Go By Airship Combined Feed

django-oembed

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:31:16 -0800

This is awesome.

Check out how it's used:

{% oembed %} There is this great video at http://www.viddler.com/explore/SYSTM/videos/49/ {% endoembed %}

Will result in:

There is this great video at <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="320" height="222" id="viddlerplayer-e5cb3aac"><param name="movie" value="http://www.viddler.com/player/e5cb3aac/" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://www.viddler.com/player/e5cb3aac/" width="320" height="222" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" name="viddlerplayer-e5cb3aac" ></embed></object>

Notifications how I want them

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:18:18 -0800

Maybe I'm just asking for too much, but I want more control over how people and services contact me. SMS or IM is generally the best, email and voice the worst. You might feel entirely the opposite of me, preferring everything to go into your email inbox so you can then sort and filter and do whatever dark, disturbing things you do to your email. That's okay. In fact, that's the point - we should be contacted in whatever manner is best suited for our personal work flow. But how do we do that? Just make little notes about each person? "Jim really hates it when I email him, so I have to break down this essay into 140-character snippets and send them out, but I need Samantha CC to get this too, and she wants IM, so..."

Yeah, no.

There's a better way to do this.

Let's say I sign up to, oh, Twitter using my OpenID. Twitter says, "Okay, great. You have an account. You have all the wonderful webapp services that we provide. However, we can also tell you about things that happen in real time so you don't have to keep checking our website - do you want to set this up?" Since I want to be notified when certain events happen, I say yes, and an OAuth (or OAuth-like) request is sent to my identity provider. My identity provider is a good one, so it has lots of different options for getting in touch with me - it can IM me, SMS me or email me. It could, conceivably, direct message me on Twitter, query me on IRC, hire a skywriter to write out the messages in the city I'm currently in - ultimately it doesn't matter how my identity provider gets in touch with me, just that it can. During this request, I tell my provider, "Okay, I want all messages to go to my IM account. If I'm not online, then I want only important messages to be texted to me." Once I'm done selecting how I want to be contacted by Twitter, I click okay and the request is completed. I go around and add friends (or, friends are already added - wouldn't that be nice!) and select some to have 'device notifications on.'

Now comes the fun part.

When there's a new update for me, any new update, Twitter sends a quick little API request to my identity provider. That API request contains a priority (eg, 1 for friend notifications, 5 for all updates, 8 for messages from people with device notifications on, 10 for direct messages), an optional short version of the message designed for IM/SMS and the full length message.

That's all it has to do.

My identity provider takes the request, looks up my preferences and acts on them. I get a normal update, it sees that I'm not on IM but that the priority is too low to go to SMS - so it ignores it, presumably returning a "Message failed to deliver due to the user not giving a damn about it" error to Twitter, who probably doesn't care. Any direct message or updates from people for who I have device notifications on would then be SMS'd to me - by my identity provider. Not Twitter.

There is, of course, a lot of customizations you could do here - the priority system is a bit clunky, but provides a lot of power that could easily be hidden by a proper UI. I still get notified of events but I get the notifications I want how I want them. I get notifications only from people I have authorized (though I would presumably have a public dropbox that I could check via email or a web interface or whatever - it's not important) and I have nice, elegant control over my communication flow.

So, let's refine this idea. What's next?

A location aware web

Tue, 06 May 2008 08:36:00 -0800

Chris Messina has a great post about the upcoming location-aware layer on the internet. He starts off by mainly pondering how trivial access to a person's location will change the way we design future applications. One paragraph in particular caught my eye:

If you imagine for a minute that the ubiquity of wireless-enabled laptops gave rise to the desire-slash-ability for more productive mobile work, and consequently created the opportunity for the coworking community to blossom; if you consider that the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones created the opening for a service like Flickr (et al) to take off; if you consider that the affordability of camcorders, accessibility of video on digital cameras, cell phones and built-in in laptops and iMacs, coupled with simpler tools like iMovie, lead to people being able and wanting to post videos to a service like YouTube (et al); if you look at how the ubiquity of some kind of device technology with [media] output lead to the rise of services/communities that were optimized for that same media, you might start to realize that a huge opportunity is coming for locative devices that make it easy to publish where you are, discover where your friends are, and to generally receive benefits from being able to inform third parties, in a facile way, where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going.

This struck me as being similar in thought to something that that Jyri Engestrom mentioned:

Last but not least, we can use the object-centered sociality theory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for social networking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.' Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too.

