Category: Usability

ClaimID adds social networking

claimID.com XFN creator

In spite of previous disavowals of having social networking aspirations, identity link aggregator ClaimID has now added the ability to add other ClaimID members to your profile as contacts.

Interestingly, they restrict you to adding friends who have OpenIDs (since every ClaimID profile URL is an OpenID) and use the to define your relationship.

This is a significant decision because, presumably, every OpenID has an owner. As such, adding one of these “verified” OpenID URLs as a contact to your verified OpenID URL could represent a higher trust level — a stronger “claim” as the lingo goes — than simply using the XFN rel-me attribute to create a “weak” relationship claim. Or so goes the theory.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reordering my Flickr screenshot collections and have created a set devoted to adding friends interfaces. If you have examples of similar interfaces, leave me a link to the source and I’ll get them added!

IconBuffet and Shopify add support for OpenID

Shopify » Please Log In

Two more announcements for OpenID adoption — but this time on the consuming side (as opposed to my originally incorrect report about WordPress.com — for now, they’re only serving as an identity provider).

The first is Shopify, a great Rails-based custom store application. As Alex points out, these guys really get it right — and make it super easy to create compelling marketplaces. And now, it’s super easy to log in with OpenID.

IconBuffet | Login

Meanwhile, IconBuffet has gone through a major overhaul, becoming something of a social network for … icon enthusiasts! (Sweet!) One of the more existing aspects of the relaunch (at least for me) is their use of OpenID: you can either create a new account with an existing OpenID (say, your WordPress.com blog URL) or you associate your existing account with an OpenID. Either way, they too’ve made it really easy to get going with OpenID.

I imagine that these won’t be the last of the increasing deployments of OpenID in the medium- to long-tail (read: not Google or IBM, but small business community). What’s so existing about these recent additions is their proximity to commerce — and how folks like Shopify could eventually weave a web service that allows you to check out — entirely by way of logging in to your OpenID provider. If you choose a good OpenID provider, you can start to see how the CardSpace metaphor makes sense — just like when you go out to eat and depending on whether it’s a business meal or a personal expense, you’ll use a different credit card to pay.

The same thing is true for OpenID — where you can have as many OpenIDs as you like and you can pick among them for different uses or purposes. It’s only a matter of time before I go to check out at IconBuffet, I login with my WordPress.com OpenID and I’m able to use credits that I’ve purchased on WordPress.com to pay for my icons — with no need to reach for the credit card, to fill in my address info or any of that ever again!

Now, if that doesn’t sound exciting, you might want to check your pulse. 😉

Soundflavor launches — a new way to discover the music you already own

Peter Merholz has blogged the release of Soundflavor, the first product released from Adaptive Path’s New Ventures project.

Lane’s written up a case study describing the process that was used to develop the app, notably using an iterative, design-and-build process, as opposed to using a documentation-design-implement method (kind of like the waterfall method).

Of course, I know quite a bit about this process, since this was also the first product that I helped design after leaving Flock (I, too, can claim that i made this, along with Dan Saffer and others, including Tim from Big Empty and the great folks at Soundflavor). In fact, I helped out with the initial spec, product development and design process and facilitating the brainstorming that lead to the soon-to-revealed relationship between the app and the website. Unfortunately, early into the development cycle, travel and other commitments precluded me from seeing out the implementation of the product, even though the final result is very much in line with my original concepts.

So what’s so great about Soundflavor?

Well, unlike other streaming services like Pandora (of which I’m a huge fan), it actually pulls music from your existing music collection and music shared on your local network with Bonjour, creating interactive playlists that vary in “flavor”, or similarity, helping you to rediscover the music that you already own or that the people around you own.

Of course, in addition to that, Soundflavor will recommend new music similar to what you already own or are listening to for purchasing and building out your library.

And, with the Playlist Creator, you can take Soundflavor’s work with you — simply pick a track, artist or album as a “flavor” and Soundflavor will generate a playlist with as many “flavored” tracks as you want (more feature details can be found on the download page).

Reviews so far seem good, and I’m eager to see their playlist-cum- sharing community launch (think deviantART meets iMix) — and hopefully, someday, Lucas Gonze will have his way (I rallied for ya, man!).

Anyway, I’m dying for the Mac version to come out — as the subset of tracks I listen to from my 22,000 track library is starting to go stale (as evidenced by my Last.fm account). Give it a shot and let me know what you think — since I can’t try it yet and would like to know, in terms of iTunes controllers, how this one stacks up given its pretty sweet featureset.

Luke Dorny on which apps to try

Luke DornyI have noticed that more beta-y and more independent software developers are more likely to put newer services and features than larger developers though. Like integrating audioscrobbler into an itunes controller, etc. These days the first thing i do is try to weigh how grassroots and forward-thinking a developer is when weighing a decision to download and try.

