Category: xml and web 2.0

Is federated microblogging this easy?

everything you need for decentralised Twitter?

I’m wondering if I should bite the bullet and install these alpha and beta plugins under Cubicgarden.com? In my mind it seems what you need for a federated/distributed blogging system is just a few plugins away?

OStatus for WordPress turns your blog into a federated social network. This means you can share and talk to everyone using the OStatus protocol, including users of Status.net/Identi.ca and WordPress.com

WhisperFollow turns your wordpress blog into a federated social web client.
In it’s current form it aggregates RSS feeds in a page on your blog called “following” which it creates.
The links it aggregates are the ones from your blogroll with rss feed data.

And many more…

These would be a good time to have a duplicate setup of cubicgarden.com to test these and many more plug-ins out on..

Could Rebelmouse be used in distributed dating?

There is something which has been in the back of my mind for ages. Its the concept of distributed and dating.

It drives me crazy to see how closed the online dating world is and even if one breaks the glass, there sharply put out of business or bought. Wheres the innovation, really? I already wrote my rough idea which I believe could change the way online dating is done for the better (I won’t even point out how useful the Okcupid journals are)

On top of that is the problem of being stuck in a silo or stuck on one platform. Wheres the data portability? Wheres the interchange? Look at whats happening with Twitter and the whole controlling yourself or owning your own words.

Anyway, I was reading my feeds and came across Rebelmouse.

The service bills itself as “Your Social Front Page” and while it currently only offers up the ability to connect Facebook and Twitter to power your Lifestream, it does provide some unique features worth discussing.

So I gave it a try and its not bad, certainly a step in the right direction of what I was proposing with my online dating idea. The problem seems to be is its lack of inputs right now, which there working on. So you can only import from Twitter and Facebook. If they had generic RSS too, that would be great. The best part I like is the ability to control the flow (yes flow rather than creation) of subsets of the data. For example I can set twitter hashtags searches to…

  • save tweets to draft, ignore retweets
  • publish only tweets, not retweets
  • publish tweets and retweets
  • save tweets and retweets to draft
  • save tweets to draft, ignore retweets
  • just show timeline

So you can really craft/curate the page with minimal effort… which means you can’t just insert content unless its coming from somewhere else. Imagine if Facebook or Google+ had the same thing instead of deciding whos going to see it. I would suggest this is the more realistic way to manage a timeline because if its online, everyone sees it anyway (imho). But I digress…

I created one as a test for Perceptive Media…. and you can easily see how I could create one for myself or as a replacement for my dating profile, if I wanted too… So the next stage is to move all the stuff away from a central server and on to my own domain. Something I’ll be looking deeper at in the near future.

Google Now

At Google a lot was announced but one of the other things which didn’t receive much attention was Google Now…

Its deceptive because whats really going on… But if you read the Tim Burners-Lee piece from years ago, where he outlines the semantic web as masses of agents skimming over a universe of rich data (big data).

The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs. The effectiveness of such software agents will increase exponentially as more machine-readable Web content and automated services (including other agents) become available. The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that were not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.

I’m not saying Google just built the first agent. that would be stupid. But what they did do is capture Tim’s vision is a extremely nice way which you can see would be instantly usable for many.

Its easy to see why people write it off as a siri copy but in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Like Perceptive Media, context informs the answer. I’m already seeing this happen on my Google Tasks manager Any.Do. Its looking deep into my calendar, my current phone calls, etc to understand what I want to write a task about. Leo Laporte said Now was creepy but to be honest, if it can truly help me so I don’t need to clog my mind with alternative directions, will I be able to make my appointments, etc. Then I got to say personally thats a good thing.

Demand your data from Google and Facebook

Data Portability logo

Tim Dobson sent me this over twitter for my consideration…

Tim Berners-Lee says demand your data from Google and Facebook…

World wide web inventor says personal data held online could be used to usher in new era of personalised services

Absolutely…

Seems people have forgotten the work which took place during the late 00’s as one of the founders of the Data Portability group (which still exists by the way). The group was made up of quite a few people all over the world and we successfully convinced the likes of Yahoo, Plaxo, Myspace, Google, Facebook, etc to take data portability seriously.

The turning point was when Robert Scoble tried to take his contacts out of Facebook and into Plaxo. Interesting to see Tim Berners-Lee finally getting the point.

