I think I probably need this.

A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site

blognation UK technology » Blog Archive » Discover Blog Posts Via Facebook With Blog Friends

I thought I'd play with this. Installed it and noticed this as the first post in the application.

"And because facebook only allows us to update profile boxes sequentially, with each update taking 2 seconds, updates may take up to 24 hours. Think of us as a wise and empathic tortoise. ; )"

FB Applications have a serious problem here. Because FB caches everything the app produces, you have to jump through hoops as an App developer to make it quasi real time.

Is Skype, IM+Voice or Voice+IM? IMHO, It's the best IM with great Voice functionality. But they're source of income is all on the Telephony side of the fence.

It doesn't really matter which way round it is. And yes, Skype phones are clearly on the Telephony side of the fence, but increasingly they make quite good portable chat clients as well. The only important bit from my position as a user is that Skype continue to innovate on the IM side as well as matching the other IM systems feature for feature. Because I use Skype for IM *far* more than the Voice part.

I think what's really happening now is that IM, VoIP are being dragged together as sectors with Skype already in the middle. The Voice/Video options in the other IM systems are pretty poor but they've been forced to add them. This leaves people like Gaim, Trillian, Adium out in the cold until they can work out how to do Voice interop with multiple closed systems. And it appears to be hard because even on the open specification side, only Gizmo have managed it and LibJingle hasn't come to anything. It makes Voice/Video interop important. Meanwhile the pure VoIP offerings are limited without IM+Presence. Which consigns them to corporate Telecom departments and telephony cost management. That's a huge market, but it's a very different market.

Perhaps this is just another skirmish in the old, old, battle between Bell Heads and Bit Heads.

» Microsoft To Buy Facebook For $6 Billion? » InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel

I think Nathan is spot on. MS Should buy Facebook. Then we can all desert it for the next greatest thing.

There's a truth here that MSN, Google, Yahoo, AOL should all wake up to. They've all built some amazing technology to customise the classic "My Pages". Portals monetizing sticky eyeballs by bringing the net to one place and then trying to keep people there. They should invert this and use the same technology to create "Me Pages". Monetising short term temporary visitors to read all about me and everything I do on the net. It's only a very short step from there to a FaceBook, MySpace competitor. And that's mainly about management of friends and followers. That is an N SQUARED problem (N Factorial?) so not trivial. But they all have the resources to solve it.

I guess that's the realisation that there's really *nothing in Facebook*. The one thing Facebook has is huge numbers of users. But so do the Portals. They should build it, not buy it. But that takes balls. And it takes imagination to see that they don't need a "Social Network System". They need to add "Social Network Function" into what they've already got.

I can accept FB being unfinished and in perpetual beta. I can't accept how closed it is. So I'm all for MS buying it, forcing us to use Passport to access it and then so screwing around with it that we all leave.

Mashup request: Skype and del.icio.us (seikatsu)

A request for a system that watched for URLs in your chats and then auto-posted them to del.icio.us.

Perhaps I could add this to void.bot.

This is all good stuff for the Skype Mashup competition.

1.) Copy Skype to the flash drive:
1.1) Copy c:\Program Files\Skype (only the Phone subdir is needed, but it has to be inside the Skype Directory on the flash. e.g. x:\Skype\Phone)

2.) Make a folder called Data on the flash drive inside the Phone subdir (x:\Skype\Phone\Data)

3.) Copy your Skype data:
3.1) You can find your Skype profile data in c:\documents and settings\Application Data\Skype. From here you need to copy that folder which has the same name as your skype user to x:\Skype\Phone\Data you made.
3.2) (optional) I also copied the shared.xml on to my flash drive as well, but this is usually generated by itself.

4.) Now create a batch file in the root.
echo off
start ".\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe /removable /dbpath:.\Data\"
exit

5.) Make sure no Skype is running and run the batch file to make Skype start from flash drive.

Here's a challenge.

You're in Thailand.

You have your UK passport.

You have a UK bank account with internet banking and money in the account . You don't have your cheque book with you.

You can get to an Internet cafe.

The ATM has just swallowed your Bank card.

How do you get cash in your hand? [from: JB Ecademy]

Teknision: Branded Applications » Adding Friends is a Full Time Job, and I am Tired of It! :

There's a difference between friends and followers. Scoble has a lot of followers[1]. He probably follows rather fewer. And somewhere in the intersection will be a few friends. As someone else said "Friend" has become completely meaningless in the context of SNs.

