[Ocs] OCS idea: Social product & service networks

[Josef Spillner]

Hello,

Yesterday, I was thinking on the train back from the OCS sprint about these 
jokes we made about the possible real-world implications of OCS. The scope of 
both social networks and software stores extends indeed to the real world in 
some cases.

There are some social networks in which persons offer human services (e.g. 
consulting services), technical services (e.g. travel booking) or products 
(e.g. ananas) in a structured way.
As I'm looking into an OCS-compliant RESTful API to Noosfero, a framework for 
such social networks, it appeared to me that we may handle this by 
interpreting the "content" on a slightly more abstract level.

For example, cirandas.net is a vivid Brazilian Noosfero instance in which 
entrepreneurs can found companies and trade their products, which apparently 
can be modelled in OCS already except that there won't be a download link. The 
network also lists real shops which sell the products, which cannot be 
modelled at the moment.
However, what can be modelled are downloads of files which describe in some 
domain-specific language the characteristics of the products and services.

Another example is my own crowdserving.com, which is not a production network 
but rather a showcase for academic stuff related to the collaborative Internet 
of Services.

It might be too weird and too much of a change for 2.0, but nevertheless an 
interesting thought exercise if social product and service interactions (think 
also marketplaces for used products like eBay) could be integrated into the 
desktop and fused with sharing of digital goods.

Josef