NoseRub

Oh boy... Sometimes you forget the most important things...

We now have RSS-Feeds and JSON output for any combination of your's and your friends accounts. So, you can create a RSS-Feed of all the interesting acounts of your contacts and but that in your FeedReader.

Or you use the JSON output of all your accounts to build a widget for your blog. That works rather simple. Beyond here, you will see the JSON output of my latest activites (look into the source code to see how it's done):


This all is hosted an Amazon S3, so you shouldn't have any problems with slow servers :-)

So, if you build any kind of widget, please let us know. We're eager to see what you guys build with this new feature. You'll find this feature after you logged in under Feed in the Setings.

It took some time, but we now have NoseRub 0.5(b) running on Identoo.com. A new relase (then without the beta) will hopefully be released on thursday. There were fewer glitches than I thought, but the evening is young, so maybe we need to fix some more stuf, before we make it a release.

What's new, you ask? A lot. When I did the update, I realized that hardly any file remained untouched. The biggest new thing is the polished and enhances profile page:


You now can add a photo to your profile, add a little "About" text and give information about how you can be reached (ICQ, GTalk, Skype, etc.). We also added services that do not have a public feed, like FaceBook, Xing, LinkedIn and SecondLife.

We wanted to give you the ability to create a real and complete profile of your digital identity.

Be aware: everything is public right now!

There is currently no way to set your profile into some kind of stealth mode, so be sure you only add stuff, that you really are comfortable sharing with anyone. The whole privacy stuf will be what we are about to focus on for the release after this.

We also introduced a new startpage, where you can follow the social stream of all the users on Identoo.com. It makes fun to browse around and find interesting people.

One other thing made it into this version just before the feature freeze: sending messages to someone else.

This is currently limited to the server, where you have your NoseRub account on. So you will not be able to send someone a message who has a NoseRub-ID on another server. This is just an intermediate solution, because we did not want to open the servers for spam. You currently also can only send messages, when you are logged in. In a future version, we also want to allow everyone to get in contact with you. Again, we need to think about the spam problem.

For the moment, the messages are directly send to the eMail account you provided on registration. You can choose who should be able to send you messages and in a future version you should be able to choose, wether you want an Inbox on Identoo, or use your eMail account for handling the messages.

At the end a quick warning: when you update you current NoseRub installation with the trunk version, you might not be able to perfrom the /jobs/:hash/system/update/ URL, because some SQL is missing. I already reported that issue, a quick solution is to manually execute migration 35 (located in noserub/app/config/sql/migrations) by doing a copy&paste to phpMyAdmin, or whatever you use. And then to call the system-update URL again. You then will get an error message because of the already present tables, but after another reload, everything should be fine.

I'm sorry for that and this is the biggest issue we need to address before the official release.

But all in all, we are pretty happy with this release and curious what you think about it.

Once again, nothing really was shown, just some new rumours on how Google will eventually try to catch up with Facebook.

In general, Maka-Maka should be an API, so developers can access your data, that is already stored on Google's servers. But the API somehow should also a two-way thing, Techrunch describes is like this:

[...] so that any app created for Google can be taken to other Websites. (Whether this will extend to actual user profile data within Orkut or elsewhere inside Google remains to be seen because of privacy issues, but the apps themselves will be portable). And data from other social sites will be able to be imported into Google’s social apps as well.

I'm really curious, where this will lead to, because people are lazy and therefore probably will just use Google's features, instead of a real dezentralised social network like NoseRub. But I believe, that one day, people will recognize, how their social network enables companies to make money and that they get only little back for this. And then, they will rather be in complete control over their data, instead of having Google owning it all.

But let's wait and see...

Just a few, quick information to let you know, that we did not leave to a nice island with all the money we got through NoseRub...

The new profile page is pretty much completely integrated, but that also leads us to other changes in the structure of the site and as well the network view for a profie. But we got a solution now and are working on that, right now.

We also have syndication of your, or yout network's activity ready. That means you can create RSS- oder JSON-Feeds from any mixture of your and your contacts' activities.

NoseRub is also on tour, so if you want to talk to us, come to BarCamp Berlin 2 (3./4. November), Web 2 Open (Berlin, 6.-8. November), or BarCamp London 3 (24./25. November).

Our goal is to release the next version of NoseRub before BarCamp Berlin. It then will be available on Identoo.com and depending on how much time is left, also for download on NoseRub.com/Download at the same time.

As we're currently working on re-designing the profile page and more and more profile information needs to be stored, we think we need a different type of data exchange format.

We currently use the FOAF-Data from our profiles for syncing between different NoseRub services. But FOAF isn't made for this and we already tweaked FOAF in some ugly ways to be able to exchange the data properly.

We will not drop support for FOAF, but we will need another RDF representation of the data we want to exchange. This is mainly a dump from the database for the user profile and the user's accounts.

I just could go ahead and "invent" some data exchange format, but I would rather have a more solid solution. So, if anyone wants to get involvd, just send me a mail.