Much like Todos was a few weeks ago.

Hyperscope and the future of the past

The mother of all demos
Photo by John Lester.

I can’t quite tell how significant this is, but I know that it’s been a long time coming and that, only over time, will we begin to understand what this system will really mean for information systems.

In classic understated flair, Doug, Eugene and Brad will be releasing the Web 2.0 version of Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope to the world tonight.

It’s hard for to describe succinctly, but basically it’s taking hypertext and adding the “hyper” to it (today’s web linking is kind of like the Model-T compared to Engelbart’s space age original 1968 vision). You’ve really got to try it for yourself to see what I mean; what at first seems like a big outline (it’s cleverly built on top of OPML) quickly becomes an immersive experience that other system pale in depth and flexibility to.

In some respects, this kind of learnable system is what I was talking about in my post on learning from game design. The only presumption, or goal, of the Hyperscope system is that you’re interested in working with knowledge and information — how you go about finding, linking to, appending or operating on that information is up to you.

All that and it’s built on Alex Russell’s Dojo Toolkit is an achievement in open source cross pollination that should be also be duly recognized.

Congrats guys.

A combined view of the world

NetNewsWire + Shiira Tabs

In a post titled “The new Combined View and hybrid web/desktop apps“, Brent Simmons reveals that’s he’s starting to see the power of AJAX-powered interfaces in Mac apps, namely NetNewsWire (beta 3.0b7 now available).

Going one step further, he makes a very important observation:

The key to the whole thing is JavaScript. When something happens in the page—you click on a news item, for instance—the page calls back into the app, and the app tells the page how to update.

It’s kind of like Ajax in that way, except that the communication channel is not http and it’s synchronous (which it can be, since it’s right there on your machine).

And in that, he’s beginning to pull away at what very likely will become the next generation platform of the next revolution in web development.

For some time, people have gone on and on about the LAMP stack — made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. It’s certainly a veritable and productive bundle of technology — if you’re always online. The truth of the matter, however, is that our local content stores don’t sync well with the remote stores… that my local LAMP don’t talk much with remote LAMPs. And in terms of offline productivity, that makes for huge dilemmas.

I’m seeing a third generation stack emerging that holds a great deal of promise for sewing up the future of offline-sync-online experiences.

That stack looks a bit more like Rails, SQL Lite (which the next rev of the Firefox bookmarks will be based on), Microformats, some blend of JSON/AMASS/jQuery/behaviour.js/scriptaculous/prototype and, yes, WebKit. What do they have in common? Well, enough inter-woven stickiness to make the heart of a true web geek start to murmur.

The missing link? The client and server OS component to tie them all together. Now, I’d love to see hAtom used as the data transport and storage mechanism in the OS. It would simply so much… but alas, it looks like RSS is the chosen son in the near term.

Why do I say that I wish hAtom were used for this purpose? Well, consider this. The language of the web is, for whatever you make it, HTML (and lately XHTML). This means that any webpage you visit, and indeed, any feed that you suck up, probably has some of this markup in it. In fact, rendering engines are getting better at both supporting web standards and as well as enabling some crazy cool things that you might not have thought possible before. All the while, XHTML is becoming the modern day ZIP format, able to store rich media as well as metadata about that data in microformats.

The browser is also constantly caching this data for you, in order to load sites faster and faster.

Now think about that: where are you doing most of your work in any given web app? Not surprisingly — in the browser! So you’ve got this cached version sitting on your harddrive with all the JavaScript, all the XHTML source, all the graphics and all the CSS, but nowhere to stick the data should you re-instantiate or open that page from the cache. Which is kind of ironic, since AJAX is all about asynchronous messaging… that is, sending messages non-immediately.

So, the thinking here is… if we’ve got this new “stack” at our disposal, it’s only a matter of time before we rewire our web apps to learn to write to a local SQL Lite store, using Rails as the delivery system, meanwhile storing the views and interactivity later, like Brent has done, in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, most of the entire stack will end up as strictly JavaScript and XHTML storage unites once we see some diversification in microformat schemas. There’s no reason why you couldn’t save your bookmarks, your emails, your blog posts, your IM conversations, your documents, your financial records and the whole lots of content that means something to you in simple, basic, readable-everywhere, XHTML.

And so I appreciate, very much, that Brent is starting to see this — and the power that might be found therein — not just for him or for his app, but for anyone for whom the web and its online-offline machinations has caused great consternation. An XHTML-driven world, though potentially messy at first, offers a great deal of flexibility, of efficiency and of reuse and cross-polination.

If only I could get Brent to use hAtom… and if only I could get Microsoft and Apple to support hAtom in the OS like they all do for RSS… We’d begin to bear witness to the promise of this so-called “semantic web”.

