"Liking" webcontent on tent apps

[Nygu]

Something that popped right into my mind the other day:

Facebook and Twitter are located at a single webadress. Because of this simple fact, they have been able to make a like-button for external use that checks for a login at facebook.com/twitter.com.

Once you start spreading a social network over multiple servers, this is no longer possible, unless you allow the user to set a (default) webapp for the like-button (a path to the site you are logged into). There has been some discussion on this issue over at Diaspora.

My question to the Tent developers is: have you had any thought about a unified like-button for external use that works with all tent apps? I feel that this is something that should be addressed in the protocol instead of letting each app create their own like-button.

[danielsiders]

Yep--We're working on "sign in with Tent", "follow me on Tent", etc all of which address the same issues. They will be addressed in the protocol and documentation (both of which will be heavily updated soon with the release of the reference server implementation).

[Nygu]

<333

By the way, my name is Kevin Kleinman. We've met online a couple of days ago. So now you know. ;-)

[danielsiders]

So we have! Hello, Kevin. Welcome to Tent!

[navarr]

I'm curious about how you plan to do so de-centralized.

My first thought is to use a browser extension that extends the page's javascript api with a fallback to using a centralized server as a gateway to the decentralized web.

[Nygu]

I believe that is what has been done for Diaspora by a third-party developer, as a prototype. However, that still requires a central server to process all likes and without getting anything in return.

So I think that the like buttons should work the way they already do for other social networks, with the exception that you need to manually fill in the address of your social app. Instead of a one-click system, this would make it a two click system, where you click the icon and then get an address-field in case you haven't filled it out yet. Slightly more complicated; hell of a lot more practical.

[jonasschneider]

This is part of a bigger problem; if this is solved, Tent could instantly be used as a SSO system like OpenID.

[joakim]

Have you considered WebIntents? Not a solution in itself, but it should help with de-centralization.

Update 2013-09-24 (to avoid bumping this dormant issue to the top of the list..) The Web Intents project has been shelved and a W3C Working Group Note created to document the results of the experiment.

As with all shelving (and Notes) the WG may decide to resume this work at any time with the current or a revised approach.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013AprJun/0751.html

[jonasschneider]

Let's rename it to WebInTents, hrhr ;)

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Joakim Stai notifications@github.comwrote:

Have you considered WebIntents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Intents? Not a solution in itself, but it should help with de-centralization.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues/44#issuecomment-8456934.

[sull]

The protocol should be generic in how it names and stores a key:value related to simple social actions such as "like". in other words, the word "like" should be defined by each server instance, not the protocol. Maybe it makes sense to have a sliding scale applied here as well... so the protocol can support positive, neutral and negative inputs. This will allow for useful analytic algorithms etc.

This is a more complex topic than it may seem on the surface. Its easy to think that a simple "like" button is just something you stick on and be done with it, but there are deeper effects and doing this right way will have much more of a benefit. More discussion is needed.