Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

OpenID in the mobile browser please

David Recordon wrote up the concept of OpenID in the browser. Yes in the browser not on the browser.

Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well (Chris Messina was quite influential in my thinking about it this way). In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID.

Its not a new concept, as David actually points out.

OpenID for Flock is an add-on that polishes previous attempts of putting OpenID into a browser. While the user experience and graphics are quite a bit better than what I helped build at VeriSign, it's lacking the features that help prevent phishing (making sure you're actually logging into your OpenID provider versus a phishing site that looks like it) which is a bit surprising given Vidoop's involvement. That said, OpenID for Flock is Open Source as part of a project dubbed IDentity in the Browser (IDIB) which the same cannot be said for either Sxipper or VeriSign's OpenID Seatbelt. Given that IDIB is Open Source and already written as a Flock add-on, I'd certainly expect to see it ported to FireFox and there be far more community support of it compared to the other add-ons.

I've been a user of VeriSign's OpenID Seatbeat from day one. Its been super useful but isn't very user friendly. It also does weird things when you open another window. But generally the concept is sound. What I really want is OpenID in the mobile browser, that's even more critical that the desktop browser in my mind.

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First major casuality in the microblogging sphere, goodbye pownce

Woke up today to this.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

I didn't use Pownce that much, it was just one of the end points on my ping.FM sends and never really logged in but I did monitor the emails. I didn't know I had 82 friends requests! Data portability wise, i'm glad to see the ability to take your data with you, in XML/RSS too which is good. I never uploaded any media, so have no idea how it deals with those things. Goodbye Pownce, its been fun but Twitter is growing in strength and with open source solutions like indenti.ca poping up all over the place now. I won't be surprised if plurk and a couple others follow suite soon.

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Social Mediaflows with Tarpipe

A friend of mine Mike Lott sent me a link to lifehacker where they talk about Tarpipe.

Tarpipe streamlines your updates to various social web sites, creating simple or complex workflows to update several buckets in one fell swoop. Let's say you want to do something simple like upload a new picture to Flickr and then tweet about it on Twitter. Normally you'd need to upload the photo to Flickr, find the URL of the pic, run it through some sort of URL shrinker, and then update your Twitter account with the shrunken link to the Flickr page. It may not seem like all that much work, but Tarpipe can tackle this entire process in one step—all you have to do is send one email.

Tarpipe creates custom email addresses that, when emailed, run through a pre-defined set of actions to update any service you define. Creating a custom workflow will look very familiar if you've ever used Yahoo Pipes, but rather than creating custom RSS feeds like Pipes, Tarpipes creates custom social media workflows. The site supports integration with Pownce, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Tumblr, Plurk, Evernote, Delicious, TinyURL, FriendFeed, Twitter, and tons more, so if you use more than one of these sites, Tarpipe could come in really handy.

And seriously…

I've not been so excited since Ping.FM (no Pixelpipe didn't excite me).

These guys have done everything correct like ping.fm. Every chance they have to use Oauth for authentication – there using it, OpenID is the default way to join up and get a account and they support everything from Twitter to Indeti.ca. The use of email to control everything is a little odd, but there is support for a API. I'm sure Instant messenger and other methods are not far behind. Most of you already know I favor pipeline interfaces for complex operations and until now I've been pining my hopes on Conduit which supports much more services but is really a syncing application rather that a Pipelining application. Anyway, I've only played with tarpipe for a few minutes, so I'll hopefully have more to say and show once I get going tomorrow.

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Twittergrader, at long last…

So after all the fuss about twitter rank, someone else has build a popularity contest which is starting to make the rounds on Twitter. Twittergrader is like twitter rank but (and this is the important part) doesn't require your twitter password. Twitter elite is the popularity part and interestingly enough it also does it per city. So although someone like myself will never be able to rank among the Scoble's, Lapour's, etc. In London I was in the top 10 believe it or not (not bad for a man who's not a big fan of twitter). In Manchester i'm number one, but like I said before I don't really care about popularity contests. Search is well search based around people and rankings. The twittergrader badge shows your own rank and points you to people you might also find interesting to follow. Generally the whole service is actually not bad, specially since no private information has to be given. Other services take note, this is a meme which you can't shake.

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Bristol crowned European City of the Year?

I'm in the European city of the year for the weekend. No thats not a invite to break into my Manchester Pad but a interesting fact I picked up from the local paper (the evening post) today. I can't work out if this is the same award as the European Green City award which Bristol is also in the line-up for. Either way, congrats Bristol, you even beat out my current Home Manchester which does need some work doing on it in some areas. Bristol is a great city, don't get me wrong. Its got everything but I just wish it was bigger and had more tech/internet jobs. Between HP research Labs, University of West England (UWE) and the watershed, you could imagine some very cool things happening but generally it seems quite slow. But hey thats a outsiders point of view looking inwards, I maybe be very wrong.

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Amplified or are some people tone deaf?

