So far it's just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

Marc Canter believes that the "dashboard" is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter's proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it's the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that's really the meat of his proposal. He says he's working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends' new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media - this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you've posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists - you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what's public, what's private, what's viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your "social graph" aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

DiSo Dashboard Outline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: outline diso)

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren't figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

We spotted an interesting screencast in the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech, that explains distributed social networking more.

Distributed Social Networking - An Introduction from pixelsebi on Vimeo.

The screencast was created by Sebastian Küpers, an Open Web and Virtual Worlds Evangelist from Germany. He starts by explaining that profiles are a building block of social networks - for example there's a lot of useful profile data in his Facebook account that he'd like to use elsewhere. Friends/contacts, messaging, groups, and activity streams are other building blocks of social networks, explained Sebastian.

He mentioned two projects that are aiming to create distributed social networks by using open standards - DiSo Project (our coverage here and here) and Noserub (a German app). DiSo is basically an umbrella project for many of the leading open standards in the social Web currently - microformats, OpenID, OAuth and more. Noserub describes itself as a "protocol" and uses standards like OpenID, RSS and FOAF.

Sebastian outlined the following use case: if you are a MySpace user and want to add someone who isn't a MySpace user to your friends list, right now you can't. But if MySpace supported the open standards that Noserub, DiSo and others are advocating (microformats, OpenID, etc), then it would be possible for MySpace to support that scenario.

Key Differences Between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect

One question that people have about distributed social networks, which Sebastian might like to address in a future screencast, is what is the relation between open source projects like DiSo and Noserub, and 'open data' projects of the bigcos such as Google's OpenSocial and Facebook Connect? Chris Messina, one of the founders of DiSo, pointed out one key difference in DiSo's Google Group in June:

"Our model is rather different than OpenSocial as I understand it, as we're trying to architect this in such a way that anyone can host their own friends list (for example) and not necessarily defer to Google, MySpace, etc... for starters."

So for DiSo, they are using the Wordpress blogging platform as their main vehicle for now. However in the same message, Chris mentioned that he's "personally very interested in the overlap between DiSo and fbConnect and OpenSocial." See also Marc Canter's comments on DiSo, because Marc's "open mesh" theories are very relevant here.

If Everything is So Open, Why Can't We Connect Yet?

There is confusion right now because all the commercial vendors are positioning themselves as open - yet they don't necessarily connect to each other! For example Google has been using the term "Open Stack" to explain what OpenSocial is doing. OpenSocial is still in development and it's important to point out that Google doesn't 'own' it, although it is obviously driving it. But OpenSocial isn't being used by key players like Facebook and Microsoft; and when it is being used by bigcos it can be buggy - a RWW commenter recently remarked that MySpace's OpenSocial implementation is "incredibly buggy". So the fact that all of the main pieces of the distributed social networking puzzle are still in beta, goes some way to explaining why ordinary people can't connect many of their profiles just yet.

We'd like to get some more feedback on distributed social networks in the comments - how would you explain the key differences between DiSo/Noserub and OpenSocial/fbConnect to people? How do you see all the different projects connecting together eventually?

Note: the idea for this post came from the ReadWriteWeb Friendfeed room, The Future of Tech. Thanks to Sebastian Küpers for posting it. If you're want to inspire the RWW crew to write posts on certain topics, our Friendfeed room is a great place to let us know! Thanks also Zee for managing that room for us.

Now that there are millions upon millions of dollars in play, is Automattic moving toward a strategy that will prioritize growing its own market share far beyond (and sometimes at the expense of) a broader vision of user-centric social networking?

BuddyPress is a social networking framework built on top of WordPress code and is seen put to use well at ChickSpeak, a social network for hot, vapid sorority "chicks." It's a solid social networking code base but doesn't attempt to solve the fundamental problem with social networks: silos. ("Get me out of LinkedIn and onto ChickSpeak!" the suits are shouting silently.)

Distributed social networking advocates are working to create bridges between different networks so you can take your data from one to the other and back again. Drupal to MySpace to Ning.

There's a world of opportunities for niche social networks to augment the big town squares of Facebook and MySpace, to break off from general communication into focused conversations with like-minded people around a particular topic.

Distributed Visions

David Recordon, associated with both SixApart and the OpenID Foundation but apparently commenting independently on TechCrunch, had the following reaction [excerpted] to the news:

"It is certainly interesting though that they chose to purchase BuddyPress versus working with the DiSo project to build distributed social networks. While the BuddyPress.com site is now just an Automattic logo (not really a good start for “Open and Free”), it seems that BuddyPress is actually more like Movable Type Community Solution –which powers sites like Boing Boing– and thus is being incorrectly described as “distributed social networking”.

I completely agree distributed social networking is great for blogging and great for the web. I truly hope to see Automattic engage the community that has already started creating and shipping this stuff instead of forgetting that it exists."

How's it going to go when the rubber hits the road? Only time will tell.