Location awareness is going to quickly become very important. We're already seeing attempts at it, but most of them (I'm looking at BrightKite here, but pretty much all of them have this issue) are the equivalent of a Flickr where you have to scan your pictures in before you can upload them. The process is easy enough, but the required constant manual entry just will not work. Even typing L: (your location) into your presence notifier is too annoying, though I can see the case for privacy-centric folks preferring that method. For about a week. Before they get bored of it and never use it again. A much better approach for the privacy focused might be a method where when a service is going to ping people about your location, it will send an authorization request via sms, email, IM, whatever asking for your permission to broadcast your location (but, again, only when you would be included in the service). Then, you would show up for however long that session is - that location only for up to 12 hours, something user configurable, whatever. Of course, these are exactly the kinds of questions that Messina is talking about - these are the questions that we should start thinking about, considering how close we are to ubiquitous location information.

I'm excited. How about you?

Your own personal airship

Fri, 02 May 2008 12:09:33 -0800

WANT

Facebook apps don't do anything "useful" - so what?

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:41:13 -0800

TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider are commenting on a nice pretty chart that hit the internet this morning which shows that the vast majority of Facebook apps are "just for fun."

Here's the chart:

Now, first off, let me come out and say that I love making fun of Facebook. I avoid using it whenever possible though I still keep my profile around in case, one day, it might be useful, even if only as a rolodex.

I do not, however, see any problem whatsoever that the vast majority of these apps are in the 'Just for Fun' category. In fact, I can't really imagine a situation where that wouldn't be the case.

People get tired of being asked to be zombies or whatever the latest app is over and over again, but it's still increasing communication and practically throwing social utility at you.

Social utility is a term I thought I had just made up, but a quick Google search shows that not only am I not as clever as I had hoped I was, but that's exactly the term that Zuckerberg used to describe the app environment.

Facebook is about communicating with people and they (unfortunately) do a pretty good job with it. It definitely has lots of major flaws, but dissing the system based on this graph is just muck raking.

Social networking fit into actual relationships

Fri, 02 May 2008 10:16:27 -0800

This video eloquently and effectively demonstrates my thoughts on online relationships.

It's also hilarious.

Relationships are awful (online, anyway)

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:14:03 -0800

People get excited about relationships. Online friend systems have in many cases become a realm that I'm sure interests the kind of people who want to create drugs for the next hip mental disorder. Anxiety? Oh no, my friend, you have online paranoid friendship issues. Here, take four of these, six of these, and for God's sake, don't check Facebook for at least two days! The silliest part about all this though is that relationships online don't matter.

The Problem

…one of my primary concerns has always been that we not accede to the heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems - and yet, that’s a precise definition of social networking as currently instantiated. -Adam Greenfield

Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.' -Jyri Engeström

Human relationships are insanely complicated. They are not only impossible to model, but they change by the second and so any system attempting to track them would need constant input. So, we abstract them down to the point where I can point at somebody I know and go "Friend," or point at my mother and say... well... "Family," or I can delve into a myriad of details and specify that my friend is a colleague at work and we went to the same school and so on and so on. Each new relationship that we specify tells the system something else about us and, in turn, we're rewarded with a higher friend count. We go along with what the system gives us, clicking on boxes and filling in forms, until we get bored and move on to another social networking site, where we basically end up doing the same thing.

I am so insanely bored by this.

Humans can handle relationships. We're really good at it. Our brains can keep track of all the minutia, all of these little bits of data ("Joe gave me a small piece of cake at the office party - that bastard," "Sally always opens the door for me, she's so nice") that combine to make a full relationship from one person to the other. Our actual feelings also tend to differ from our outward appearances, so even a careful observer could easily get our relationships wrong. Put on top of this that relationships are not mutual, they're unique and one-way, and you start to wonder why people try to model them around SQL tables at all.

But, let's step back for a minute. Let's talk about objects.

My definition of a geek is, "Somebody who socializes via objects." When you think about it, we're all geeks. Because we're all enthusiastic about something outside ourselves. For me, it's marketing and cartooning. for others, it could be cellphones or Scotch Whisky or Apple computers or NASCAR or the Boston Red Sox or Bhuddism. All these act as Social Objects within a social network of people who care passionately about the stuff. -Hugh MacLeod

Objects, in this sense, are anything. My computer. Your computer. Your chair. My hat. This blog. This sentence. Your latest tweet. Whatever is going through your head right now. The dinner you had last night. Anything at all. However, some objects become social objects. Social objects are the reason that specific people connect with specific other people. Fascinating conversations occur around social objects - think of a social object as a rock dropped into a pond. The ripples that occur is the effect that that social object had on the social space (the pond). Social objects are not just the instigators but are also the binding agent of many, many relationships.

