Category: xml and web 2.0

Is the BBC talking too much about Twitter?

BBC Technology blog

Answer: No, well maybe… (I've been convincing my friends from Bristol for ages.)

This came up on the Backstage list via (Frank Wales) today along with another actually related topic which I pitched into the list. Seems the BBC might be annoying some people with its talk about twitter. Some have even suggest the BBC setup its own microblogging service.

Obviously I don't speak for the BBC but I thought I'd twitter it and see what comes back. Here's some of the responses.

dogsbodyorg @cubicgarden No idea if it's too much but surely it's better to talk about Twitter (an open company /w API & no ads) than Facebook / Myspace

euan @cubicgarden talking about it as individuals is one thing – appropriating it as an organisation is another

oliciv @cubicgarden I can remember thinking the same thing about Myspace when it was the hot new place to go on the internet and all over the media

lancew @cubicgarden wondering if BBC is obsessing over twitter, maybe they should setup a laconica server for BBC folks?

SoullaStylianou @cubicgarden nope I don't think BBC's mentions of twitter is OTT. Its basically of the moment is it not?

digitalmaverick @cubicgarden i think Twitter is as important as email, so I have no problem with BBC mentioning it lots at the moment

mmetcalfe @cubicgarden I thought the protesters were complaining about the Gaza situation, not a bloody microblogging platform!

So everyone keeps shouting we should setup our own.

I thereby recommend they have a look at laconi.ca. It’s ‘micro-blogging’ software which functions in a very similar manner to twitter, but would allow the BBC to set up their own service, without having to lend commercial support to an entity. It’s also used to power identi.ca – a ‘free’ rival to twitter. They’d have to think of a new name for the service though… what would you call it?

Well I'm happy to say we did. We used Laconi.ca but haven't really made use of it yet. I was also thinking with the change in Jaiku's licensing we should set that up too. The main purpose of the setups was to interop on to and off Twitter and Jaiku at the time plus kill off the internal twitter system Yammer which I'm still not totally convinced about (although others are). At least someone should have told Peter about Yammer.

So whats going to happen? I think as the BBC gets its heads around microblogging it will quickly notice that not only is it somewhat promoting a single startup through its wording but that Microblogging is much bigger and like how we don't host our blogs on wordpress.com, we will want to host it ourselves. There's all type of things we could do with our microblogging system, things which are forbidden on Twitter or even not possible because of the way Twitter is setup. The obvious example is a children's microblogging service. This will resolve its self and it will be the geeks who had a hand in the new bright future of the BBC.

And at the end of the day, some fun.

imran @cubicgarden not only can't the bbc stop talking about twitter, but now the bbc is talking about the bbc talking about twitter /images/emoticons/wink.gif

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The day the cloud rained

Ma.gnolia

In my data portability presentation, I always talk about services going away or changing. But even I hadn't really considered what happens when theres simply data lost. Ma.gnolia was a service I did use briefly between my switch from delicious to evernote and back to delicious. I had a ton of bookmarks on there but only really had 20 or so which were not on delicious or evernote. On top of that, I use a simple cron job to pull down my bookmarks every few weeks. However even this method isn't perfect as I sometimes have my laptop offline when the time comes around for the next backup. I really should move the cron job to my download machine which is always on and connected to the net.

Anyway I was lucky, I was reading stories earlier in the month from people who couldn't trust online services again with there data. I hope over time they will find ways of trusting services but I totally see the need for more services/apps which offer simple backup solutions. For example Conduit could be perfectly placed for this type usage, if there was more providers and generic hooks. The other solution is to simply have your data running through many services. One goes down and looses everything, another can be pulled upon to get the data back. Actually Ma.gonlia is using Friendfeed to recover some of its data, so it may sound slightly crazy but its already happening. Right now my microblogging activities are aggreagated over about 4 different services including twitter, identi.ca, Jaiku and Ping.fm. My RSS reading is still all on Newsgator but I'm planning a cron job for the APML (one of the things i'm missing from ma.gnolia) and OPML. Plus I have Newsgator offline clients on 2 phones, 1 ipod and 2 computers.

