Just Bru

In august 2004 I remember a very nice dinner in Amsterdam hosted by Marc Canter.
During the dinner, Marc explained this cool new company who was taking on where FOAF "left" (or well, this is what I remember from that evening) as in trying to develop and push an identity management infrastructure enabling users to keep control of all their identity data and at the same time get maximum advantage from services using this new technology. The company name is Sxip. The protocol is SXIP and the infrastructure is sxip. But I may be wrong :)

Anyway, little I've heard since then about the whole thing, except for an authentication module for Drupal and the occasional blog post here and there (of course I may have been a little distracted too :) ). Similarly, typekey, 6A's own authentication system and, I thought, a potential concurrent of sxip, settled as a standard, but with little or no penetration of the world "outside" 6A (typepad, movable type and livejournal).

Now suddenly, I saw the logo back in an e-tech picture and then this post about sxore, the new commenting system powered by sxip.
They're promoting it as:

sxore is an identity and reputation system for blog authors, readers and commenters. By acting as an intermediary between blog posts and comments, sxore provides a framework of identity for participants in the blog dialog. At its simplest, this framework stops comment spam by requiring commenters to prove that they're not automated spam bots, and by providing moderation tools to blog authors. At a more sophisticated level, sxore enhances blog quality and enriches the blog dialog by applying the principals of Identity 2.0 and the technology of the sxip identity architecture (based on the SXIP Protocol) to provide authors and commenters with personas relevant to their blog interactions.

From what I see it is "just" a glorified comment system. Which is good, of course, but not really revolutionary.
They put a strong accent on identity management as in "stopping spam" and "gaining a reputation", which is great, of course... but made me realize that the most widespread "reputation system" in use at the moment is probably gravatar, which adds no real identity enforcement to the blog (so no anti-spam facilities here), but on the other hand is really immediate, easy to setup and adds eye-candy cool pictures of your friends all over, which is quite appealing.

Now, going back to sxip, what would be really revolutionary (and this kind of architecture has the potential to do it) would be to foster conversation tracking across blogs, comments, wikis and social software in general. This happens also to be the graal of the moment, with players like the evergreen technorati, del.icio.us, but also new comers like digg and cocomment.
The nice thing is that, since sxip is a distributed architecture, every user could actually choose her favorite Homesite where to store all data... and this could range from a blog hosting company, to a social bookmarking site to, eventually, the user's own main blog/website (thus making all "give my data back" geeks happy, me first).

Roughly, it could work like this: suppose Alice comes to Bob's blog and she wants to leave a message. Bob's blog will ask for authentication and let Alice sxip in and comment through sxore (so sxore will know about the comment).
Similarly, suppose that Alice now wants to answer Bob's post with a post on her own blog. Alice can just log into her own sxore-powered blog (and this is the missing piece at the moment) and write the post. Sxore will know about this too and, as a bonus, can also track the relationship and "trust" between Alice and Bob based on the number of links, relationship tags (XFN), and comments between the two.

If anybody out there is looking for the next killer app to develop, please suits yourself.

Quick update: I just signed in sxore to peek at the look'n'feel. Signing in actually was not exactly "natural", but somehow I made it and finally I got in.
First thing I discovered is that Movable Type is not a supported blog engine at the moment (only wordpress is), so I registered Giocolando (my Italian blog), which is wordpress based, and downloaded the plugin. The installation is pretty straightforward, you just have to unpack, activate it through the web admin interface and insert a code provided by the sxore website. The disturbing thing that happens immediately after is that the blog appears to hang for a while, probably while sxore sucks RSS data in and sets up the service.
Even more annoying is the fact that nothing seems to change afterward :)
Probably it depends from the fact that I'm using a cutting edge installation of wordpress, but as I leave comments on the blog nothing happens on the sxore dashboard (if you want to see a working example of sxore, you can head to the Identity 2.0 blog).
Aside from this, now I've a perfectly neat and polished hud where I should be able to manage incoming comments, whitelists, blacklists, full with RSS feeds of the whole thing and a nicely guessed icon of mine grabbed from either flickr, gravatar or whatever :)

P.S.: If you want to play with the sxip architecture, here you'll find development kits for both Membersites (site "client side" of the architecture) and Homesites (the "server side"), as well as a sxip authentication module for MediaWiki.

• Posted in BlogTools,Knowledge Management,MetaBlogging
• Tags: blogosphere,blogTools,conversations,gravatar,identity 2.0,livejournal,Marc Canter,movable type,reputation,semantic web,sixapart,sxip,sxore,typepad
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