Archive of "DiSo"
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Hot on the heels of the Actionstream 0.50 release comes the 0.50 release of DiSo Profile! It can be downloaded from the usual place.
Note: The permissions logic has been spun out into the new permissions plugin. Make sure your install and activate that plugin first if you have any private data, or it will be displayed to the public.
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I have just pushed wp-diso-actionstream version 0.50 out. You can download it from the usual place.
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Groups seems to be a very popular concept on the social web. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, last.fm, Ma.gnolia, FriendFeed (rooms) : everyone has groups. How do we think about these groups in the context of tearing down walled gardens? Do we think of places like Ning that replicate all this functionality in a more open ecosystem? Or do we push further into a more decentralized way of thinking and collaborating? Try the following links out:
What do you think? Besides being a bit rough (some unrelated data sneaks in), this seems like a very good snapshot of what is going on in and around DiSo : better, perhaps, that any of the “official” sources.
I would maintain that on the Open Web we can see two different kinds of groups: ad-hoc and gardens. Both could be maintained by the same software (which I would love to build, but will not be upset if the lazyweb beats me to it!) Ad-hoc groups are the simplest: let a user choose one or more defining keywords and then display content from all over the social web that fits that tag (with options to filter by blog, microupdate, bookmark, event, etc). Done. A group is born that you can track and reply to and interact with (with appropriate links back to the original service, of course, no extra comments layer like we see in FriendFeed if we can help it).
Gardened groups would be a step more formal, and would be the open variant of existing walled-garden groups. Group administrators (“gardeners”) could choose a group name/shortname and keywords. They could then choose to have the group not follow certain services (for example, if no photos would be relevant, not track Flickr) and could also add other relevant feeds/respose links (ie mailing list RSS feed with mailto: links for the “reply” function, code repository commit feeds, etc) and links to relevant pages that are static content (wikis). Content coming in from all sources could be pruned to hide content that matches the keyword(s) but is not relevant.
Feeds and OPML files should be provided to go along with groups, interaction links should make it into the footers of feed item bodies.
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Tantek Çelik has purchased socialsearchme.com for this service! Thanks!
Never tweet about something you don’t want to go public. I’ve been annoying my followers for some time now about my new social search engine. Tantek then linked to it from his WordCamp SanFrancisco presentation. Not that I’m upset at all. I’m ecstatic that he thought it was worth linking to! Still, a word to the cautious 😉
So how does this search engine work? What does it do? Basically, it’s an hCard search engine. Unlike the Yahoo or Technorati Kitchen implementations, however, this search is focused on social networking and profiles. If DiSo were Facebook, this could be the friend search functionality. So instead of having the results be links to pages that contain matching hCards, the results are profiles with social networking data (including contacts) and names, etc.
One other key thing that is different here from pure hCard search is that I am only spidering representative hCards (with some small hacks for well-known sites like Twitter). This means I don’t spider arbitrary hCard data, instead I am only indexing profile pages. I use both XFN parsing and the SGAPI to verify claims that two pages represent the same person, and then associate them. Data from both pages goes into the index as if it were all on one page. Only one page needs an hCard, since connections are made through rel=me and XFN. This way, although my profile is on my main page and my contacts are at singpolyma.net/contacts, the search engine indexes them both.
To find new pages to index, I spider along XFN (and FOAF, since I also ask the SGAPI) to find pages likely to have the sort of data I’m looking for. Interestingly enough, this means that social networks like Twitter, Pownce, and Digg, who support hCard and XFN, get almost completely indexed. There are over 100000 profiles in the index now, and I have only given it one manually : singpolyma.net.
I’m not entirely sure how the data will be useful yet, but I’m really excited about the possibilities. I firmly believe in making XFN lists, static though they may be, come alive with potential through layers of functionality, be in through plugins, 3rd party services, or bookmarklets.
Speaking of bookmarklets, I have one. Go to that page, add the bookmarklet, and visit my contacts page (or any other page with lots of XFN data). Click it and watch that boring list of links and names turn into a more functional social-networking list.
The code has been released under an MIT-style license on my repository. Front-end is PHP, back-end is Ruby.
DiSo : on our way to fixing your addressbook 😉
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There a fair amount of buzz around messaging sysems, be it microblogging or direct messages. There is also discussion about broadcast social media (share this with all your friends!). One use case keeps cropping up for me: sharing content with individuals or ad hoc groups. I will focus here on sharing links, but much of this applies to any media richer than one raw text blob.
If I want to keep a URL for later – I use bookmarks. This was de facto for a long time. Then, one day, someone decided it might be cool if not only they could read that page later, but everyone else could too! Thus, the birth of social bookmarking. Today, if I want to share a link with all my contacts I simply bookmark it on my Ma.gnolia, and if they care, they’ll see it.
Then, groups. If I want to share a URL about copyright issues with the Waterloo Students for the Information Commons, we have a Ma.gnolia group. Interested parties subscribe, and the stream is also syndicated to the main page of our wiki for general interest. (Aside: if a discussion with the group is to take place around a link posted there it sometimes happens on our mailing list… I’ve recently begun experimenting with Friendfeed rooms for this. While commenting on FF in generally seems dumb, in this case many of the shared links have no comments themselves and the commentary would only be interesting to other group members anyway.)
One extension of groups really : ad-hoc groups. I don’t want to create a new group somewhere and invite everyone who might be interested every time a topic comes up breifly. It needs to be easy (like, one step, no more than three short fields) and not require people to sign up for anything to contribute/subscribe. Then it can die out later naturally. Stronger (more organized) than hashtags, but less formal and permanent than groups. This is analogous to the cc-everyone chains that develop because people are too lazy to make a small, temporary mailing list.
Alright, now to the big one: point-to-point. While 1:1 communication is usually not the answer (and this has partially sparked my ideas about ad-hoc groups) – sometimes you just read a page and go “so-and-so would be interested in this”. This has, in the past, caused me to email URLs to people. This feels like the wrong solution. Even Twitter dm doesn’t seem quite suited to this. First I will describe my ultimate UX, then I will describe what seems to exist today.
I want a button in Firefox (or whatever browser I end up using in the future – Firefox for now) that opens a dialog allowing me to simultaneously save the link into my bookmarks (on Ma.gnolia or wherever), share with an arbitrary number of groups, and with an arbitrary number of contacts. You can take a peek at my mockup if you like. This is very different from how, say, Ma.gnolia or Pownce does link sharing. Note that all of these (my bookmarks, some groups, some contacts) should be optional – I may not want to use all of them each time. When people send me links this way I want an RSS feed of the links. If they get emailed to me it is not much better than the original solution. If they are delivered into some “private message” box we have YAI, and that’s worse.
Tie in to DiSo: wouldn’t it be extra neat if I could type not just, say, Ma.gnolia or Pownce usernames, but could type URLs? System asks their provider how they prefer to recieve links and then sends it that way. I really don’t want to make people sign up for whatever service I happen to use.
So what can we use today? Well, there are a few options.
Enough from me for now. Think about it.