as to avoid/minimize user administration burden and spamming or inappropriate contents. Obviously, some of these features/concepts will be optional for some sites and the trust restrictions could be eased but for institutional sites, this will likely be mandatory for inter-institutional networks.
I like the idea of OAuth but with slight enhancements. There probably need to be some kind of a registry of validated sites, perhaps Elgg can host it (and provide as a service - for a fee/subscription), maybe in conjunction with a Verisign type validation of domain identity/ownership. Social media need to mature and I think this is the next step in its evolution.
I'm also generalizing - just wanted to clarify the extent to which this could be applied (the requirements) in practice and the need for TRUST, as it will be key in the institutional/corporate space.
We also probably need a new nomenclature, similar to or hybrid of email addressing but an extension of the social media convention such as @dave@elgg.org.
I am a developer but a bit rusty in coding. However, I think my education, experience, background and interests can help contribute some ideas to help make this a reality. I'll be glad to help.
Well..;-)
Got my attention.. tho I have been a little slow to show it. I spent quite some time earlier this year looking to "federate" Elgg-based Schools' sites to share education related content. Then got busy with too many other projects and sort of got distracted..
I had, for lack of familiarity with other technology, then started coding some basic routines using XMLRPC to enable 2 elgg sites talk to each other for funcionality such as exchanging user registration info, etc. Simon Bazley ("SiBaz") has already coded a plugin "coreg" for this same purpose between elgg and a different s/w.
Mmm, federations.
I like federations.
*ponders*
I'll be back with ideas. >.>
This federation/aggregation in the social space a hot topic:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/169957/facebook_buys_friendfeed_what_does_it_mean.html?tk=nl_dnx_h_crawl
My first response as a user - this sounds a little scary, why would people then sign up to my site if they can add friends on another site?
How do I convince them to join my site? Small start up don't have the money to advertise or contually enhance we will only grow if we have registered users logging on.
OK I see the great benefits of it from a developers point of view, just worried about the user reaction.
Address that concern and it will be a great feature.
People will not "sign-up at your site" just because the site exists.. unless you site offers them something of value there that they cannot find any where else.
This is the traditional "build it and they will come" fallacy.. This concern cannot be addressed by software because software merely serves people's needs.
People as "people" already have their own friends and their own "social networks" whether on the internet or not.
You might find this Blog by Ben Werdmuller ( co-founder of Elgg ) -- interesting, refreshing and thought-provoking -
"The Internet is People"
@ Dhrup.. I never said they will sign up just because it's there. I said they wont need to sign up.
Obviously you missed the point I was trying to make, so to clarify:
I dont want to detract from users recommending their friends sign up to my site if they can easily add them as a freind on the other site. To me thats a bad business model as I can't say to how advertisers "look at how many people I have logging on everyday."
aha ;-)
found the original URL for Ben's blog article...
http://benwerd.com/tag/the-internet-is-people/
The discussion point is introducing Elgg network of site, I beleive this will have an impact to numbers of people who register. Ignore the purpose of the elgg social site or how it attracts users thats not the discussion.
Given an example I have a site (any site it does not matter) 2000 users join. Great i use that as my data for approaching businesses to advertise. (Yes that is my main purpose in life - make money)
Now introduce the ability to see other social sites info and add friends on that site, could it not be reasoned that my site numbers drops by the amount of people not needing to come over to get access to my info and my users. It may only be a drop of 10 but it is all numbers.
It doesnt matter how I build my site does it? other sites may have access to it and my users. So I opt out of an elgg network and I fall behind the trends so my site doesn't attract the same amount of users as I first hoped.
No need telling me that how I build my site will be the reason for the success of it, I am not trying to argue that, I am trying to impart my view as a user, how I feel this will impact me. I wont know until it happens but it still what i can foresee the impact will be.
Dhrup and I had a brief brainstorming session at the afterhour gathering following the #elggcamp last evening. We had a flow diagram written on a napkin but I think it got used to clean up another mess ;-) I'm tied up this week but will try to put it back on something that could be shared for review. I'm hoping it can be built as a plugin (thanks Brett for the quick tutorials at elggcamp.) @n0de I think this may actually add more users to your network. For example, if another site friends your site, all the users on that site can potentially be your new users and if your site had real useful/interesting content, others can login to your site directly and will likely need a stub profile to handle how elgg works internally. I will try to elaborate more on how this may work in the near future
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