Barcamp: August 2007 Archives

Led by: Tantek Çelik

why do i have to re-add all of my profile information, re-add friends, etc.?

what about change jobs? move?

base on assumption that user owns their own data - should be able to display profile information anywhere - need open standard to do this

need:

• profile info - vCard (rfc2426), hCard is the same thing, but on the web; doesn't do arbitrary key/value pairs, has 80/20 sweet spot of information; already social sites that, today, are publishing your info as hCard.
  
• friend list - no good standard
  
  • Blog roles is a good analog
    
  • XFN - add rel="friend", supported part of HREF; can do asymmetrical relationships
    
  
  

Satisfaction - they will import hCard information from other sites when you want to create a new account

Right model is to subscribe to hCard - just poll it, no special protcoal (like RSS) needed. Incombent on consumer to figure out the diff.

hCard only handles public information

OpenID - could be used to try export personal information. Give permission to 3rd party site to access OpenID. Uses website URL to prove that you are who you say you are.

Tantek Celik talking about social network portabilty.

XFN (xhtml friends network) - renders in a browser, but FOAF doesn't - FOAF is somewhat fuzzy as a standard

• It is HTML, just ad some extra elements to existing tags
  
• simple to understand
  
• supports differnent granularity for contacts - persion in your XFN list can be a contact, acquaintence, friend, family, etc. - will need import UIs that understand this and give this richness (only import family, etc)
  
• gmpg.org/xfn - homepage for XFN
  

can combine hCard and XFN - sprinkle in hCard information into XFN data. Add very little code to make it work. Sites like Cork'd, Dopplr (will import social network), LastFM, and Twitter already support this.

By default, always exporting - the page is the API, is the export.

If you change your URL, you can totally disconnect from your social network. could be bad, or could be what you want.

Identity consolidation - use rel="me" in XFN, to essentially denote that you are friending yourself - or yourself on another site

• need to do bidirection claim in order to verify that it really is the same person
  
• tantek.com claims twitter.com/t, and twitter.com/t claims tantek.com. Can know that Tantek owns both URLs.
  

Want vendors to compete to be more open.

ClaimID - identity, also do microID (hash of e-mail address).

Do simple things, evolve simple stanards, make building blocks (the UNIX way), add more complex feature if needed.

Doing this stuff, hCard and XFN, puts you on the open social web.

Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampBlock, XFN, hCard, Social Software

It seems like whenever you have a talk about mobile software, it devolves into converstation about everything that is wrong with the space (constrictive nature of the carriers, all phones have different properties, hard to develop for, hard to get users to adopt things, etc.). But, I thought that we got to some interesting points in this conversation, about mobile applications that can work today. You have to think simpler, and base things on SMS and WAP. Everybody wants to do cool things with location-based services and whatnot, but the technology just isn't there yet.

My notes follow.

led by: jordy, social games at digital chocolate, bebo.com

skyhook - company in boston, makes a firefox extension (loki) - senses nearby wifi networks, tries to triangulate your location based upon SSIDs that it can see (they built a DB that maps SSID to location)

standards in mobile

• WAP is pretty much a standard
  
• SMS is finally a standard (as of like 2 years ago)
  

if you get embedded on the phone - you're golden. People don't download java apps to phone (too hard, poor experience, etc)

barriers to entry

• downloadable apps - have to do engineering per phone
  
• barriers on cost side - costs money sms (e-mail to sms gateway works for hackers)
  
• distribution - have to find ways to get people to find your app
  
• usability - if it isn't sms or wap, people probably won't figure it out and use it
  

admob - mobile ads, works in wap browser; can target ads per country, operator, handset, etc.

• any hacker dude can add admob to their mobile site
  
• also, can buy ads, to help distribution
  

wurfl - open source mobile device db

Papers and other sources:

• social network graph - brad fitzpatrick - apparently, Brad gave a talk on this on the first day of BarCampBlock, that everybody was talking about.
  
• social network aggregator - bunch of startups in this area, can find via mashable.com

twitter is another great example of what can work in mobile - so stupid simple, which is key to their success

mobilemonday.net - tracks mobile industry news, has pointers to lots of other good stuff

Talk by - Erich Nachbar

CarrierIQ - OpenVZ virtualization

case for virtualization - make servers that are idle do useful work. more about efficiency per unit of space/watt

types of virtualization

• hardware emulation - parallels, vmware - can run any OS unmodified. Cons are that it is hard to manage, performance hit (especially with system calls), static resource allocation (vmware can sortof get around this), density is low (# of VMs per server)
  
• para-virtualization - run multiple kernels (XEN 2 - bundled with RH5, UML).
  
  • Typically better performance (cuts out some layers of translation)
    
  • cons: requires modification of guest OS, static resource allocation
    
  
  
• OS level virtualization - run only one kernel
  
  • Native performance, dynmaic resource allocation, cheap fast (can make new virtual instance in seconds), much easier to manage.
    
  • con: same kernel per virtual server, no mix of operating systems on one server
    
  • examples: OpenVZ (stable, works well), Virtuozo, FreeBSD jails, Linux-Vserver, Solaris Zones
    

Erich talking about OpenVZ

XEN isn't ready for prime time (not production grade - stability issues?)

OpenVZ has templates - for different distros

OpenVZ is basically Solaris Zones, but open source, and works entirely on Linux. Install procedure on CentOS requires a new kernel (because they have lots of patches to virtualize certain things in the kernel), and some tools RPMs.

I'm at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto today, and the second talk that I went to was about a new OSS-driven service, Worldwide Lexicon.

Worldwide Lexicon - user contributed language translations of Internet content

• produce tools that webservice providers and publishers can use to produce websites in multiple languages
  
• like wikipedia - users produce translation
  
• popular sites will have bilingual users in their population - low percentage in US, much higher in the rest of the world
  
• want to make system accessible to wide range of websites - via plugins for popular CMS systems, etc.
  
• add links to blog posts - to translate it to different languages. Look at IP/browser preferences to suggest a language.
  
• click on edit - brings up an editor that floats on top of the text, for editing the translation.
  
• Have Wordpress and generic PHP, coming with Movable Type, and possibly Drupal. It is an open source project, so it is possible to easily add support for other platforms.
  

Brian McConnell, talking about Worldwide Lexicon at BarCampBlock

http://marx.worldwidelexicon.org - more of an admin site

• powered by PHP and cake
  
• working on a commercial system that'll be out later this year - publishers will be able to list what translation they want done, and list a price (i.e. $.50/paragraph), then it will be up to translator to decide if they want to accept
  
• governments (particularly EU) might be interested in using this for translation.
  
• Could extend this framework to translate UI of website, not just content.
  

user motivations - people who want to keep their language skills up, people who want to share text with friends/family that don't speak the source language, etc.

copyright issues

• translation is a derivative work, translator doesn't have any rights - copyright goes to original author?
  
• can do it so that they don't steal page views - route all traffic to translate articles through original publishers site.

Education applications

• there are a lot of ways to use this for teachers and students
  
• could have students do translations of content for assignments - makes it more relevant to them, etc.
  

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Clones - shows how there is a market for translated applications.

• People want to be able to see a UI in their own language, and with local idomatic expressions, etc.
  

Technorati Tags: BarCampBlock, BarCamp, Worldwide Lexicon, Wiki, Translation