So I attended Amplified 2008 at Nesta yesterday. It was a interesting event for many reasons, but I had one burning question.

As expected it was like a mini BarCamp but over 4 hours. Yes only 4 hours. This was certainly not your democratic barcamp structure where everyone was expected to talk or our at least given the opportunity to talk. Instead the Nesta offices were split up into 9 areas and there was enough room for 3x 45min talks with tons of time for breaks between. So yes in total there were 27 slots for a room of about 80 (I think). I thought this is so weird that I might not give a talk at all because I'm sure there will be fighting for places. Most people were happy to just check out stuff with there two ears. But after the first session I went to (the future of the book) I got frustrated by one of the organisers who cut the session dead because time was out. The conversation was going toward something interest and for it to die flat like that, we deserved another session. So walked to the board and thought of something which would attract peoples imagination.

I'm a pirate and what are you going to do about it? It was a late entry on the board but we still gathered a crowd of about 12. Before long we were admitting to each about our darknet collections and ways of getting more stuff. We went in that angle and came out thinking about ways the licensing should change for the good of the commons and industry. It was a good idea, had wished I had put it on there earlier and I didn't have to miss all the other sessions which were on at the same time.

The last session was me working with Nicole in her session about a match making agency for entrepreneurs and developers. Nicole with a bit of prompting did write a ton of notes down on her moblog, so I won't go into a ton of detail. Anyway I think its a good idea and most people agree, but as we already know its about the way its done.

After a final wrap session where everyone had to say one word which they we thinking and that was pretty much it. Thanks now bugger off to the pub around the corner. My one word was BarCamp. Why? Because I don't understand lots of these people would come to Amplified but never a BarCamp. Everyone seemed to enjoy the format, although you could tell people were not happy about the general room noise during slots, specially whoevers idea it was to put four talks in the same room with no barriers! sometimes people were shouting over each other to be heard and that's worst that BarCampBerlin3.

There were lots people who I've never seen at a BarCamp before and I wonder why? Is it because there community driven, BarCamp is associated with different circles, the event was arranged by Nesta, they never heard of BarCamp? It weird at a time when BarCamps are blowing up all over the place were not attracting some of these people along too. I'm sure they would totally dig it. I'm not taking anything away from the Nesta Team, they did a great job. I guess I like the idea of us not having to wait for the big names to run such events for us. We the people can self organise and setup things ourselves. Nesta and others can help but don't need to own it.

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Drm, simply say no

apple display

Another reason not to buy a apple laptop me thinks.

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)—you can't live with it, but you practically can't buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple's new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

And in other news Blu-Ray has been cracked again…. so the endless war looms onwards.

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Rich Kid Poor Kid

Channel4's Cutting Edge documentary Rich Kid Poor Kid was quite something. I only heard about it from a comment someone made. Generally the idea of the show was to question two kids who live on the same street in South London, about there lives. One lives in a nice leafy area with 6 bedroom houses and goes to private school, the other lives in a council house and left school at 15. Then bring them together and see what happens.

It is a winning formula but there was something quite humbling about the fact these girls could get on, share experiences and find a certain amount of respect for each other. Its something I really believe in, once people come in contact with each other its really hard for them to hold there sometimes extreme views. So in this example the rich girls views on kids that don't go to private school starts to soften after meeting the poor girl. In the face of all the BNP stuff earlier in the week, its refreshing to think we can and will get along the more time we all spend together.

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Things have gone a bit wrong

Ok need to keep this short because I'm typing on the small keyboard of the acer aspire. Its ok for my fat fingers but certainly not like my lovely dell keyboard or even better my ibm keyboard at home.

So I tried to do a few things over the last few days, and maybe wrongly rushed them.

  1. I did change the partition on my old dell using the live ubuntu 8.10 cd. Everything worked but i over wrote the master boot record and had to install grub again. My idea of booting into xbmc from the media direct button is put on hold for now.
  2. I also somehow while playing with resolutions and multiple screens during a video conference call yesterday, killed my xorg.configue settings and can't seem to get them back to a state where I can actual login to ubuntu. So i'm currently backing everything up (something i should have done when doing the partitions really) ready for a clean install of ubuntu 8.10 tomorrow. This means little email, twittering, etc for the next few days sorry.
  3. I decided to upgrade the ram on both the dell and acer. The dell now has 4gig and the acer 1.5gig. It took me 5mins to do the dell and a best part of a hour to do the Acer. I filmed it which I'll put on online later

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So I bought one… Acer Aspire A110L

150 pounds from Comet in White City, Manchester. The box was opened so I got a discount. Otherwise the machine is brand new. Its the basic model with Linux, 8gig Solid state drive and only 512meg of Ram. I'm expecting once I do the 4gig upgrade on my Dell to pass on the memory to this machine, then maybe stick in a small bluetooth dongle. I'm also checking out how to get ubuntu or xubuntu on it. But generally I'm planning to use this device for im, rss reading, ebooks and general web use.

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