DiSo for Drupal

29 May 2008

DiSo for Drupal

I had an interesting e-mail exchange yesterday with Chris Messina and a handful of folks from the DiSo project about "DiSo for Drupal". For those of you who haven't heard of it DiSo is:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

See, Chris recently started a new job working on DiSo full-time at Vidoop. With the announcements of Facebook connect and Google's Friend Connect, there is a battle raging for control of your identity and your relationships. DiSo, in many respects, is the free open answer for the rest of the internet. It combines several free, open standards that already exist in the wild like OpenID, OAuth, and Microformats for exchanging identity and "friend" information.

So, Chris reached out a handful of us Drupal folks about getting on board. The good news is: we, the Drupal community, are already well on our way:

OpenID (in Drupal 6.x core)
OpenID Provider : http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider
OpenID Attribute Exchange : http://drupal.org/project/openid_ax (in progress via Google SoC)
OAuth : http://drupal.org/project/oauth
Atom : syndication only - http://drupal.org/project/atom - might be nice to have a basic envelop generator/parser implementation
XMPP : http://drupal.org/project/jabber , http://drupal.org/project/xmpp and http://drupal.org/project/xmpp_server (the latest of which is maybe the most promising)
vCard / hCard : http://drupal.org/project/vcard

The big holes at the moment (from a DiSo perspective) are XRDS-Simple support and better support for microformats - specifically XFN.

From the list of Drupal modules above, you may notice that this is an area of interest of mine :-P I look forward to working with the rest of the DiSo project and the Drupal community on this stuff!

posted 1:13pm:

tags:

Distributed service providers?

by Dan K. (not verified)

May 29, 2008 - 1:51pm

I went to an OAuth talk at MeshU to investigate the potential for OAuth in open-source projects -- especially where the projects act as providers, not consumers. The problem I ran into is that the protocol specifies that consumer applications have to be registered with the providers before individual users of those consumers can log into the provider. So, suppose I make a consumer that can aggregate content, via OAuth, from a bunch of Drupal sites. For each site I want to grab content from, I not only have to authenticate myself using OAuth, but I also have to register the consumer. This thread makes the case for doing things this way. It's a sensible case, but limits the potential for the protocol in my view. I haven't looked into it much further, but am curious whether the OAuth push in Drupal is considering the issue of distributed providers. Anyway, I'm glad to see you're on the case!