Social Networks are pretty big business at the moment, but one thing about them always bugged me. I have two separate networks, one, my offline peeps, guys I went to school with or worked with over the years, that tend to be using Facebook, and the other group my online-peeps, who I tend to interact with via my blog. The first network is already there, but I wanted a way to make use of the second

What I really wanted was a distributed network that let me use my blog to connect to others, so I planned on writing a plugin to do just that.

My plugin would use WordPress as a base. It would follow the regulatory of linking out, of people commenting on my blog and use these to determine whether a site was part of my network.

Once it decided a site was part of my network it would use WordPress’s XML-RPC implementation to contact that blog and ask to be friends and the blog owner would need to agree. I am assuming that the other blog is also using the plugin.

With the blogs connected (automated passwords having been exchanged) we could now share data, all automatically, about who the author is, perhaps a Twitter-esque networking messaging thing, and possibly share search results of common searches to help define what is going on in the network.

The feature I really wanted was one where each blog would share its own network. This would not be displayed to anyone but where several sites have a site in their network, which you did not have in yours, you would receive recommendations.

Finally, you could automate your blogroll, assuming you have one.

I think this sounds pretty interesting and I was all set to start on it when I found out about the DISo project. Their website describes it like this:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

It is all I wanted and more.

There is a video of Chris Messina explaining the DISo Project at Read Write Web. I suggest you take a look.