2010-199-tantek-fsws-talk

(originally posted on 2010-199 at http://federatedsocialweb.net/wiki/2010-199-tantek-fsws-talk which was moved to the W3C FSW IG wiki, have copied here for easier referencing/updating. -t 2012-066)

= Itches & Scratches =

2010-199 Federated Social Web Summit talk by Tantek
 * many building blocks - towards a Federated Social Web
 * hopefully you might be able to (re)use some of them

successful projects

 * most successful projects
 * are people scratching their own itches

consolidating profiles
itch: no easy way of consolidating profiles

scratch: XFN rel-me (since 2003)


 * http://gmpg.org/xfn/and/
 * http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

easy way to publish personal profile
itch: no easy way to publish my preferred profile

scratch: hCard (2004)


 * http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring
 * broke thru 2 billion recently (blog post)

sharecropping and site death
fast-forward to 2008-2010

itch: tired of sharecropping and site death, untrustworthy content hosting


 * 2008-03 CNET killed Consumating.com
 * 2009-02 SixApart killed Pownce.com
 * 2009-12 Yahoo killed GeoCities.com
 * 2009-10-26 Tears in the rain blog post by Jeremy Keith on Geocities's death.
 * 2009 Google shutdown Dodgeball.com
 * 2010-05-14 Google killed Etherpad.com content and URLs
 * 2010-08-04 Google announced end of life for wave.google.com
 * less than 3 months before, Etherpad users were encouraged to transition to Wave.
 * 2010-09-30 Six Apart shutting down Vox on September 30, 2010 (going read-only on 2010-09-15)
 * irony: Six Apart encouraged Pownce users to switch to Vox
 * 2010-09-03: pointed out by Heidi Cool:

and
 * person-specific sharecrop vulnerabilities:
 * 2008 - BoingBoing "unpublished" all articles by Violet Blue (>100 posts) (see: William Gibson Completely Deleted from BoingBoing Archives)
 * Twitter fail frustrations

scratch: DIY indie web, start with my own site
 * use my site as my identity - XFN+hCard+OpenID pretty much solved this
 * post tweets/notes on my own site
 * syndicate out to silos - that's where my friends listen/post

http://tantek.com/


 * server-based Twitter client
 * called it Falcon http://tantek.pbworks.com/Falcon
 * the fastest bird, when trained, can drop things off, pick things up for you

user interface frustrations
itch: crappy Twitter permalink UI, etc.

http://twitter.com/t, http://twitter.com/t/status/18803073634


 * inconsistent typography (sans vs. serif ?!?)
 * navigation deadend
 * no URL embeds
 * poor auto-linking (e.g. "federatedsocialweb.net" )
 * auto-shortening when not needed!

scratch: improved UI on my site http://ttk.me/t46n3
 * Helvetica - at least it's consistent
 * next/prev buttons/shortcuts (arrow keys, j/k)
 * easy URLs for copy/paste linking
 * better auto-linking (handle URLs without http)
 * better ellipsing

URL shortener service problems
itches:
 * tr.im being down, shutting down, going away
 * bit.ly being blocked

scratch: my own shortener domain

http://ttk.me/

everyone should have one (in addition to their own domain of course).

go get one.

URL shortener fragility
itch: url shorteners are fragile (Joshua post), databases are fragile (database dies, IDs die)

scratch: algorithmic URL shortening


 * Whistle
 * what you use to call a trained Falcon
 * introducing "algorithmic permashortlinks"

non-printsafe short URLs
itch: non-printsafe short URL encodings
 * http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bit.ly - note use of "O", "l" etc.
 * print evidence: http://tantek.pbworks.com/ShortURLPrintExample

scratch: print-safe NewBase60
 * http://tantek.pbworks.com/NewBase60

writing code over and over
itch: tired of writing same logic front/back-end
 * http://bulletproofajax.com/

scratch: CASSIS language subset/framework
 * runs native in Javascript and PHP
 * http://tantek.pbworks.com/CassisProject
 * http://tantek.com/cassis.js
 * open source

CASSIS proof of concept
itch: amazon shortlinks too long

scratch: ASIN.cc


 * proof of concept of CASSIS, NewBase60, algorithmic shortening

OpenID too hard to consume
itch: OpenID PHP libraries too big/complex
 * http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/ or http://www.janrain.com/openid-enabled

scratch: RelMeAuth - generalize form of TwitterAuth model
 * http://microformats.org/wiki/RelMeAuth
 * Python open source proof of concept
 * http://github.com/ptarjan/relmeauth
 * PHP proof of concept
 * http://github.com/themattharris/relmeauth
 * live prototype: http://tantek.com/relmeauth/ (was live demo: http://apps.themattharris.com/relmeauth/ )

Twitter bottleneck
itch: twitter being down - bottleneck to update other sites

scratch: implement PubSubHubbub support (easy) + Atom (bulky)
 * goal: unbottleneck myself from Twitter
 * e.g. updates my Buzz directly

http://www.google.com/profiles/tantek

discovered:
 * Buzz not really support Atom with XHTML (avoiding double-escaping)
 * Buzz special treats Twitter - can't emulate yourself (yet)

Maybe Activity Streams can solve this.

diso
itch: DiSo lack of apparent progress, don't want to install/maintain/update WordPress, database backup tax

complexity favors oligarchies, rise of the oligarchies

scratch: reframe DiSo2
 * indie web first, oligarchies second

conceptualizing DiSo 2.0:
 * 1) personal site+shortlink domains.
 * 2) algorithmic URL shortener.
 * 3) hAtom store (no DBA tax - easier to maintain/backup than MySQL).
 * 4) hAtom activity stream (DRY).
 * 5) update notifications to PubSubHubbub (PuSH).
 * 6) your own PuSH hub.
 * 7) content-type-specific syndication to specific sites (e.g. text notes to Twitter, geo checkins to Foursquare, photos to Flickr, events to Upcoming, etc.).
 * 8) reverse syndication of comments+tags+notes from said specific sites.
 * 9) edit/comment authorization via RelMeAuth (OAuth + rel-me).
 * 10) personal OAuth endpoint.

summary
steps you can take today:
 * 1) use your own site as your identity
 * 2) publish on your own site: HTML first (XFN, hCard, hAtom), XML next (Atom, ActivityStreams), API last
 * 3) syndicate with PubSubHubbub

Most importantly, build things that scratch your own itches first.

thanks
Tantek Çelik
 * http://tantek.com
 * http://twitter.com/t

Add hCard to address book