NoseRub

After a few days of test drive on Identoo.com, the new 0.5.4 release is available for Download.

Here is what you can expect from 0.5.4.

NoseRub 0.5.4 looks good right now on Identoo.com, so I guess there will be a release either tomorrow evening, or on saturday.

And then, I will finally reveal, what we want to do in NoseRub 0.6. Oh boy, I'm so excited and hope you all will like it, as well...

Originally it was planned to release NoseRub 0.5.4 at this weekend and we finished developing on it. But we would like to test a little bit more. We probably will put it live on Identoo.com (and thus merge the development branch back to the trunk) some time this week and make the proper release on next weekend.

As you can see from the change on the minor version number only, this release is not a major breakthrough. We had a lot of new input during the past months and often struggled with what to do next of all the things we would NoseRub like to be. We now decided to make small steps, but therefore hopefully more often. During the step, we made some groundwork for the next steps already - that is the good news.

So, what is actually new in the upcoming 0.5.4? Basically, just four things:

1. Adjustable filters for the social feeds

We had that wish for some time now: allow me to filter out the last.fm updates. We don't do it on basis of an account type, but on the filter type. So, if you want to, audio will not show up any more, when you watch any social stream.

2. XFN and tags for contacts

You now can edit a contact and apply XFN and own created tags. We currently display the XFN tags along with your contacts on your profile page. We started with this feature to allow privacy settings based on this tags, but we're not there yet. So basically, you just can give your contacts that tags, but cannot do any more else with them right now. Sorry...

3. Locations

Do you remember Plazes? Back then, it was a cool thing to show off, where you currently are. I never liked the idea to exactly determine, where I am. I rather want to locate the city, or maybe sometimes only the country. You know can create your own locations and add an address to it, if you like. But basically, it is just some free text. Whenever you update your location, it will show up in your social stream - and of course in those of the people who added you as a contact. Your last location is also displayed on your profile page.

4. API

This more not really a valid point here, as we currently only cover methods to retrieve and set your location.If you want to, you can already have look at the documentation. The authentication right now is not so greatly solved, OAuth would be a better way to do it. But you know: we have only so much time and are lurking for someone to make a nice iPhone or S60 app for setting your location...

So, that's it. After the actual release, we will tell you, what we plan for NoseRub 0.6, which should be out by the end of this month. This is, what we call small steps...

Here are two screenshots. The first one shows a little bit about the location thing and if you look closer, you will see, that All on the filter panel changed to Overview - because it's now obviously not "all" if you adjust the filter...

The second screenshot shows the screen for editing a contact. In the statement above I forgot to mention the notes you now can make for every contact. Notes and tags are also displayed on a profile page, if this person is your contact.

(Click on the screenshots to give you a larger version)

As I'm currently at the SG FooCamp in Sebastopol, I had the possibility to directly talk to one of the heads behind Google's SocialGraph API and it really eases some stuff that NoseRub is trying to do in the current development version.

For those who did not hear of this API, here's the link to the project page:
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

What it basically does is to give you URLs that are "socially" connected to a given URL. NoseRub can use this for people being able to add any "social" URL as their contact. When someone adds a blogpage of someone as his contact, Google's API is able to return URLs of other social applications like flickr or magnolia. Of course only if on this blog page, there are some XFN enabled links to those accounts. But with the DiSo Project we will probably see more and more of this stuff seeing grow on Wordpress pages. Livejournal and Typepad had that information embedded for quite some time now.

Google's Timing couldn't be better, as I was thinking about how to implement this crawler in NoseRub for quite some time now. So, this is really a time saver for me. And the API is very clean, so I already was able to add is a component to the NoseRub development branch.

In preparation for SG FooCamp at this weekend, Poolie designed some business card, which I just fetched from the print shop, just two blocks away:



I think they look great and I hopefully can get rid of some of them during the FooCamp :-)

(The reddish look is not part of the design...)