The sublime abiding

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Chris Messina made a great point about simplifying XFN usage. rel=me by itself has a lot of untapped potential. Using a single URL as the entry point to a cluster of URLs that describe me, a detailed profile can be built from a diverse set of profile pages/services.

Each profile page can list friends, usually of the same service, with rel=contact. There is a question that comes from these links - is this rel=contact link mutual? i can have <a rel="friend" href="http://famous-person-you-have-heard-of.com"> on a profile page but it doesn't mean much by itself. When the target of the link is loaded and contains a reciprocal rel=contact link, then it can be verified. The same idea applies for rel=me links.

Which brings up another point - this data has to be spidered or loaded via a background process. That takes time. if i give a website an entry point into my cluster of profile pages, that website cannot visit all those URLs and still respond to my web browser's request in a timely manner.

Using a tool I've been playing with, my home page points to 8 different profile pages. One of which is twitter and has 41 friend URLs. Each friend URL points to their cluster of profile pages. That amount to 239 URLs. Some of which (digg) will timeout or not respond. The user experience needs to handle this - profiles will start quickly with one url and will grow and change as the spider grooms the local copy of this data.

Another option is to query google's social graph api. That's what google is good at - spidering the web and querying its cached data quickly. I am not sold on this idea because as powerful as google's spidering is, it can still take days for an update to be noticed and it creates a dependency on a single web service. This cache is different, the URLs are in the hundreds or thousands, not billions, and need to be very timely. Running a local application with social graph smarts sounds like the right idea.

XFN -> OPML -> Activity Stream	[Mar. 6th, 2008\|01:48 pm]
I was just playing with liferea. It imported the OPML I exported from my 'brief' firefox feed reader. If you click on a folder, you get the entries from all the contained feeds. Thats largely what jaiku/friendfeed do. I'm going to extend the XFN Friend Lister to spider the XFN links from a given starting page, and generate an OPML file. The folders will represent groups of pages that are 'me' linked to each other. The friend links will provide fresh URLs to try and group together as individuals. hmm. maybe it'll be more interesting to work on the SVG graph first.
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xfn friends representation	[Mar. 6th, 2008\|01:20 pm]
i've been thinking about how a chart might be programatically generated. here is a chart made by hand in inkscape. note that it starts at my 'home page'. it first discovers all the pages that further describe 'me'. two seperate 'me' pages link to the same friend. how to know that digg/factoryjoe and twitter/factoryjoe are the same person? they are if they 'me' link to each other.
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where to keep money	[Mar. 4th, 2008\|01:54 pm]
when last i checked, paypal was the best place to keep money 100% liquid and earn a small return. the money market fund for paypal balances has fallen from 5% last year to a current 3.3%. where is a good place to keep money? i feel slightly more brave/interested so an investment that is not liquid for a short amount of time is also ok. Certs. of Deposit are boring. A bond sounds interesting.
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running log	[Mar. 4th, 2008\|07:46 am]
5 miles. 50 minutes, 30 seconds. donp, this is tower control, you have been cleared for shamrock takeoff. very nice run today. my pace is stuck at 10 minutes/mile. i would like to quicken that.
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activity stream reader

[Mar. 3rd, 2008|10:21 am]

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Activity Stream Reader (for Android)

 * start with the user's identity URL
Your home page. The starting point. Maybe a blog URL or an openid.
    
 * identify 'me' links. load 'me' links.
Now we've got 5-10 or so links pointing to twitter, blogger,
delicious, last.fm, etc. Load those pages.

 * discover friend links on all me pages
My twitter me page, for example, is going to have 40 or 
so friend links. Load those pages.

 * discover the 'me' links for each friend
Each friend's home page has on average 3 me links. Thats 120 links. 
Load those pages.

 * discover RSS feed for every friend me page
On each friend's me page, look for the link tag that signifies the 
RSS URL for this page, assuming the URL is not already an RSS feed.

From one starting URL, a collection of RSS feeds to pull in is gathered. All this feed spidering will be going on in the background.

Define filters and various display settings. A straight timeline of all feed entries. All entries for a specific user, or a specific service.

The result is a high-quality activity stream to display in the application.

running log

[Mar. 1st, 2008|11:12 am]

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4 miles. 40 minutes.

yeah.

two weeks until the shamrock run.

PDA as a second monitor

[Feb. 29th, 2008|02:44 pm]

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im moving my desktop back to ubuntu after a few months on vista. i've been thinking about pidgin and how it works and finding out its not as extensible as i was hoping. as i was shuffling windows around so that my IM list had its own spot in the corner i thought for a moment that a second monitor would be nice. i've had a second monitor before and i find it to be information overload.

if you think about the iphone cradle, its angled to work like a second screen. you're going to want your android smartphone to have a really good IM/activitystream application anyways. so why not set it up in the cradle when you're at the desktop.

if you're getting an IM, you're going to want to use the desktop keyboard and mouse to interact with the phone app.

activity stream updates are going to be wide. as in a line of text, usually. cell phone screens are not wide. maybe the screen is too small to use as a second "dedicated IM/activitystream" monitor

friendfeed and rss readers

[Feb. 28th, 2008|02:42 am]

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friendfeed primarily takes multiple rss feeds and presents them as a single list. the funny thing is most RSS readers already do this. Taking as an example, Veronica Belmont and Chris Messina, i can get their 'activity stream' by subscribing to their individual feeds as demonstrated in google reader:

Notice the 'blogs' folder is selected and that displays the contents all the rss feeds as a single page.

friendfeed makes it easy to manage groups of urls. each group describes one person. i can spot a friend of a friend and add them as a friend. with one click i get their dozen rss feeds blended into my daily reading stream.

my friendfeed is available as a feed of its own. so i could stick that into my rss reader and let friendfeed do the merging and managing. that is cool for sure but i don't like being dependent on a single service provider. i mostly like the idea of caching and merging those RSS feeds on my own box, the way an rss reader application does.

friendfeed gets huge props for 'imaginary friends'. other services try to keep you in their silo by saying you can only follow a friend if that friend has signed up for our service (readr.com seems to work this way). in friendfeed i can create a profile for another person and add URLs to that profile without that person having to signup for friendfeed. i'm saddled with managing changes to that profile since its really my profile, but describes someone else.

instant messaging programs already have a concept of a friends list. they're a local application and they have a slick UI. i use pidgin in ubuntu and vista. i looked at adding the last twitter update to each friend listed in pidgin. the problem is pidgin doesnt support changing the buddy list view with a plugin (according to a guy in #pidgin), plus it doesnt support a conceptual user that is represented by an AIM account, a gmail account ,etc.. I would need to use that more abstract user concept to thrown in the twitter feed. Trillium for the PC has this concept.