NoseRub

The current version is not so clean, that I would let anyone try it. But those who already downloaded it, might need some help. This walkthrough will also show all others, how NoseRub works, what it currently is capeable of and what's so special about it.

Registering and Login

Everything starts with a registration, of course. The username will then be part of your NoseRub-ID, very similar to an OpenID. If you register on noserub.com and you enter 'dirk.olbertz' as username, your NoseRub-ID will be dirk.olbertz@noserub.com.


After the registration, you will get a mail with your verification code. Just click on the link and after that, you can log in with you username and the chosen password. If you have difficulties sending out the mail and thus are not able to click the verification link, just go to your database (phpMyAdmin most probably) and remove the value of the field hash for the username you just created.

Adding accounts

After successfully logging in, you will see your NoseRub profile page. This page is also viewable by everyone else who knows your NoseRub-ID. Privacy features will be introduced in further releases. The NoseRub profile page for the example above would be at http://noserub.com/noserub/dirk.olbertz


Right now, there is not much to see, so we click on Add new account to tell NoseRub which other social network accounts we use. This page needs a lot of work and will be replaced by a wizard to make it as easy as possible. In the example above, Ijust select del.ico.us as the service I want to add and the name of my account at del.ico.us.


When I did that, this new account is displayed at the accounts overview page and my profile page.



As you can see at the bottom of my NoseRub profile page, two items are shown. They are the last links I added at del.icio.us. Currently, only the items from the last 7 days, but never more than 5 are shown - for each account. You should be able to config and alter that, of course.

So, let's add another account. This time, I add this blog here. After submitting the form, the new account is shown next to the previously created.



It is also shown on the profile page and the latest blog entries are inserted at items to the bottom of the page.

Adding Contacts

It's nice to have all your own accounts aggregates, but this is about social networks, so it's time to add some friends.

Unlike other social networks, you don't need to force your friends to join NoseRub. You can just add them and add accounts to this created contacts. Let's see that in an example:



On the profile page, we just click on Add new Contact and afterwards enter the desired username. You can choose the name as you like. Once you did so, the new contact ("poolie" in this case) is shown in your list of contacts. It's type local indicates, that you created that contact.

When clicking on Add new account next to your contact's name, you can tell NoseRub, which social networks your contact is using. This works exactly as with your own contacts. We add a flickr account and his blog.



When clicking on the contact's name in our contact overview, we will see his NoseRub profile page. Similar to our own, we can see his accounts and also a list of items at the bottom. Here his lates flickr photos and blog posts.


All accounts are internally marked with a so-called service type. Currently NoseRub knows media, text, links and event. The output on each profile page can be filtered by using this service type. In the next screenshot, you'll see poolie's profile page, filtered so that only media items are shown.

The network view

I also added another account and will now show the network view:


You see a timeline of all the items of people in my network (without my own items at this time. there might be an option to include them, too). You may notice, that there are also some Twitter items there. Twitter is one of the accounts right now, that are integrated with NoseRub. Adding all the others will not take much time. All they need is an RSS-Feed for the things you do there.

The ability to filter by service type is also possible in the network view. This way, you can have a similar output to flickr's contact overview.

Where is the decentralisation?

NoseRub is not only a social network aggregator, but claims to be decentralised. What does this mean? You can install NoseRub on your own server and let it connect with your friends NoseRub server, or with hosted NoseRub servers. A good similarity is wordpress. You can either host your blog at wordpress.com, or install the software from wordpress.org on your own server.

The next screenshot shows a NoseRub profile page on another server - yes, I can not proof it to you, but it really works. For this demo, all is running locally on my computer and this second server is called server2>. The username of that NoseRub profile is don, therefor his NoseRub-ID is don@server2. As we can see from the screenshot, don has added two photo accounts (hq23.com and ipernity.com) and his twitter account.


Back on my server, I want to add don as a contact. I therefore use the same form as previously, when I added local contacts. This time, I enter not only a username to add, but don's NoseRub-ID.


My server now adds don as a contact and looks at don's NoseRub profile page to gather information about the accounts he has added. This information is stored in the FOAF format and thus can easily be read by my server. NoseRub on my server also adds this accounts to my local database. Because of this, I can see don's photos in my network view. In this screenshot, I filtered it for showing media only.


Now, I have something like flickr's contact overview, but also with photos that are stored at ipernity.com and 23hq.com!

In my contact overview, don is marked as NoseRub to distinguish him from my local contacts.


The nice thing is, that whenever don adds a new account, my NoseRub server will display this items in my network view, too. Becase NoseRub frequently looks at don's NoseRub profile page and looks for new and updated accounts. So, when he starts a new blog, I will see that once he adds it to his NoseRub profile.

As I wrote before, privacy issues will be addressed in further releases, so you can decide who will get which updates of your profile.

I hope this walkthrouh helped you in understanding what NoseRub is and should become.