2012/OpenFollow

 OpenFollow  was a session at IndieWebCamp 2012.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/indiewebcamp-openfollow

When: 2012-182 15:00

discover a person on multiple services.

similar to pinterest example of asking you if want to follow your Facebook friends on pintrest, it sends you to facebook for OAuth & permission, and then you discover them on the same service.

Evan would like to see something like this on all services, not tied to a big corporate entity like facebook — the promise of the indie web! and the dream of the '90s is alive in portland!

audrey suggests if everyone did rel="me" on their identity web pages, much of this could already be taken care of by just going to their identity site and seeing where else they are under which user-name/identity.


 * Gravatar profiles e.g. https://en.gravatar.com/evanprodromou
 * rel=me spidering starting from a known set of friends, like the people you follow on twitter
 * Dedicated service with an API
 * By email address (hashed)
 * By phone number (hashed)
 * By Facebook
 * By Twitter

Hubs could query "peer" hubs for information before crawling, keep track of who has the most recent crawl, only re-process when needed

evan's evil genius plan - pubsubhub (publish so friends can subscribe from a central hub), and donp lobbies hard for it to have an on-going spidering feature to constantly search for friends you're looking for.

Ongoing updates

Example: I follow @benward on Twitter, but he doesn't have an indieweb site (results are empty).

Later he gets one.

I get an update -- "Your friend @benward now has an indieweb site, follow him at benward.me!"