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RSS almost completely covered

I have Newsgator on almost every device I own, which is great because the syncing feature means I never end up reading the same news again and again. Except there's one problem, I have no offline version for my laptop. Yep crazy, my work pc (windows) is running FeedDemon, while my ipod touch runs Netwirenews and even my two windows mobile phones are running the newsgator go client. Usually when I'm connected I'll use the web site directly but when offline I have to use my ipod touch which is stupid when I got such a great display right in front of me. Anyway I'm not the only one.

I was thinking about this the other day now that I have an Eee PC. I'm liking it so far, but the keyboard is definitely maddeningly small. Still, I'm getting better at it. Anyway, one thing I'd really like on it is the ability to read feeds offline. I currently use Newsgator products to read feeds–both Feeddemon and Newsgator Mobile. I love the syncing capability.

But unfortunately, Newsgator doesn't have a Linux product. It does, however have an API into their syncing infrastructure. However, without a Linux product in the first place, most of the people I know that are using Newsgator are corporate types. Newsgator Go!, their mobile product, is for Blackberry and Win Mobile.

With no Linux client and no iPhone app, what are the chances that the developer community is going to care enough about their product in the first place to develop on top of their syncing api. Developers tend to build things to solve problems for themselves. Not surprisingly, NO ONE has built a Linux RSS desktop client on top of their API. Even a Thunderbird plugin would be nice, b/c Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds and it works in Linux. So far, nada, zilch.

Luckily Newsgator do have a POP3 service too, so its possible to get some kind of offline usage even if its nothing like the RSS service and I'm still unsure how/if the syncing works with it too.

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RSS-powered desktop solutions

RSS-powered Windows 7 desktop slideshows

Part of the new theme file specifications in Windows 7 is the ability to specify a RSS feed as the source of slideshow images. To put this to the test, I created three themes that source images from the RSS feeds of various Flickr users’ who make available the original high-resolution photos to the public. If you have a copy of Windows 7 handy, feel free to download these and play along.

I've been informed this isn't unique to Windows 7 but I got to say its pretty cool. I'd like to see a lot more RSS powered things on the desktop. For example I still don't understand why there's very few RSS screensavers specially on Linux. Long Zheng does mention this but quotes a quite boring example of the background changing depending on the weather outside. I'd like to more of the social networking rss/attention pushed into the desktop. On Linux when the screen is locked, people can leave a message but imagine being able to leave a message for those around your computer using your own lifestream feed. Tie it your Brightkite or Fire eagle and you could give a estimate of how long your'll be till your back. Combining your personal informatics (credit to Tom Coates and Matt Jones, but I still don't like the phrase much) and maybe your computer could suggest which project you should work on based on how much work you've done previously from a data sensor service like Rescuetime. It could even suggest you take a break.

Although OSX and Windows seem to have gotten a head on this march so far, I expect the FOSS operating systems to really steal the day because of the diversity of developers and different versions.

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Gwibber the dashboard for streams and flow?

I partly talked about this before but theres been a series of updates which I couldn't help but blog about.

So I was talking to Miles about a client which could support much more that Microblogging and we were suprised that no ones actually built a clever client app which supports Microblogging + RSS + XMPP? Well the closes we can find to that idea is a OSX application called Eventbox. Actually this blog entry does a much better job explaining what it can do, and what a difference it means for advanced users.

If you imagine the dashboard of Facebook (credit to Stowe Boyd) but under your control using the services you prefer. Fan of Flickr, just add them and the RSS feed. Prefer photobucket use that instead. Its a bit like the life streaming services such as Plaxo, Mybloglog and Friendfeed. The application/client should be clever enough to look at the service and work out through maybe some discovery service/xml whats possible with the service. So for example adding Twitter will allow you to post and read, while a flickr feed won't. It would be cool to also finally start adding some of those comment services into the mix, so for example allow backtype comments if you start adding stuff to a RSS feed from a blog. Hell why not add a proper metaweblog/atom Blog editor too maybe?

