Monkinetic Weblog

I ran across a link to this morning, and while it's a technically interesting application, I can't help but see it, at best, as a complete dilution of what OpenID is supposed to mean, and at worst, an intentional abuse of OpenID and a perfect tool for spammers.

To Jeremy in IM:

Welcome to redmonk.net -- all DiSo, all the time.

>A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? Thats the nerd working on his project in his head.

The action is over here. Next step is to start in on the thornier issue: how to start building the whitelist.

While writing Whitelisting With OpenID and XFN, I started thinking about what kind of work would have to go into implementing these ideas in Wordpress. One of the roadblocks I ran into was that in Wordpress (and Drupal, probably, and most other similar systems) links only support a single URI (not surprisingly). In order to support OpenID whitelisting, we need a unique identifying URI for an XFN contact - which may or may not be the same as the blog/site URI that you'd want to list in a blogroll.

This weekend I ran across a post on Tim Berners Lee's blog (the Giant Global Graph - Groan), but what got my attention was a previous post by Dan Connoly about the social-network-based whitelist they've developed for commenting on the Decentralized Information Group blog.

I setup our pre-lit Christmas tree last night, and discovered to my dismay that four different strands of the pre-installed lights were not lighting.

"Big Cat" references aside, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is pretty nice. My favorite feature so far is probably Spaces - though others have pointed out that it's hardly the 1st implementation of "virtual desktops' on Mac OS X, and it's missing some features, it's (understandably) the best integrated of any implementation so far. And it makes my 17" monitor at work actually useful. My only gripe is that I want/need different desktop backgrounds for each Space so that I can remember where I am.

>Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Kottke:

Check out this screencast from tagamac.com on Things, a new GTD app from Cultured Code.

Seeing as I've been in Vladivostok, Russia for a week and a half now adopting our second (and incredibly precious) daughter, this is going to sound remarkably petty. But I'm a geek and it's been driving me nuts.

-portable-social-networks

> If you love something, set it free

> If it comes back to you, its yours

> If it doesn't, it never was

> -- Author Unknown

These wise words graced the wall of my childhood home in Virginia Beach, VA, along with a generic painting of a seagull. (Why anyone would want to keep a seagull was beyond me.) However, in today's web the words ring true all over again.

Social networks are popping up faster than weeds, and user fatigue is already setting in. One of the solutions (the most "Don't Be Evil" in my opinion) comes in the form of a discussion of Portable Social Networks - the idea that social networking sites should allow users' data to be portable between sites. This idea comes in two parts:

1. Allow users to import their data from a source they trust in the form of an hCard, and their existing contacts in the form of XFN-linked hCards.

2. Optionally publish user's data in these same formats so that if they lose interest, they can move on.

Part 2 used to scare people running sites, but it's becoming the de-facto standard and is becoming expected behavior (see Twitter, Flickr, dopplr, etc.) Data lock-in is considered in very poor taste now.

Surprisingly, part 1 is still finding its way into apps, though it would go a long way toward making users feel that they and their time are respected. A few sites are doing a good job of making it easy for users to bring their data with them. Dopplr.com, though in private-beta right now, is getting good reviews for a registration process that offers the user the option of importing their profile data from a variety of other social sites, and also offers to match up the users contacts from those sites with (and this is an important point) users already in the Dopplr system. Let's cut down on the social-network-invite SPAM while we're at it, mmmkay? Dopplr as even gone as far as publishing code.

Portable Social Network Lib

As a couple folks have discovered, I've started a project for a ruby library called, surprisingly, Portable Social Network Lib.

PSNlib is quite early in its life (and I've been distracted by an adoption and by adding some stuff to mofo to make building PSNlib easier) but it has two goals:

1. Make it easy for a ruby-based app to add hCard+XFN import to an existing model layer, and

2. Make it easy to publish user profile and contact/friend information as hCard+XFN

Eventually, I'd like to see OpenID/OAuth mixed in in some way as well. Kevin Lawver has started some cool stuff in that area, and I'm going to keep my eye on it.

Outstanding Issues

It's after 2 AM in Vladivostok, Russia, and the whole point of this post was to get down some issues I'm having in implementation so I could STOP thinking about them. So in no particular order, here are some things that are bugging me:

Mixed data: XFN+hCard

When parsing an XFN list and you want to look for hCard data for those contacts along it, what is a good parsing strategy? lab.backnetwork (another site experimenting with XFN+hCard importing) uses:

<li class="vcard"><a rel="friend coworker"><span class="first-name">Co-worker</span> <span class="last-name">Friend</span></a></li>

This is thorny because while mofo/hpricot makes finding the XFN relationships easy, it would take some working around the default behavior to figure out that the XFN relationship was wrapped in an hCard (class="vcard"). Likewise, I'm unsure of the recommended practices when publishing XFN contact list data with hCard data mixed in with it.

