Overview
Open Connections is an open, distributed system for connecting the profiles of people and organizations. The primary goal is to build a foundation upon which anyone can interact with any application or website in a social manner, without going through a gatekeeper. A secondary goal is to end the era of corporate ownership of private profile data and communications content.
Open Connections is both a protocol and an open source implementation. The protocol is based on the principles of REST and incorporates some of the leading open protocols in this space, including OAuth 2.0. The first implementation will be open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license to encourage adoption and experimentation. The draft protocol, once finalized, will be submitted to a standards body assuming there is sufficient interest and momentum.
The system itself is not a social network. It is a way of linking profiles in a privacy conscious fashion, with enough machinery to support a basic infrastructure of messaging, posting, and sharing. These are the building blocks of social applications and they are features that users have come to expect. What we think of as social networks today will be merely social applications that provide views into the graph of open social data. The landscape of social applications will become democratized. A new era of competition will bring the best applications to the forefront and provide an ecosystem where they can thrive.