To transport contacts networks from one SN to another, we need:-

a) A unique identifier. It used to be email but that's as disposable as everything else. Maybe it will be OpenID. But they're proliferating as well. How many OpenIDs do you have?

b) A way of aggregating our lists of contacts across sites, exporting them from one place and importing them somewhere else. FOAF might have been this, but it's flawed. We don't even have much of an agreement about how to describe people in code. The nearest thing to a standard is VCard as exported by Outlook.

c) Multiple SNs to actually play along. Sadly some of the major ones (like Facebook) make it extremely hard to get data out (no, or almost no RSS). And have no API for moving data in.

So don't expect this to happen any time soon.

And don't expect some big shakeout where a clear winner absorbs all the losers. This area is *hot* now. And that attracts VC and Developers. It'll get more fragmented not less.

Meanwhile there's some things you can do to take all your FB, Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes, Pownce, last.FM, Ecademy contact's updates and display them in one place (in Skype!). And if you're really clever, you can update one each day and have all the others synced (well most of them).

A note here about Ecademy. Almost every SN has a process where you add somebody to your friend's list and they get a message saying "Is XXXX your friend Y/N?". At Ecademy we heard a different drummer. People become contacts by talking to each other. They're not a contact until you exchange a message with one in each direction. So being a "Contact" is something that naturally arises out of communication rather than something that you explicitly create. This mostly works until we introduced a status function. At that point, I might well want to follow somebody's Status but not talk to them.

[1]And a note here about Twitter. "Follower" is exactly right. I read the Tweets from people I follow. "Friend" then has some meaning. We both read each other's Tweets. But then they confused it with "Make followers Friends" Which means that I want to follow anyone who follows me. Regardless of who they are or why they're following me.

An experiment in trying to understand Internet Communications on the basis of how many authors there are and how many readers

Authors	Many	Many to One Answers YahooAnswers, Linkedin Answers	Many to Few Listings, Blogroll Aggregators Craigslist, MyBlogLog	Many to Many Blog Aggregators, Advertising Technorati, Adsense
	Few	Few to One Reading Friends' Status, RSS Reader Twitterific, Newsgator	Few to Few Mailing lists, IRC, Group Chat, Closed Discussion forums Mailman, Skype Public chats	Few to Many Blog Comments, Group Blogs, Open Discussion forums, Magazines phpBB, Drupal, WeblogsInc
	One	One to One Phone, IM, Private messaging Skype, AIM, Facebook	One to Few Status to Friends Twitter, Facebook	One to Many Blogs, Public Status, AboutMe Pages Blogger, Twitter, Myspace
		One	Few	Many
		Readers

Was it really 30 years ago? Feels like another lifetime when I was at Glastonbury on seven seven seventy seven. I met a guy on that day who was having his 77th birthday. I guess he's probably not around any more.

There's a weird time gap though that my memory can't quite fill. I'm absolutely certain I was at Glastonbury that year, and that there was a free festival with a small pyramid stage. But if you look at various histories of Glastonbury there was no festival that year and the small gathering wasn't in Pilton on the Eavis farm. I was on a bicycle which means I was either banned from riding or my bikes were broken and that doesn't quite line up with my memories of the bikes I owned. So then I look at '78 and that's what I remember.



You know what. I think I can see my tent. A green ridge tent, far right.

But if that was '78, then where did the memory of meeting a 77 year old man on 7-7-77 come from?

It's tough when you can't make sense of your own history. Who do you turn to, to verify it?

I've been thinking about Twitter utility sites now I'm using Twitterfeed a lot. One fascinating thing about Twitterfeed is that they have no register process. They use OpenID to create and later, log into an account.

Somebody at Chinwag last night said text didn't convey emotion well enough and he wanted to say "I'm feeling xxxx: Picture". Like, "I'm feeling Existential Angst: Picture"

So we came up with this plan for a site with no signup but using OpenID.
Give it your Twitter Login.
Choose from a multiple choice of emotions (including Other).
Use that as a keyword search into Flickr Tags.
Choose a picture that expresses your emotion.
The service then turns the picture URL into a tinyurl,
and posts "I'm feeling Existential Angst. http://tinyurl/ushwsb" to Twitter.

