14 DAY TRIAL // The social web is thriving and stabilizing, becoming a powerful force online. But, at this stage, even though there are plenty of social components, sites and services, everything is pretty fragmented with the conversations walled off in various places. Stuff on Facebook stays on Facebook, stuff on Twitter stays on Twitter for the most part, and so on. But that's about to change with a little help from Google, the open source community and inspiration from a very determined fish species.
The Salmon protocol aims to make sharing, one of the most popular and common interactions online, a two-way feature, meaning that information flows from the source to the location of the shared content, but also back again. The idea is to connect social networks and various social services so that the conversation doesn't splinter into several smaller ones and the comments stay centered around the source regardless of where they are coming from.
In practice, someone could share a link to a blog post on Facebook, for example. Other Facebook users would perhaps comment on the story on the site. Normally, the conversation would pick up from there, but stay inside Facebook, with the original author of the post unaware even that someone is discussing about it. With the Salmon protocol, those comments would get back to the blog and show up there too, along others from various other sources.
This is how the protocol got its name as John Panzer, the Google engineer who leads the Salmon project, explains. "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 protocol is in early prototype phase and its backers are currently just laying the foundation and solidifying the concepts. There is some proof-of-concept code coming soon, but that doesn't mean that you'll see Salmon adopted and implemented by the major sites anytime soon. But things are moving fast enough and Google, which is especially interested in the project, let's face it, it's right up its alley, may implement the Salmon protocol in Google Buzz in the not-so-distant future.