Anyway, Eventbox is close and seems to be on the right track and I was starting to get worried that once again the linux platform would be left behind in this area. But I was wrong actually deadly wrong because under my own nose was Gwibber.

I've been using it for a while now and its actually fended off competition from Air apps like Twitterdeck (far too twitterfied) and Twirl (crashes a lot) for my ubuntu desktop. But what shocked me today when talking to Miles was the new supported protocals it has. I had done updates and never knew about the new features.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

So now theres support for,

  • RSS/Atom
  • Digg
  • La.conica
  • Twitter
  • Pidgin
  • Ping.fm
  • Facebook
  • Jaiku
  • Pownce
  • Flickr
  • Indenti.ca

So most of the Microblogging services including the recently defunked Pownce and open source La.conica. RSS including automatic discovery for Digg and Flickr. Then some of the interesting ones, Facebook with the ability to also send messages into the Facebook paywall. Ping.FM support, means you can send from Gwibber to all those other services such as Brightkite, Rejaw, etc, etc. But the one which is strange and most exciting is Pidgin support. The problem is, there is no documentation for the Pidgin part and the account says you can send only. So after some playing around, I worked out that when you send a message on Gwibber, it will also set the status of Pidgin. This is cool, but I also want the ability to recieve XMPP messages straight into Gwibber.

Gwibber 0.72 Screenshot by you.

Actually Gwibber has the structure to really move forward. I've already seen multiple types of authentication from username/password to a Oauth like facebook auth. Each protocal gets its own colour which you can set and you can enable recieve, send and search on each one (protocal supporting). Search works well, but I'll like to see some kind of watch or a pounce system like you get in Pidgin or Specto. Finally it would be useful to support the Newsgator API (yep I switched from bloglines to newsgator) for RSS, so you can properly manage the RSS and not end up reading the same news over and over again.

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And the social stacks fit together like that…

One of the things I really missed out on but have been following is the developments around the open stack. I kind of prefer social stack but I can see a lot of benefit to open over social. Anyway, this work has been pioneered by some really good guys including David Recordon, Chris Messina, Sebastian Küpers, etc, etc (sorry to many names to list). Today I was struck by Jyri's blog post about Chris Messina's talk at some event recently.

In his presentation at Friday's event, Chris Messina demonstrated the use case of subscribing to someone who lives on a foreign Web service.

In what follows I'll expand on Chris' story by discussing another use case, where you add the
foreign friend to your address book without needing to go to their site.

Imagine I want to add a friend, David Recordon to my contacts. I
know his email address, so I click 'add contact' in my client and enter
his email.

My client translates David's email address into his OpenID URL, probably using a method called Email to URL Translation.

Now that my client knows where to find David on the Web, it goes out to David's URL and fetches a little file that contains machine-readable pointers
to David's public profile and the photos, status messages, bookmarks,
blogs, and other feeds he publishes. The enabling standards at work
here are likely to be XRDS-Simple and Portable Contacts.

This loop is simply referred to as 'discovery'.

Once my client is done, it is ready to display its findings to me.
Here's a mock-up to illustrate what I might see (the same mock is in
Chris' slides):

Dave

After selecting David's contact information and some of his feeds, I
click 'Save', and a subscription request is sent to these services. They
return a few of David's most recent public updates to me.

The next time David logs into these services, he sees a standard new
subscriber notification. His service can perform discovery on me to
display my name and profile summary to him, and allow him to
reciprocate.

David may also choose to allow me to see some of his private information, such as his contact details. The enabling standard here is of course OAuth.

