W3C Social Web Working Group

Aaron Parecki / @aaronpk

Social Web Working Group

The mission of the Social Web Working Group is to define the technical protocols, vocabularies, and APIs to facilitate access to social functionality as part of the Open Web Platform. These technologies should allow communication between independent systems, federation (also called "decentralization") being part of the design.

Why Standards?

  • Avoid creating another "special snowflake" API
  • Create APIs and systems that are already familiar to developers
  • Interoperate with other tools without custom-building each integration point

W3C Group Deliverables

  • Social Data Syntax - a JSON-based syntax to transfer status updates and other social info across systems
  • Social API - an API that can create social data, as well as consume it, e.g. allowing embedding updates elsewhere
  • Federation Protocol - to allow sharing information between disparate systems

Current Specs

  • Activity Streams 2.0
  • Webmention
  • ActivityPub
  • Micropub

Activity Streams 2.0

Social Syntax

Activity Streams 2.0

An activity stream is a collection of actions that have been taken by users in a given system

www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

Activity Streams describes actions such as:

  • "Andrew created a map"
  • "Ben added a photo to a report"
  • "Courtney started following a map"
  • "Dave commented _____ on a post"

Activity Streams 2.0

Current Status:

  • Working Draft
  • Likely to be finalized later this year
  • Replaces previous (XML) version of Activity Streams
  • Only 2 current interoperable implementations
  • Seeking implementers and feedback

Activity Streams 2.0 and
ArcGIS Online

  • People, orgs, maps, and other items can publish an Activity Stream
  • Subscribe to the Activity Stream of the person/group/org/map you want to follow
  • Collect these activities into a single feed for people to read
  • Allow other systems to aggregate activities from ArcGIS into their feeds. e.g. in Salesforce, see what your org is doing in ArcGIS Online

Webmention

Federation

Webmention

A simple protocol to notify a URL when you link to it

Primarily used for cross-site commenting, likes, RSVPs, etc

www.w3.org/TR/webmention/
editor's draft: webmention.net

Webmention

Current Status:

  • Working Draft
  • Likely to be finalized later this year
  • Many interoperable implementations
  • Working on extensions for presentation, anti-spam techniques, and private content

Webmention and
ArcGIS Online

  • When publishing a map, notify any URLs that it links to, to advertise the map was published
  • Accept comments on items by showing what people say when they link to an item

ActivityPub

Social API

ActivityPub

An API to create Activity Streams objects and otherwise manipulate social data

www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

ActivityPub

Current Status:

  • Working Draft
  • Likely to be finalized later this year
  • No currently interoperable implementations
  • Likely to change significantly before final draft is published

ActivityPub and
ArcGIS Online

  • A "follow" activity indicates you want to subscribe to a feed
  • Provides activities to add and remove objects from a collection, could be used to organize objects in the Portal API

Micropub

Social API

Micropub

An API to create posts such as notes, photos, comments, etc.

Enables using third-party apps to post content to your own site

www.w3.org/TR/micropub/
editor's draft: micropub.net

Micropub

Current Status:

  • Working Draft
  • Likely to be finalized later this year
  • Many interoperable implementations
  • Creating posts is stable, read/update/delete is nearly stable

Micropub and
ArcGIS Online

  • As a server: Adding data to a feature service from existing blogging/photo apps
  • As a client: Sharing a map from the ArcGIS iOS app to a blog