Now that the Ogoglio platform is seeing serious improvements in terms of usability and avatar presentation I've been looking ahead to the day when there is a one-click installer which can turn any desktop machine or server into a host for multiple rich social media spaces with many simultaneous users. With the right people creating cheap or free user-oriented creation tools this will radically change the industry and art of online spaces.
However, I can't help but feel that it's the prelude to the real story, in which these islands are joined to form something else entirely. I remain dedicated to the goal of a global network of interconnected spaces which foster a community of creative collaboration and which can be encouraged to emerge using the lessons we're learning from the new understanding of civil planning and architecture on this newly networked Earth. Along those lines I've been tinkering with ideas about how to use the web to interconnect Ogoglio spaces using a combination of massive automated discovery and action based valuation.
Starting from the painful lessons we're learning from Google's PageRank, watching the blossoming culture around apps which communicate with mDNS, and finding a fascinating standing wave of conversation among twitterers, I believe that we have the technical and social foundations on which to base Ogoglio City.
Relevant patterns:
dynamic local discovery: The ability for software to find software running nearby in terms of network topology.
manual linking: The ability for a person to indicate that a place in a space should lead to another place in another space.
automated crawling: The ability for software to expose links and content to other software which collects, analyzes and provides search functions.
global reference: an Ogoglio space has a unique URL, as does every user, coordinate, and thing in that space
A rough draft:
Right now you can manually create doors which hold URLs to remote spaces and on the pages containing spaces link via HTML. Public Ogoglio spaces make their contents public via crawl-able XML, and in fact this is the primary form of communication of that information to Ogoglio clients. This XML includes the text descriptions of the things and people in a space, as well as the names, position and outward links of all doors.
Assume that in the near future every Ogoglio server MAY publish its spaces over mDNS and also MAY create a space which is filled with doors to spaces automatically discovered via mDNS. Each multicast locale becomes a fully connected graph of spaces. These interconnection spaces are crawl-able using the same mechanism as any other space, so long lived services will make their way into the crawl indices and may be ranked using identical ranking algorithms which are used with any other hypertexts.
I put this out as a question as much as an answer. What am I missing?
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