XFN pagination

rel="next" or rel="me next"? lab.backnetwork uses rel="next" but microformats.org recommends rel="me next".

Wrapping Up

That's all I have energy for today, but if you have thoughts or ideas, please leave them in the comments. Thanks!

> If you love something, set it free

-portable-social-networks tags: "" tp_commentcount: "0" tp_favoritecount: "0" tp_urlid: 6a010534988cd3970b0120a55ce758970b

If you love something, set it free

If it comes back to you, its yours

If it doesn't, it never was

-- Author Unknown

These wise words graced the wall of my childhood home in Virginia Beach, VA, along with a generic painting of a seagull. (Why anyone would want to keep a seagull was beyond me.) However, in today's web the words ring true all over again.

Social networks are popping up faster than weeds, and user fatigue is already setting in. One of the solutions (the most "Don't Be Evil" in my opinion) comes in the form of a discussion of Portable Social Networks - the idea that social networking sites should allow users' data to be portable between sites. This idea comes in two parts:

1. Allow users to import their data from a source they trust in the form of an hCard, and their existing contacts in the form of XFN-linked hCards.

2. Optionally publish user's data in these same formats so that if they lose interest, they can move on.

Part 2 used to scare people running sites, but it's becoming the de-facto standard and is becoming expected behavior (see Twitter, Flickr, dopplr, etc.) Data lock-in is considered in very poor taste now.

Surprisingly, part 1 is still finding its way into apps, though it would go a long way toward making users feel that they and their time are respected. A few sites are doing a good job of making it easy for users to bring their data with them. Dopplr.com, though in private-beta right now, is getting good reviews for a registration process that offers the user the option of importing their profile data from a variety of other social sites, and also offers to match up the users contacts from those sites with (and this is an important point) users already in the Dopplr system. Let's cut down on the social-network-invite SPAM while we're at it, mmmkay? Dopplr as even gone as far as publishing code.

Portable Social Network Lib

As a couple folks have discovered, I've started a project for a ruby library called, surprisingly, Portable Social Network Lib.

PSNlib is quite early in its life (and I've been distracted by an adoption and by adding some stuff to mofo to make building PSNlib easier) but it has two goals:

1. Make it easy for a ruby-based app to add hCard+XFN import to an existing model layer, and
2. Make it easy to publish user profile and contact/friend information as hCard+XFN

Eventually, I'd like to see OpenID/OAuth mixed in in some way as well. Kevin Lawver has started some cool stuff in that area, and I'm going to keep my eye on it.

Outstanding Issues

It's after 2 AM in Vladivostok, Russia, and the whole point of this post was to get down some issues I'm having in implementation so I could STOP thinking about them. So in no particular order, here are some things that are bugging me:

Mixed data: XFN+hCard

When parsing an XFN list and you want to look for hCard data for those contacts along it, what is a good parsing strategy? lab.backnetwork (another site experimenting with XFN+hCard importing) uses:

<li class="vcard"><a rel="friend coworker"><span class="first-name">Co-worker</span> <span class="last-name">Friend</span></a></li>

This is thorny because while mofo/hpricot makes finding the XFN relationships easy, it would take some working around the default behavior to figure out that the XFN relationship was wrapped in an hCard (class="vcard"). Likewise, I'm unsure of the recommended practices when publishing XFN contact list data with hCard data mixed in with it.

XFN pagination

rel="next" or rel="me next"? lab.backnetwork uses rel="next" but microformats.org recommends rel="me next".

Wrapping Up

That's all I have energy for today, but if you have thoughts or ideas, please leave them in the comments. Thanks!

Ooooooh, my paper-product fetish just kicked into overdrive: Moleskine Notebook Cover

So, Jodi and I are back from the Far East, and Jodi has been writing about the trip (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). For those of you who don't know, we traveled to Vladivostok, Russia to meet our prospective daughter. We had some basic information about her - deaf, mild CP, 2.5 years old - but were able to get her full medical information after we got the referral. We went back and forth with our doctor a bit trying to determine Annna's actual medical situation, but eventually decided that there was nothing there that would keep us from adopting her, and so we're going forward! For more details, check out Jodi's writeup.

Damien Barrett is blogging again. Yay!

Tomorrow I have a guest strip featured on Sheercore.com (about) - I'm very excited, conversation with Matt always seems to end up with something quotable and this was no different.