Neat Mac apps that help you concentrate

Todos

I’ve found a couple apps recently that help you focus by removing your desktop clutter using various techniques. I’ve used Backdrop forever (and also for my screenshots) but there are some newcomers.

One is $15 Zazen, which sits in the menubar and helps you to “concentrate” on the foremost app by dimming the others. Doodim does pretty much the same thing, albeit less elegantly but for free.

WriteRoom offers “distraction free writing” and comes pretty close — closing off all other distractions and situating you in a black room where you can write Matrix letters to yourself. The autosave and autosession-restore really do make this one feel well thought out and don’t forget to participate in their user-powered software development methodology.

In the neat category is Italian-born Afloat — similar to Doodim in a sense, but in reverse. Rather than dimming everything else, Afloat lets you dim the current foremost window or set it to always be on top. Looks like the developer is looking for localization help, so if you’re game, drop him a note.

Finally, if you’re looking to take a power nap when your fingers are tired and your head ist kaput, check out the pricey (but worth it) Pzizz. They’ve added iPod integration lately, but the idea is simple: create an audio track to accompany you on your naps. Sounds fluffy but it’s not. I downloaded the demo, tried their 20 minute power-nap and literally was out for 20 solid minutes — resuscitated when the announcer dude mystically awoke me from me sleep. It was actually a little freaky. But it worked.

Oh, and the image for this post really has nothing to do with concentrating, but it was a great distraction earlier this week. Using the application Todos, I took a screenshot of my apps, uploaded it and something like 6 hours later there were already 200+ notes on the thing. How’s that for community collaboration? Anyway, I created a group for folks to do the same thing and to share the apps they use.

I’m sure there are more and I’ve barely begun to fill out my I Use This profile, so let me know — which ones do you use that I missed? Linux/Windows folks? Got suggestions?

SoylentGreenSpace v3 launches

Technorati Redesigns

My buddy Dave Sifry over at Technorati has launched v3 of Technorati, commemorating their three years as a company and as the interweb’s reigning whuffie tracker. However, the changes as I see them so far seem to represent a shift away from the Matrix-green-loving blog divas and digerati that have made Technorati their shrine towards a wider, and perchance less discerning, audience:

While we love expert bloggers, we’ve also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.

As long as normal doesn’t mean “mediocre” or “average” I guess I can see a need for this change — but my feeling already is that the new design is too Friendster-cum-MySpace than the good ol’ Technorati greenback of yore. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been anticipating this redesign for some time — my concern though is: did they identify their audience correctly? …or am I feeling a bit snubbed because I’m not part of a presumably profitable demographic (profitable for advertisers that is)?

To be more positive (since I’m trying to make an effort lately!): the things that I am excited about in this milestone are taking place either behind the scenes or will only show value over time. For example, getting more accurate link counts and stats (which lately have varied between Technorati Mobile and the main site)… Consider the expanded popular page (whose URL should really be renamed to /popular)… or take a look at your personal page — certainly a lot more cluttered and riddled with things of little use to me personally, but at the same time showing the promise for someday becoming my electrocardiograph on the web. Oh, and the Favorites feature is an interesting not-too-del.icio.us-like addition that unfortunately doesn’t do anything better than NetNewsWire, Flock, Bloglines or others already do (popups?!) — so why not just integrate with those and offer me a remote view of feeds in context? (Especially since NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator and has an open API that would make this process fairly trivial).

But Dave et al — here’s my plea and my challenge to you: in your efforts to grow your business and maintain your position as top of mind for what’s going on in the blogosphere, don’t forsake those who have championed you for so long in exchange for what looks like an opportunity to go massive. The long tail is chunky and has a richness that Technorati can help us all make sense of. In that way, Technorati should endeavor to become (hold your groans) the Flickr of Blogs — in the truest sense. When I come to Technorati, I don’t want only what’s popular, I want what’s good. And sure, “good” is in the eye of the beholder but frankly, if you take my earlier suggestion, then you’ve already got the data that you need to help me understand just what is good and relevant to me, rather than a broad swath of what’s out there and being linked to.

So Dave, think about it this way: when I come to Technorati as a blogger and as a registered user, I want Technorati to reorient and rebuild itself around me at the center. And I’ll tell you, every other blogger feels the same way. For the longest time, this is what Technorati offered to the world. Forgive us for being self-absorbed and echoic, but blogging works when you know who’s talking about and to you, so that you can respond — and as our ears to the ground, you offer an essential piece of the conversation toolset. Essentially, you provided me an inbox for my blog and for my second ego. I hope that, in orienting towards “normal people”, you don’t end up diminish what it is that puts the rati in Technorati.