What is Social Media Standards?

Social Media Standards is an Open Source and Open Standards initiative to bring consensus to the way social media campaigns are designed, developed, and deployed - and how we maintain and scale them over time.

As Social Media Producers, we've "reinvented the wheel" far too many times - building the same core social functionality into projects running as Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java, .NET, etc applications. We're integrating with an increasing number of external services - who each mandate their own integration strategies. Open Source Standards and new technologies come and go - also being forced into adoption.

By working together we hope to build consensus through cooperation and coordination to help startups, open source projects, interactive agencies and corporations can use to execute their social media strategies.

Our immediate goals are to:

  • Define and mandate industry best-practices standards for privacy, portability, and development and integration
  • Define, build and maintain a core set of open source libraries and applications to work across platforms
    • Define and maintain a base specification for Social Media Applications -- including a standardized database structure , object classes & methods
    • Build core libraries and reference implementations available under BSD/MIT or other 'do as you will' open licenses

Who is Social Media Standards ?

We are startups, interactive & advertising agencies, corporations, non-profits and individual developers who are committed to sharing our knowledge and experiences as we develop social media.

How does Social Media Standards compare to efforts like DataPortability.org ?

Social Media Standards embraces the concepts and technologies involved with Data Portability - how to port information from one Social Media application to another. However we aim to solve a different problem: the internal functionality, architecture and management of the Social Media Applications -- how data is stored, how applications are structured, how objects are related. We hope to support all DataPortability formats and protocols in our APIs, Libraries, Toolkits and Reference Implementations. We think we're a bit closer to IAB in scope, goals and function.

Why not build Social Media Applications using [insert commercial service or open project here] ?

In the past few years, numerous Commercial Services and Open Source projects have sprung up -- offering managed social media services or self-maintained applications. While these offerings are great for those who want their version of 'an exact product', for the majority of business concerns they are either inappropriate or sheer overkill.

  • Corporations and non-profit organizations: a managed solution often violates data/privacy/security policies or established business practices.
  • Brands/agencies: successful social media campaigns are not 'myspace clones', but new features built on some base social functionality.
  • Startups: can't build on 3rd party platforms, open source software is overkill
  • All: Support for platforms is usually limited to one or two languages, which many not be compatible with development resources or mandates.

What are the target platforms for libraries and reference implementations?

We're targeting everything.

Languages & Frameworks

  • Python
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • Ruby
  • Java
  • .NET

Databases

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • SQL Server
  • Oracle

How about some use cases?

These use cases juxtapose the world that we live in, with the world that we want to live in:

The Startup Starts Up

A startup is building the next-generation video/photo/writing social application.

Today: Their first days and weeks are spent working out account & profile management, registration, lostpassword, photouploads & storage.

Tomorrow: Their first hours are spent downloading a Social Media Standards toolkit, which gives them a basic database architecture -- and subclass library models and controllers to enable the selected functionality. Now they can focus on their application logic.

The Startup Grows

The startup grows in popularity, but deployed on a Rapid Development Framework that wasn't designed to scale this big. They keep tossing more hardware at their problem, and know that instead of band-aids they need to refactor and redeploy.

Today: Class by class and function by function, they refactor and migrate their code.

Tomorrow: Their v2 codebase gets a jump-start with libraries and reference implementations for platforms that scale better. Since a standard Database structure is used, the models + controllers are available from Standards, and they can enjoy the collective learnings of the community... redeployment is drastically streamlined.

The Corporation

A corporation is building a private-based social network for internal and client use.

Today: The corporation can't use a managed system because of security/privacy policies and their application needs transcend available open source projects, so they build an internal solution from scratch.

Tomorrow: Most of their needs are covered by libraries and reference implementations, all they do is subclass and extend.

The Agency / Brand

An interactive agency builds a microsite/campaign for a consumer brand. It is expected to peak at 2.5MM users, and is a simple photo-sharing application that superimposes brand products with fun captions. The brand maintains that the system runs on their servers with certain corporation-approved technologies.

Today: The agency tries to salvage what it can from previous projects and internal libraries, but ends up building almost everything from scratch too meet the technical requirements.

Tomorrow: The agency downloads the appropriate toolkits, subclasses and extends.

What are the existing commitments?

FindMeOn.com has committed to release "Open Social Network - In A Box", a subclassable library and reference implementation for Python & PostgreSQL, to serve as starting point.

PHP and MySQL support is being offered by many.

What are the licensing issues? What about joining? How does FindMeOn fit in?

Social Media Standards is a fully open industry association. We expect all code and standards specifications to be released as fully open products under MIT, BSD, and other open licenses. Our vision is for a cross-platform stack of MIT licensed open source material, that allows agencies and startups to build their commercial and open applications on -- simplifying integration, scaling, and porting concerns. We also hope to create and mandate a set of standards for social media legal concerns ( user privacy, data ownership, terms of service), and application architecture and deployment. Commercial interests will be able to build close-source proprietary technology without any concern for licensing implications of the underlying components.

FindMeOn.com is organizing and promoting the working group, and contributing the first round of code as a starting point.

Member Organizations

Want to Join? Get in touch!

Resources