Although to be fair he goes much further thinking about a standard way to export data.

Right now both Google and Facebook have export features and each one is very different in structure. I personally regularly export my data from them every month along with my wordpress and others. I find Google’s Data Liberation centre the best because it gives you control across the board, but then again Google do have more data from me. But right now its all just for back up purposes.

The next step which Tim hints at is the ability to transform and import the data in a standardised way. To be honest its something we (data portability group) talked and thought about, but we were maybe a little too early. Now seems about right to think about the interchange of data more than ever.

There has always been space for startups to be brokers and transformers of the data. Someone like ifttt.com could make a killing in this space, specially if they start charging for use of their pipes (something I suggested while doing the xml pipeline stuff). Could make a nice sustainable business

 

Bring your own bucket of photos

A little break from perceptive media, but don’t worry it will be back once we have something solid in that area.

I was intrigued to see two things happen one after another. I’ll have to store this one under the decentralised magic or something.

First Tim sends me a tweet about OpenPhoto which is a decentralised flickr (my words not theres)

The inception of OpenPhoto was a desire to liberate our photos and take back control. Like you, our photos are the most valuable digital files we have. Also like you, we’ve used Flickr, Picasa and Smugmug and wound up with our photos scattered across numerous sites on the web.

So I signed up and will be looking to move my pictures from Flickr to OpenPhoto when the flickr subscription runs out in May. Which reminds me I need to download all my photos using this lovely app on Ubuntu. It requires you to bring your own bucket or storage system. So right now you can either use Amazon S3 or Dropbox

Then almost like magic, Dropbox quietly announced they were doing Google+ like automatic upload of photos to your dropbox account.

Even though the holidays have passed, we’re really stoked to give you guys one more present — a new experimental release! Under the wrapping you’ll find a bunch of new toys, including a brand new Camera Upload feature. Here are the release notes:

• Automatically uploads photos and videos in the background using Wi-Fi or data plan

Together you have a complete solution to sidestep Google’s Picassa, Flickr’s reach and all other solutions. I just hope some of Flickr’s magic has rubbed off on OpenPhoto, as a decentralised Flickr is no easy feat. And I have to wonder how they stay sustainable if the money is going to Dropbox and Amazon.

Update – If OpenPhoto and SpiderOak would work together, I wouldn’t have to move anything at all. Although I’m wondering how permissions work? Wouldn’t want to just hand over my Spideroak authentication, as it has lots of my private backups. However its worth noting SpiderOak does support dropbox-like shares and Oauth, so that could work…

Distributed Social Networking, one day soon?

WordCamp 2011 Bulgaria

This has to be the ultimate standing in social networking. Distributed social networking is going to happen at some point but in the meanwhile, we all have to put up with these crappy social networks.

I read a few things recently which got me thinking about this again… The main one centres around this read write web piece.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new – but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook, Tr.im’s up and down and Twitter’s denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there’s sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

The one which got me writing is the WordPress.com ability to do real-time blogging…

Jabber (XMPP) is an open instant messaging protocol used by millions of people daily. At WordPress.com we use Jabber to instantly deliver new blog posts and comments to subscribers.

It for me is very intriguing… Its a lot more like how Jaiku use to be (I actually wonder what happened to jaiku engine?). The WordPress ability is nice but if they bring the same idea to self hosted wordpress blogs too, now that would be amazing…

Diso the project all about this went quiet back in 2010 it seems, which is a shame.

I fear Matt Mullenweg the great guy that he is, may not be able to provide the ultimate standing. The im.wordpress relies on wordpress.com too much for my liking. It would be great if there was a way to do most of the piping through other distributed means. I’d also love to see the ability to post comments/feedback through im? And why not? You got the persons details, and you can subscribe to the comments, why not replies?

Matt had to said recently in GigaOM

The Internet needs a strong, independent platform for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. I like to think that if we didn’t create WordPress something else that looks a lot like it would exist. I think Open Source is kind of like our Bill of Rights. It’s our Constitution. If we’re not true to that, nothing else matters.

The independent web is growing quite a bit. Although we have these great cloud servers for WordPress, the software that people run and install themselves is still as popular as ever. Our services are bringing more people online, but they’re also bringing more people who want to own their own space on the web–they want to own a house instead of rent an apartment. When we were first starting out, I thought, “Downloading and uploading software, managing databases, no one wants to do that.” But it turns out, a lot of people do.

