Swimming Upstream: 'Salmon,' Google's Open Source Social Web Aggregator

Google engineers and the open source community have begun laying the groundwork to support an open social Web. The group has been working on a protocol that would aggregate conversations at the source, bring them back to any Web site related to the stream, and avoid spam and duplicate posts as well.

The Salmon protocol aims to connect social networks that today cannot share posts and information. The goal to syndicate and aggregate conversations related to the original post that live in silos across the Internet would create what Google calls a social graph.

People want to choose tools to create, post, and publish social media. Salmon would allow that to happen. Today, individual sites like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz have tools to pull in content from a number of different sources, but the protocol allows decentralized comments to post back to the source in real-time. Web sites will have an option to embed the comment stream on any specific topic.

While conversations drive engagement and interaction, the comments in social sites remain fragmented, redundant and fractured. Salmon makes it possible to join the conversations in one stream, explains John Panzer, Google engineer, who heads the Salmon protocol project. "You can end up with four or five different places where conversations happen and none of them know about the others," he says.

Panzer likens the protocol to salmon swimming upstream. He describes comments as little salmon swimming back up the syndication stream to the home source. "The happy comments swim back upstream to spawn new comments and conversations before they are sent back downstream," he says. "It's the cycle of life."

The Salmon protocol isn't available yet. The proposal and prototype code demonstrating proof of concept could move into the test phase shortly, Panzer says. The group continues to put the finishing touches on the code. Once that's complete, Salmon could move to a site where developers would test the code.

Talks are underway with StatusNet, a microblogging company whose engineers are active on the Salmon protocol mailing list, to provide testing on a site. Panzer hopes testing will begin soon, as StatusNet has already begun to integrate parts of Salmon into an experimental site.

The goal to enable social networks to participate in Salmon would also move the code into Google Buzz, an integration that Andy Beard, search engine optimization (SEO) professional, believes will happen sooner rather than later. Beard says content aggregators have not been effective in the past, but "Salmon could change the way people communicate across the social Web."

Salmon will support open protocols and standards to make it easy to operate with Buzz, which Reliable-SEO Founder David Harry and SEOPros Founder Terry Van Horne say already supports PubSubHubBub to make real-time feed syndication happen.

Buzz, Google's Gmail social network add-on, also supports the ability to pull in standard-format feeds like RSS/Atom from third-party sites. And it produces a public-data feed that anyone can pull in and use.

Think Google Buzz. Marketers will have an option to take the conversation to any Web site. Salmon would allow marketers to seed content to destinations or communities and feed the content across the Web back to the company's Web site, according to Chris Messina, an open Web advocate at Google. "Some people want to consume content and participate in commenting, but may not have the tools," he says. "If they're in Google Reader or another feed reader that doesn't have the ability to comment built in, they may not bother to participate."

While Salmon may give companies an instant audience, it also provides a security signature to prevent spam and duplicate posts. Messina says blogs support trackbacks, or pingbacks -- a method originally created in hopes of allowing the blogs to host distributed conversations, failed in the sense that they cannot verify authentic comments. Salmon relies on a digital signature built into the protocol to validate posts.

Messina says one challenge in implementing the protocol remains addressing economic arguments supporting the technology to get people to adopt it faster.

One application did have some of the features being built into Salmon. FriendFeed, which Facebook acquired last year, let people pull in feeds on a specific topic from across the Web into one location in the application. But people often complained that FriendFeed did not give content creators or people following the posts the proper tools that aggregate content, although the platform had great features to provide comments and posts, according to Panzer.

1 comment about "Swimming Upstream: 'Salmon,' Google's Open Source Social Web Aggregator".
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  1. Jonathan Mirow from BroadbandVideo, Inc., March 3, 2010 at 11:38 a.m.

    Sounds fishy to me. "The happy comments swim back upstream to spawn new comments and conversations before they are sent back downstream," he says. "It's the cycle of life." Ummm, too much Lion King soundtrack and not enough time interacting with real people I'm thinking. Try Match.com or something. Quick.

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