With Skype's new Rich Mood, you could do the same thing but actually include a thumbnail of the flickr picture in your mood.

This approach of bolting utility onto Twitter with a service site has other possibilities. Particularly Location.

No signup site using OpenID.
Give it your Twitter Login.
Choose a location on an embedded Google map
Give the location a name.
Offer up previous locations you've used as a shortcut.
Create and post a Twitter tweet "L:lat,long I'm at LocationName"

Now you've used Dave Troy's Twittervision convention and quickly and easily posted to Twitter using it. And there's obvious potential here for aggregating everyone's places (like Plazes) and for aggregating more location data as more people use it.

I don't mind having multiple Status Services. But I want one Service to rule them all. So:-

- Aggregate them all in one place (RSS+Twitterfeed mostly does this). But not all services have an RSS feed of my friend's posts.

- Post to one, posts to all. Requires that they all have an API and somebody does a Twitterfeed like service for each one, and they all have RSS out for just my posts. Several of the systems don't have this RSS.

- Aggregate and/or find my friends on each new service. This one's hard. We don't have universal Nicks or a universal ID translator. And most of the services don't have an API for exporting lists of friends. And we don't have a good common format for lists of friends. But without this we're condemned to the "You Are My Friend Y/N?" feeding frenzy on each new service as we try and find all the same people. And just to make this harder and amazingly almost none of them actually have a Search People function.

When Dave Winer started blogging, he used to have two forms. Some would be the long form essay, some would be the short form sentence. His blogging platform encouraged you to build up a day's journal entry from a mix of the two.

Then everyone took the long form essay and said "That's Blogging". The platforms encouraged people to think in terms of posts rather than a Day's Journal. So a Blog post became 20 to 50 lines of text.

But the need for the short form didn't go away, until along came Twitter (and Facebook Status). Suddenly here was a platform that encouraged (and enforced) the short form micro-blog.

So now we have two systems doing essentially the same thing. Providing a platform for the Blog Monologue one encourages essays, the other encourages the short snappy comment and link.

But they're both One to Many Monologue Publishing. Inevitably people also want the One to One Conversation and the Few to Few Group Discussion. So we try to bend the systems to make them do that. Twitter adds function for the @name convention. Pownce builds in "Reply" functionality. Blogs have this love hate relationship with comments as it veers from useful to poison to spam and back again with still no way of tracking multiple comment discussion across multiple blogs.

And each system is still amazingly bad at providing alternate communication methods to a particular person. So I find myself seeing a Twitter post and wanting to start a full blown conversation with the person. So I have to go off hunting and googling to find an address where we can have that. Whether it's Email, Skype, IM, IRC Nick or whatever. Frequently I just give up because the profile pages on each system are so thin, or because the person is hiding their communication addresses.

I have one ticket for the DOUR festival in Belgium for sale. 50 Quid.

12-15 July
Saint-Ghislain near Brussels
http://www.dourfestival.be/en
Lots of Ninja Tune, Ambient, Chilllout, Breakbeat etc bands.

Will take Paypal.

julian_bond at voidstar.com

So now we've got
- Ecademy
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Jaiku
- Pownce
- Plazes
- Skype Mood
All trying to get you to post "What are you doing now?". Some of these have RSS/atom out. Some can read RSS in and use it for posting. Some have an API. They allow 140, 160, 255 characters. And they each have their own set of friends and followers. I really just want one place where I post what I'm doing now and where I am now. And I'd really rather have a single list of friends and followers.

Is this ripe for a shake out? Or is it the future and what we need to do is to build bridges between all of them and create one system to bind them all?

Meanwhile I have yet to see a really good system for posting "Where are you now?". Twittervision have overloaded Twitter with a convention for L:address or L:lat,long but it's really manual. Plazes is getting there but it's still really clunky. Loki have some cool technology but it's unfinished and still largely US only. Yahoo! are working on research projects in this area (like FireEagle from Tom Coates) but it really is pre-alpha.

And location is one of those things that should be transparent and require minimal input from the user. Your PC and/or Cellphone knows what IP address it has, the Cell ID it's connected to, the Wifi AP it's connected to, it may even have a GPS. All these things can get you close so that you can just fine tune it on an embedded map and give it a re-useable name. And given the multiplying status systems, maybe it should be bolted on the side of the existing systems rather than trying to duplicate all their other function.

