NoseRub

Would you create a Yahoo! E-Mail account just to send emails to people with @yahoo.com? Or the same for @gmail.com and @msn.com?

Would you want to add your address book to any E-Mail provider in order to be able to write an email to your friends?

Then why do you still join dozens of social networks to be up to what your friends do?

Curious? Go watch the NoseRub-Tour.

Th first NoseRub-Screencast is coming to a browser in your city! Seven minutes and eleven seconds of poor english, bad sound and a nervous script. But you can just sit down and see a small tour through NoseRub:



I know that I forgot to show a few essential things like adding accounts or contacts manually. But hey, what would a real pilot be, without a sequel and a cliffhanger?

And next time, I will work with a different sound engineer...

Update:
I also uploaded it to Google Video. Although it is listed in the search results, you cannot watch it right now, so I have no clue about the quality. If you still want to see it, this should be the link.

Update 2:
The quality of the Google Video is very poor. The basic overview resolves to some blueish and whiteish...

We just released NoseRub 0.4 and intentionally left out the alpha postfix. I use my Identoo-Account everyday and so does Alex and we're petty sure that we covered most of our bases.

Sometimes things like this happen, but that problem was fixed along with this one rather quickly and are both inside this the new release. Along with those bug fixes, we polished our Activity-Feed and added a bunch of new services: Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, DailyMotion, Zooomr and iLike, just to name a few.

We will constantly add new services, as this allows us to exactly determine how the output should look like. But you can also just add whatever RSS-Feed you have and select the appropriate ServiceType to it. Et voilá: your photos, videos, links, etc. will be shown in the correct categories and you subscribers/followers can filter them as they like.

If you want to know what is next, you can always have a look at the issue tracker. If this is too technical for you, I will try to lay a small roadmap for you:

1. Use your NoseRub-ID as an OpenID


2. Use the activity feeds on your sites: syndication as RSS and JSON


3. Much more Privacy


4. More dezentralisation: get notified, when something interesting happens on other servers


5. Export and Import of your complete NoseRub network to move from one NoseRub server to another

This is not neccessarily the order in which we "deliver", as some things need more time and preparations than others and sometimes you just feel like doing one thing and ignore the other. #4 is mostly vague, as so much other stuff depends from fullfilling it. We need some kind of internal notification system first, but then again, privacy issues come along, because we don't want to show everything as a default behaviour, but also want to give the ability to show publicly, when you add someone as a contact. So, the privacy layer needs to evolve, before we can start our dezentralised search engine to tell you, that we found a NoseRub-ID of a guy you just added as a local contact.

You can expect a lot of minor improvements on Identoo.com almost on a daily basis. Not every single thing gets the big attention of a blog post, so keep in touch on Twitter if you like - at least until the activity feed syndication is done and you then can just add my NoseRub-ID to your feed reader...

Just yesterday, Six Apart announces, that they soon will show demos and code for an "opened social graph".

The ideas they already published, base on the same principles that NoseRub follows: use open standards and combine them to make usefull tools for the end user.

I'm thrilled, that now finally one of the bigger companies come forward with their ideas. And I'm eager to see, what they did. Honestly, I'm a bit sceptical, because Six Apart clearly has commercial interests and therefore probably focuses on support for their own products. But let's wait and see until something is released and we can look into it.

I hoped to have it ready by the weekend and am happy to announce, that NoseRub now comes with optional feed caching. I already activated that option on Identoo.com and you now should see much faster page displays. They are not lightning fast, because a lot of external data is loaded when there are photos in feeds, so it is not all my fault...

Alex is currently working on a different display of the network- and personal-feed. It will be much more compact and probably only display it contents after a click on a specific item. That would speed up speed as well.

For those who are interested in the technics behind the feed caching: the library we use (SimplePie), of course does caching and conditional requests, so a feed was not fetched every time a profile page was loaded. But when the internal cache was invalid, SimplePie made a request to the server, what resulted in the long delays while displaying the pages.

Now all feeds are stored in the database and NoseRub just displays what is inside the database. Another process runs in the background and runs every ten minutes to update the feed data in the database. This way, page display is constantly fast and does not depend on how "old" the feed data is.

The downside is, that there might be a newer information in the feed, but the background process yet did not fetch it. But I think that is not such a big downside and optimization can be made. Even now, NoseRub counts how often a feed is viewed between two refresh cycles. So this could taken into account to maybe refresh popular feeds even more often.

It is also doable to update feeds from Twitter-like services more often, as more updates are very probably. I will monitor this and optimize accordingly.