Two years ago when I re-joined Six Apart, I did so out of an interest in evolving social networking technologies along with
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brad and we – along with many others – have made an amazing amount of progress. This was my second time working at Six Apart and I'm sad to leave; they're a great bunch of people with some awesome stuff coming.This past year as I've worked closer with teams at Facebook, I've been impressed by their products, smart people, and innovation. I hope to continue building on my past experience in working on making the web more open and useful for everyone along with the great team at Facebook!
I Dig It - Another iPhone game which is quite addicting until you run out of missions. You run a "digger" machine and go mining under a farm for jewels, fossils, gems, etc in order to raise money to save the farm. You have to spend money to upgrade your digger to go deeper, hold more cargo, have more gas, etc and complete your mission goal before time runs out. Some missions include finding things underground versus a specific monetary goal.
The first Community Leadership Summit - Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager for Ubuntu around the World, organized an unconference style event the weekend before OSCON to bring together people who work with various open source and related communities. I went Saturday and really enjoyed the series of discussions that I participated in. They ranged from how to be successful at marketing open source style projects, to building healthy open communities, to how open source projects live or die through acquisitions. If Jono organizes this event again next year, it is definitely worth checking out.
Roast Chicken - I was out in New York a few weeks ago having dinner with Anil and Alaina when we started talking about easy things to cook at home. They both suggested roast chicken and were right! The first one turned out great and I made a second last night – less lemon and more garlic – which is even jucier! Chicken, butter, garlic, lemon, salt, pepper, oil, an oven and an hour is all it takes.
And of course, OpenID continues to rock! (though Google News keeps including articles that mention "OpenID" as one of the log in methods which is really annoying since the articles aren't actually about OpenID)
“We’re constantly looking for ways to stay innovative in our online initiatives by identifying and implementing technologies that help our users navigate our communities with ease,” says Rob Harles, Sears’ vice president of community. “Our adoption of the OpenID technology helps simplify our customers’ online experience and ultimately helps us meet our goal of ensuring our customers have the most efficient shopping experience possible.”
Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.Read more...
I was never big into social bookmarking, I never really used delicious and only used ma.gnolia mainly to track things which I found interesting. When I log into bit.ly, I now see largely the same thing.
It wouldn't take much for bit.ly to give me a public profile listing recent URLs I've shortened. Ideally they'd show the tweet I used the link in and who else linked to it or wrote about it (which they also already show me). Sounds to me like the main functionality I got out of my ma.gnolia profile.
Might bit.ly go from URL shortening and stats to social bookmarking? Throw in chartbeat too and betaworks has some pretty interesting data.
The person in front of me was a flight attendant for American Airlines. As Starbucks is located before security, she had a half drunk frappuccino with her and an obvious intent to take it through security. If you haven't flown in the past few years, the TSA has gone to great lengths to ban people from bringing liquids and gels through a security checkpoint.
TSA Officer Pittman who was standing behind the metal detector asked the flight attendant, "is that a caramel frappuccino?"
The flight attendant somewhat casually replies, "no, of course not" and then walked through the metal detector with it in her hand. Officer Pittman clearly saw that she was violating the TSA's liquids rule but did nothing to stop her.
Quite honestly, I could care less if people are allowed to bring coffee through the security checkpoint, but I expect my government to hold themselves to a consistent and higher bar. It isn't about this one flight attendant "sneaking" a frappuccino through security, but rather that the rules and laws the TSA has created should be enforced uniformly and not ignored when it is convenient. I'd obviously love to see the prohibition of liquids changed, but until then we've all got 3-1-1 to live with.
- Location:DCA
It's been awhile since I've posted about stuff not related to OpenID, so I figured it would be good to share some things from the past few weeks I've really enjoyed!
World of Goo - I first played this game on a Wii at my friend's house a few months ago and it's incredibly awesome. Such a simple idea of building structures out of "Goo Balls" with a bit of physics included so if you're structure sucks then your Goo Balls will topple over. The Mac Heist Bundle includes it for OS X, so now I'm addicted again on my laptop.
Amazon Kindle - I bought a new Kindle (I didn't have one of the original ones) a few days before I went on vacation in Belize about a month ago. It's really easy to read and being able to make the font small to fit more on a page during the day and then a few sizes larger at night is a huge help. Made it through The Shadow Factory while in Belize which is about the NSA directly leading up to and then after 9/11. Right now I'm working my way through Freakonomics. Most books for the Kindle seem to cost about $10.
Custom Google Maps - FedEx was supposed to deliver 180 Moleskin notebooks to me via next day air this week and blew it. So I played with custom maps on Google for the first time and came up with a way to visually show why FedEx sucks! Wouldn't a live Google Map showing the plane in flight or truck carrying your package be a much better way to track packages than the normal tracking pages?