Do you see the problem yet?

When we focus too much on the relationships between individuals, we lose track of what provides the most interesting fodder for all parties involved. The role of social networks these days is not to keep track of who friended who, but rather to make communication among these completely ad-hoc social-object-based groups as easy and efficient as possible. It's all about communication.

The Solution

The key to effective online socialization (which, mind you, often translates very nicely into offline socialization - just ask anybody in the Portland twitter scene) is open communication. We currently have walled garden applications all over the place that keep hold of your data, hoping that you'll only interact on these objects using their service. You can't stop communication.

I think DiSo is probably the best bet for an effective future where I don't have to spend most of my time online answering or sending friend requests and setting up completely arbitrary relationships. DiSo represents a network where social objects and the communications around them are easily exchanged, and that's definitely something I can get behind.

I want to communicate, not check boxes.

Reading more

First off, Chris Messina's post titled Relationships are Complicated was what started me thinking about this.
Jyri Engeström's presentation about growing social networks, which you can watch online, was also a huge influence, as was his blog post on a case for object-centered sociality.
Hugh MacLeod also helped tie a lot of bits together, especially his thoughts on social objects.

Going to Sun's CommunityOne OpenID Workshop

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:20:18 -0800

Sun has offered to host an OpenIDDevCamp at their annual day-long CommunityOne developer conference the day before the start of JavaOne. Not only will you get a chance to talk with OpenID developers you’ll also get to interact with members of other open source communities (such as Drupal and Ruby on Rails). Vidoop’s Michael Richardson is going to be helping lead the efforts with the help of other community members.

Monday May 5, 2008 - 11am - 8pm Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA

Queryset-refactor hits trunk! Woohoo!

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:09:50 -0800

Malcolm Tredinnick just merged the queryset-refactor branch into the Django trunk. I'm really looking forward to the improvements it brings.

Quick note re: design of the blog

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:49:43 -0800

I apologize for the horrid undesign of the blog, I've been a bit too busy to really sit down and work on it and figured it would be better to get the content up asap. Hopefully you won't know what I'm talking about by the time you read this.

Update (04/28/2008 9:25pm): My good friend Josh Pyles, aka Pixelmatrix gave me a couple of quick recommendations on the site - tons of improvements! Thanks, Josh! If you still think it's ugly, well, sorry.

OpenID and Django

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:33:49 -0800

If you've ever gone to implement OpenID on your website, you'll know that it's not exactly an easy thing to do. Enabling OpenID is super easy to do if you're using Wordpress with wp-plugin. OpenID support is also built into Drupal. If you're not using those solutions, however, it's definitely not as simple as installing a module. It should be, however.

Simon Willison went a long way with his django-openidconsumer application, and extended a bit further with his basically unreleased django-openidauth which allows for a greater integration between an OpenID authenticated user and the contrib.auth system. Simon hasn't updated the module to use the openid2.0 libraries, which is very unfortunate - however, I was able to update it to use the 2.0 library in about 10 minutes while flying from Portland to San Francisco this morning.

But that's kind of the problem.

The resources are there, they just aren't really designed for easy adoption. Part of this I think is contrib.auth. It's designed to do authentication its way very well (namely, usernames are required, emails are not unique). It's easy to hack it so that you use emails to log in, but you're still using an improper model definition for that and there isn't really an elegant solution for using that. I'm not sure that piggy-backing OpenID onto contrib.auth is the best approach.

Regardless, I'm very interested in helping put together a good OpenID package for Django. I'll keep posting notes as I come up with them.

Video - Discovery Channel's I Love the World ad

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:01:25 -0800

This is such a great ad.

Vidoop is going to Web 2.0

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:49:23 -0800

Vidoop - er, I mean, ConfIdent - is going to Web 2.0. This will be the first time I'm going and I'm looking forward to wearing my Vidoop - er, ConfIdent - sweater vest.

Portland Django User Group announced

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:13:29 -0800

I'm a big Django fan. I've always been kind of disappointed by a like of any Django community in Portland, so on the recommendation of Kveton I started a Portland Django User Group. Feel free to join the list. Our first meet up is tomorrow, April 16, at 5pm at Bailey's Taproom which is cool enough to have its own twitter account.
RSVP on Upcoming and I hope to see you there!