The goal for location should be that it's as easy as with Twitter to keep track of where your friends are now as it is to track their thoughts and attention.

Well whoop-te-do. AllOfMp3.com has been reborn as mp3sparks.com with all your old accounts moved across. In general, they're still banned from taking your money but it turns out that this is dependent on your country as identified by your IP address. If you used a remote proxy or the TOR onion router, you can find yourself appearing as from a country that is not banned and you can use your normal western Visa credit card via Chronopay.

So now you've got some credit again and it turns out that the Alltunes download manager still works.

So we're back to getting quality encoding using an encoding method of your choice with no DRM and with properly named and tagged files for a very reasonable fee that is about 1/6th of the iTMS price.

It's all good for the consumer, though as before it's less good for the RIAA, record companies and the artists. And it may still be illegal in your jurisdiction.

Now. Amazon or Walmart or eBay. How about you buy the AllOfMp3 technology and offer an identical service. Then negotiate retail prices that substantially undercut iTunes. Let's say $5 per album for lossless FLAC, $3 for 192Kb VBR and $2 for 128Kb VBR.

Key websites
- Twitterfeed Entries in an RSS feed copied to a Twitter account
- Twitter4Skype Twitter account updates copied to a Skype chat
- OpenID This page has a list of OpenID providers where you can get an OpenID
- RSS for your Ecademy status http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&uid=YourEcademyIDNumber
- RSS for your Ecademy contact's status http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=status&op=feed&all=1&uid=YourEcademyIDNumber

Preparation. Get yourself an OpenID.

1. Copy your Ecademy status updates to your Twitter account
- Go to Twitterfeed.
- Log in with an OpenID
- Create a feed entry using your Ecademy status RSS
- Send it to your main Twitter account.
Every update on Ecademy also updates your Twitter

2. Copy your Ecademy Contact's status to a Twitter friend
- Create a dummy Twitter account (eg JBFeeds)
- Add this dummy account as a friend on your main Twitter account
- Go to Twitterfeed.
- Log in with an OpenID
- Create a feed entry using your Ecademy Contact's status RSS
- Send it to your dummy Twitter account. Prefix each tweet with: EC

Now you can see all your Twitter and Ecademy Friend's updates in one place.

3. Display your Ecademy Status on your Facebook profile
- Go to your Facebook profile.
- Add the Facebook Feeds RSS application http://apps.facebook.com/rssbook/
- Add the RSS for your Ecademy status as a feed

Your Ecademy status is now on your Facebook profile.

4. Add feeds from Facebook, Jaiku, Plazes, Ecademy to a Twitter Friend
- Follow on from 2. Seek out the RSS for all the other Status feeds for other services like Facebook, Jaiku, Plazes and add entries in Twitterfeed for them routed to your dummy Twitter user created in 2.
- Add a two letter prefix for each one like FB, EC, JK, PL

Now all your friend's on all your services can update their status and you'll see them all in one place.

5. Route all your Twitter updates to a Skype chat.
- Go here for a tutorial about Twitter to Skype.
1. Add twitter4skype as a contact.
2. Type the following as a single chat message to twitter4skype:

/account (alt+return)
yourtwitteraccountname (alt+return)
yourtwitteraccountpassword (alt+return)
3. The system should return: twitter4skype Registration complete!

All the status updates you've gathered together in 4. appear in this Skype chat. Set Notifications to off for this chat so it doesn't popup every 5 minutes. [from: JB Ecademy]

Only hours to go now till Hackday. What will it be like? The mind boggles at 500 geeks in a hall for 36 hours.

Skype, eBay, PayPal,Twitter, Facebook Mashup competition has just been announced.

The competition runs up to Sept 12th and the Skype developer's conference in Prague. Skype. The one requirement seems to be that there should be at least some use of the Skype API.

There's a public chat running here about it.

How do you tell Google not to index XML such as RSS or FOAF?

As I've turned comments off to avoid the Spam Deluge, answers on a postcard to the usual addresses
julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond?chat

Interesting that Google is reading large quantities of RSS and FOAF (and other XML formats) and doing remarkably little with it.