Interview with Robert Mao on His Open Portable Social Networks

Written by Tangos on March 10, 2008
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Robert Mao works in Microsoft in Europe. Prior to it, he was founder of UUZone, one of the first social network websites in China but entered into dead pool in last year. He is now working on a hobby project called OPSN, which stands for Open Portable Social Networks. In last week, he made a presentation about this project on BlogTalk 2008. We recently conducted a short interview with him to talk about his OPSN project.

Disclaimer by Robert Mao: The views expressed here are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Would you please introduce your OPSN project briefly?

OPSN stands for Open Portable Social Network, it’s just a experimental solution and prototype in the direction of Social Network portability. OPSN is a very simple solution, it only intend to solve very few problem in the huge social network clouds, it’s just like a piece of jigsaws.

It will be better to read more about social network portability to understand OPSN better. My slides for BlogTalk 2008 can be view here, and I made a quick and dirty screencast for the prototype, it’s on Youtube. I also created a site and related groups for it, though the update will be slow.

OPSN is NOT an official Microsoft project, it’s just my hobby project. As many nice companies do, we are free to do some interesting research or experiments during our spare time. I only spend very little time on OPSN project, so the progress will be slow but keep on the track.

What makes you decide to work on this project?

Social network portability is become a common issue for the users. All today’s SNS are walled gardens, this bring users quite a few troubles: how many times you are asked to join yet another SNS? How many times you have to re-invite your friends again and again? Too many SNS is becoming annoy instead of bring the fun of be social online.

What the advantages or unique features of OPSN?

OPSN is just a simple prototype for proof of the idea. Social network portability is not something purely about the technology or advantages, or even features, it’s a kind of user’s wants and needs, the problem in this area is not really that technical.

As a experimental project, the main purpose is proof of the idea, and use as a prototype to test, experience and discover the hidden problems or issues in the social network portabilities.

One advantage of the design of OPSN is, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, I try to adopt the existing technology into it. It’s a decentralized solution, I believe that’s the real trend of the future.

What you have done and which your plan on OPSN in near future?

So far, just a simple prototype written with Microsoft ASP.NET MVC (CTP). I will continue work on oAuth support in the next stage. Again, since it’s a bobby project, there is no clear plan on the future. :)

Do you think decentralized social networks will be the trends? if yes, how will this trends influence the SNS sector in China?

I believe the decentralization and data portability will be the trend, it’s a trend from the customers side, not from the service providers’ side, so it’s hard to say how this trend goes in the near future.

I don’t think this will influence anything in Chinese SNS sector in the near term. The social network portability is still a very geek style talk and tries today, it’s a long way to go to turn it into anything real.



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One Response to “Interview with Robert Mao on His Open Portable Social Networks”

  1. Interview with Robert Mao on His Open Portable Social Networks on March 11th, 2008 12:28 am

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