Airport Mania - I twittered about this iPhone game last week, but it's been a huge time suck! On each level you control planes landing, dropping off passengers, being repaired, refueling, waiting, picking up passengers and taking off. All of this with bonus point optimizations for using the same runway for multiple landings in the row or the same gate for a few planes of the same color in a row.
Doña Paula Malbec 2007 - Picked up this wine randomly from Whole Foods for $14.99 ($11.99 at K&L) and really enjoyed it. Great flavor, not expensive and whitaker, mart and deflatermouse liked it too!
A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user. This is the same model that destroyed AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy's ISP businesses when normal people chose the Internet itself versus their thoughtfully curated walled gardens.Read more...
I was using FriendFeed a few days ago and came across an excellent example of why this project is so important. Today, FriendFeed writes custom parsing code for about sixty different services across the social web in order to understand the feeds that each service produces. This means that if I'm using a service that FriendFeed knows about – like Disqus – it works really well. Then again, for services they haven't taken the time to write parsing code for – like TypePad Connect – it doesn't work so well. While I'm certain that FriendFeed could easily write additional code to understand TypePad's feeds, as more social web sites are created it will become increasingly difficult for FriendFeed to keep up with every new service, let alone blogger.
While FriendFeed can certainly keep coding support for new services, it isn't a sustainable proposition for the decentralized nature of the social web. If TypePad published my commenting feeds using Activity Streams markup (which the TypePad team plans to do) and then if FriendFeed parsed the Activity Streams markup, this would have automatically worked! No custom code from FriendFeed and a little bit of extra code for TypePad. Now that's a decentralized social web!
The four of us ended up shooting a quick video telling the story and how a few Tweets caused someone else to choose a different hotel for their upcoming trip. Gary also posted about this as How your brand can be affected in 2009 and its impact and it ties directly into a presentation by Alex Hunter of Virgin earlier in the day at FOWA about managing your brand online.
Update: Four hours later and this post is now fourth on the second page of Google results for "Mondrian Miami".
Also, welcome Don Thibeau as the new Executive Director of the Foundation!
While you need to be an OpenID Foundation member to vote ($25 per year), the working groups themselves are open to anyone for participation!
I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure the list goes on. I'm trying to break down all of these products - ignoring the underlying open or proprietary technologies that make them tick - toward a straw man definition of a "Connect" application:Read more...
- Location:Wellington, New Zealand
Today at the OpenID Design Summit at Facebook, Joseph Smarr presented the results and they were pretty mind boggling; 92% clickthrough rate from the invite email all the way through logging into Plaxo with their Google Account (via OpenID) and importing their address book (via OAuth).
ReadWriteWeb sums it up nicely:
This experimental method refers to big, known brands where users were already logged in, it requires zero typing - just two clicks - and it takes advantage of the OpenID authentication opportunity to get quick permission to leverage the well established OAuth data swap to facilitate immediate personalization - at the same time.
Five months ago I joined Mark Zuckerberg on stage at Facebook f8 during their announcement of Facebook Connect, where I demoed signing in to comment on a Movable Type blog using my Facebook account. Today, I get to join Mike Schroepfer, Chris Messina and my fellow board members in announcing that Facebook has become a board member of the OpenID Foundation.Initially Facebook is focusing on helping the community improve the usability and user experience of OpenID and Luke Shepard has already blogged his thoughts on how to accept OpenID in a popup without leaving the page. Luke and Dave Morin's involvement in getting Facebook to the point where they are today truly cannot be overstated.
Next up, some working code!
David,
I note from your profile that you are involved in the OpenID standard initiative within SixApart.
I am Managing Director for a web authentication technology company which has recently developed a patent-pending, completely secure, un-hackable and unbreakable authentication technology that I think may be of interest to you and your organisation.
The technology is hardware and software based and is built around two factor authentication with an out of band element which is far superior to any other authentication solution on the market.
It is low cost to manufacture/deploy/integrate, extremely simple to use, maintenance free and is presented and utilised in a format regularly used by most adults in the developed world today.
It is like nothing else in the market place (tokens, OTP by SMS, biometrics etc) and does, I assure you, defeat the one attack that all of these technologies are susceptible to – 'man in the middle' attacks.
We are in the process of trying to identify and establish relationships with the most dynamic organisations that are leading the way as OpenID service providers, as we believe that our technology could give your company the cutting edge in authentication solutions, and which could considerably strengthen and compliment your OpenID service.
If you would like to learn more about out technology then I would be more than pleased to share an executive summary with you and to talk further should you be interested. Feel free to reply via InMail/email or you can call any reasonable time GMT.