I have never needed to join any of the services David uses; in fact,
I don't even need to know their names. It is irrelevant to me if he
uses Twitter, Plurk, or Friendfeed to publish his status updates or
prefers Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa for sharing his photos. All I care about is seeing his updates and being able to respond to them using my own client.

Information wants to be free, and social objects want to travel.

The thing this reminds me of, is when Tim Burners-Lee wrote about the Semantic web and how agents talk to services, etc. You can follow how it works without even knowing the different technologies too well. So while these guys figure out the webside of things, these other guys earn a mention for there work on the services stuff and Controlyourself for there work on openmicroblogging.

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Data Portability done correctly by Pownce

Goodbye Pownce

A few days after setting the wheels in motion, I got my email today saying things are ready to take away. My only complaint is its close to the deadline.

Your export files are complete.

You may download your files at:
http://pownce.com/settings/export/

Please stop by as soon as possible to pick up your files. Once Pownce is closed, on December 15, these files will no longer be available.

Thanks!
The Pownce Crew

If only all startups would be think this way about there customers data.

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Facebook connect, are you for real?

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

Someone (I expect Miles) once talked about the idea of hidden in plain view to me. I can't find much about it except its a album title too, but that its about hiding things in plain view. The viewer almost doesn't believe its there so they skip over it or ignore it. I think Facebook connect is exactly this.

Rejon's ident/tweet says it all.

Everybody knows # # is trying to lock you in # style. Lets make # # # #! # #

Not even the video chat on the social web tv and interviews insills me with any real joy. Welcome to the new lock in…

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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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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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Web of Flow

I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.

A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.

Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.

He shows his desktop: Snackr,
Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all
flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots
more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social
interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of
implementations.

This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually
broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers.
People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your
life because of life streaming.

If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.

In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.

Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.

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Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…

Oh lovely another screenshot and example for my presentation about data portability in cloud computing.

Yes Yammer went down yesterday and worst still seemed to be throwing out data all over the place. A work mate of mine reported getting some email from Yammer when he's not even registered with the system. I assume the email address came from when someone else request you join Yammer.

The cloud is great, but examples like this are really worrying!

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Microsoft embraces the cloud and its technologies

cloud office

So I did say in a few presentations recently, that I'm dying to replace my slide of Microsoft Livemesh and Ray Ozzie's thoughts about cloud computing with something more cloud like. Well yesterday Microsoft unveiled Azure, a operating system for the cloud. From my understanding, its like Google App engine but using .net instead of python. They do say Python, PHP, Ruby, etc are coming soon.

I did sit and watch the Channel9 video where he explains the whole thing over 40mins and it does sound good but not ground breaking in my own mind. Could be useful for the backstage wild west server but I expect the community would litch me before I got close to suggesting it.

So after the cloud computing announcement of Azure, Microsoft went on to surprise us all with a consumer facing announcement that Windows live ID will OpenID 2.0.

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

I wonder if they ever plan to support access to there own services via openID?

But the biggest announcement was of course a demo of microsoft office live which is like google docs but microsoft office. Unsuprisingly Microsoft will still be selling copies of Microsoft Office 14 in shops.

So Microsoft have certainly put a foot in cloud computing but between livemesh, azure and officelive I'm not exactly wow'ed. More me too that trailblazing.

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Just bought a ticket to the official after party for Web 2.0 Expo


Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008

The official LateCrunch Party to Web 2.0 Expo, costs roughly 12 pounds, starts at 10pm and ends 4am in the morning. Seems perfect if your planning to catch the easyjet flight (Redeye) back to London at 6am. This also means I'm now committed to going now. Yes I'll be going to BarCampBerlin3, yes I'm going to the conference too. But somewhere in between I need to spend some time with my great german friend Carl who's putting me up at his place during the week. Shame I'll be out most of the time. Anyway i'll make it up to him somehow.

Good on Tim Oreilly too…. Stop building crappy apps and build stuff which changes the world. This is certainly why Backstage and myself finds things like scripting enabled, AMEE and Operation Sleeper Cell really important.

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