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Larry Halff and Tara Hunt - Ma.gnolia 2 October 28, 2008

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Video introducing Ma.gnolia 2 from this year’s Gnomedex conference:

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Ma.gnolia 2.0

Larry Halff and Tara Hunt [...] discussing how Ma.gnolia has implemented many of the tools of the open web such as OpenID, OAuth and Microformats and [...] unveiling Ma.gnolia 2, the next evolution of Ma.gnolia and a building block of the open web.

The real Web 2.0 entrepreneurs like Larry will realise when they’ve got something great — and how they can get that something into the hands of the most people possible might be by giving it away, opening the data for unknown uses, letting you import (and export) as much as you want, giving you tools that don’t just raise their bottom line, but instead make you love the service so much that you need to invite everyone you know to use it.

Ubiquity: Web Services + Microformats + Quicksilver = Mashups (in your browser) August 27, 2008

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Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
* Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
* Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
* Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
* Extend the browser functionality easily.

I think Microsoft is going to copy the hell out of this and release a “Microsoft Live OpenWeb Command Window Beta” before mid-September.

What’s your interest in distributed social networking? February 23, 2008

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After watching Chris Messina’s existential DiSo Interview, I decided to go check out a bit more about the distributed social networking stuff Chris and Steve Ivy have been working on - there are 160+ people on the mailing list now, and hundreds of threads.

Here’s a little bit about the DiSo Project:

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.
So what does that mean?

We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

* Microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
* OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
* OAuth
* …and others

They also ask you to state a reason for wanting to join the mailing list, which I’ve copied here:

I am a big fan of microformats and distributed, semantic applications. I work for a social network that’s a little bit different because we’re mapping the relationships between animals. It gets even more interesting there, because some animals live together, some animals play together, some share parents, and then they all have one or more people who take care of them. It’s been difficult for us to take open source software and shoehorn the relationships into it, and what that means as far as a user experience goes.

One funny thing is the idea of your “active pet” or active profile - if a person can create multiple resumes, one for film jobs and one for programming jobs, for example, then maybe this idea of having multiple profiles is important. The people you play poker with on the weekends might not want to be notified when you update the work blog - others will.

So there’s another layer. If someone subscribes to your updates, can they subscribe to a subset of those, so as not to get loads of BACN in their activity stream reader?

I think about these things.

If you haven’t seen it, check out that weird animal social network.