Lets hope he follows through on that thinking…

Zuckerberg casts doubt on Silicon Valley

Some interesting comments from Mark Zuckerberg recently…

In a rare interview conducted over the weekend at Y Combinator’s Startup Schoool, the brash, young CEO admits he would have stayed on the east coast if he could have his time again.

He said: “If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything.

“In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston.

“But I think that now, knowing more of what I know, I think I might have been able to pull it off. You don’t have to move out here to do this.

“Silicon Valley is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.”

Many others would say he benefited from Silicon Valley’s short-term focused nature and I would agree with that statement. I would like to see if he’s going to now shift Facebook out of the Silicon Valley area? I very much doubt it and that as far as I’m concerned is like moaning about where you live and not lifting a finger to do anything about it…

hindsight is always wonderful…

Although I got to say its a very small victory for other places such as silicon roundabout… Hopefully they will read this as a sign NOT to clone silicon valley

Human insights in the data of Qriously

could the chromebook be googles ipad

Data is a really interesting but you already knew that… I hope…

Qriously insights reminds me of the excellent insights we use to get from OkTrends (okcupid’s blog) before Match.com bought it (wheres the cool insights now then?). In aggregation there are some really amazing things which can be pulled out. Qriously puts the power to ask the questions and define the sample and scope in a very simple way.

I’m hoping to be able to use it at Ignite Leeds to finally decide who should pay on the first date?

More details are due soon… but the Leeds digital festival looks great, well done to Imran and others. Thanks to Monica Tailor too…

Do delicious understand there audience?

I heard that Delicious was relaunching so I thought I’d check it out.

I tried to login and it said there was a problem with my login and password. So after  a series of 404’s and 502’s over 2 days, I finally got my password changed (still don’t know what was wrong with my previous one, as I know it was correct) and was able to finally export my updated bookmarks (I had a older version).

I’ve not really looked back as I’m now with Diigo… Good reddens seriously and I’m not the only one…

Here’s one commenter, Suman, explaining what went wrong via Thomas Vander Wal:

I had a fairly bad experience with the new Delicious today. Just last week I had spent a few hours curating my saved bookmarks and organizing tags. The new Delicious doesn’t seem to know anything about it. All my effort is lost. There is no longer a bulk-edit function to redo my changes. I can no longer manage my tags – could find no option for deleting old tags. Some of my tags with special characters are now broken, I get a 404 when I try to access them. I am done. Goodbye Delicious.

Yes, goodbye delicious, we had fun times in the past but I have no idea what your new owners are up to and to be honest I don’t like it, I’m done!

If this then…. web pipelines are back again?

ifthisthenthat workflow setup for #workbetter tweets

I first read about if this then… on lifehacker today while riding into work on the tram.

If This Then That is a simple to use tool to keep your social networks, to-do lists, RSS feeds, imaging sites, and all your other webapps on the same page.

The core of If This Then That works off of different channels you can use to create your own recipes for sharing by using the basic instruction, “if this, then that.” For instance, you can set it so that if you text message something with a particular hashtag to a specified number, then it will automatically create a note in Evernote. You can also set it to automatically pull your photos off Instagram and save them to Dropbox, send you a text message when you have a Google Calender event, or even send you an email if it’s supposed to rain tomorrow. Provided you’re using one of the 35 different services and webapps currently supported, you can cross-link and integrate them in almost anyway you see fit.

It strikes me as a good stab at what I wrote about in 2006. Pipelines for the web…

That was quite some time ago and I’ve been hoping Conduit would get worked on but things have gone very quiet on that front. Then came along, Ping.FM which was also interesting for slightly different reasons before they got aquired. So I was surprised when I learned about IFTT, so I gave it a try.

So my first pipe or task, useful so I can save links from anywhere just by sending a correctly formatted instant messenger to the right bot.

my first task

I made it into a recipe, then decided to checked out the pre-existing recipes other people have made.

Here’s some of the ones I’m finding interesting…

So right now I’m pretty impressed with iftt but I’m hoping they add even more services soon. Don’t get me wrong the list is pretty huge right now, but I’d like to have some things like NewstoBook, DeskSMS, Top10, Google plus, etc…