Kind Regards
Justin Chamberlain
ScreenKeyID
p.s. I may have forgotten to mention that the technology could also be used as a simple yet very significant revenue generator.
This morning we announced that PayPal has joined the Board of the OpenID Foundation along with Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! who were the existing corporate members. I think that PayPal helps to really balance out the types of companies on the board and hopefully will really engage the community when it comes to security and trust. As Michael Calore said on Wired, "There are several issues preventing OpenID from being widely adopted on the web. The issue cited most frequently is the lack of a cohesive, elegant user experience, but there's also a lot of confusion around the issues of security and trust." Like him, I hope that PayPal can help knock one of those items off the list this year.
crucially travels just as much as I do). This of course only made my mail situation worse as I didn't have an easy forwarding address. So, I signed up for Earth Class Mail.
A month and a half later and I was still happy; receiving email telling me I had new paper mail with a scan of the envelope and a web interface where I could choose to open and scan the contents, group together a few pieces of paper mail and ship them to me, shred it, or recycle junk mail.
All of a sudden, I could manage my paper mail via the Internet instead of having huge piles sitting at home which I never touched. This also meant that if I was actually being sent something important and I was out of town, I could see the scanned contents instead of having to wait until I was home. Didn't want to deal with a piece of mail, no problem as it was sitting in their warehouse instead of my living room.
I've been up in Portland the past two weeks for the holidays which coincidentally is where Earth Class Mail is headquartered. A few days, ago their community manager @UncleNate shot me a message asking if I'd be interested in checking out their facility. So yesterday – yes they work on Saturdays too – I drove over to Beaverton to get a tour of their warehouse. It's an old Tektronix building which was originally built not really as a building but rather as a machine. It's full of row after row of shelving that used to have computer controlled robots running on tracks in the ceiling fetching, storing, and moving all sorts of stuff. Today, it's a nondescript security-conscious facility (I couldn't take photos inside) sorting, scanning, storing and shipping a shit ton of mail.
Nate walked me through their process from receiving mail and packages to taking all of the normal sized envelopes and running them through modified mail sorting machines. These machines are like those used by the USPS but also scan the front and apply a unique barcode to each piece of mail. This kicks off a job which sends out emails, like the one above, automatically letting everyone know that they have a new piece of mail. From there, mail is sorted into tubs and stored until more jobs come in to open and scan, ship, shred, or recycle a piece of mail.They're also proactively looking for mail (by the barcode) that needs something to happen to it every time they're re-running a tub through one of the sorters. This means that if I have a piece of mail in tub 183 which I've asked to be shipped to me and you have a piece in the same tub that you asked to be recycled, when they pull the tub and run it through the sorter to automatically find my piece of mail to ship, the machine will also automatically sort out your piece to be recycled. Everyone in the warehouse is wearing pocket-less coveralls and no cell phones, cameras, etc are allowed and the people opening and scanning mail work in separate locked room.
All in all, a pretty cool operation (with even cooler mail robots coming to their warehouse in the future) and it was great for Nate to see that I was a happy customer, that I grew up in and was visiting Portland, and to proactively reach out to show me just how they took over dealing with the paper mail I love to ignore.
- Location:Portland, OR
One of the fun projects I've been involved in at work the past few months has been Motion which we're describing as "a new free beta social application for Movable Type." As Anil wrote today in the blog post announcing the public beta:
But the vision of Motion is something we've been working on for a long time, well before we acquired Pownce or before the tech blogosphere started talking about Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect. So, we'd like to outline some of the guiding principles that informed our creation of Motion, as a starting point to the conversation about where social applications in general are headed.
- The biggest social network is the Internet itself.
- Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.
- Reveal the community you already have.
- Your social network belongs under your control.
- Your community should start with half a billion members.
- The web is in Motion.
Basically, Motion brings even more social feature to Movable Type focused on being able to run an interactive community, a social network, that is connected with the rest of the web. This means that the main page of your site is an aggregation of what your members are posting locally (photos, videos, text, links, etc) as well as the actions they're taking around the web (such as their Twitter updates). Profiles then show what a person has been doing and who they're following. Really just all sorts of interesting stuff that's explained even better on the Movable Type Motion beta page.
It's been a fun project since the team hasn't been thinking about how to cram every latest feature from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr or FriendFeed into Motion, but rather around what real community maintainers are wanting to be able to do with this sort of tool. It also follows through on our announcement at Facebook f8 earlier this year where we said that we would ship support for Facebook Connect, but of course we did it Six Apart style and included support for Google's OpenID Provider as well!
Go open web, go!
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