NoseRub Blog

NoseRub 0.6 released

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:22:10 +0200

NoseRub 0.6 was just released and Identoo.com got that update already. This release contains mainly bugfixes, but also some new services: you can now add your Online IDs from Nintendo Wii, Playstation Network and XBox Live. We also added support for YouTube and Ormigo.

If you have your Profile on Identoo, check it out and see if you can add some more information about you. I'd like to see some of you guys adding me through Playstation Online. Check my profile page out: identoo.com/dirk.olbertz

The new version can be downloaded here.

Problems with del.ico.us on Identoo.com

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:46:00 +0100

Has anyone reading this have good contacts to del.icio.us? It seems that del.icio.us blocks requests from Identoo.com, as curl "http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/dirk_olbertz" works fine locally and from different other servers in the UK.

It might be a problem with the Provider I use for my servers. I heard that, at least for email, their IP ranges are on some black lists.

I already contacted del.icio.us' support, but after telling me, that they would forward it to someone else, I did not hear anything and a second reply to that ticket got no response at all.

Right now, even a simple "we blocked you and cannot whitelist your IP" would help me in order to think about the next steps. But rught now, it's just frustating, as users on Identoo.com won't see any updates from their del.ico.us accounts.

So, help is greatly appreciated!

Update: Apparently, fetching del.icio.us feeds is working again. I'm not sure wether this is a temporary thing until I hit some treshold, but if not, I hope this blog post reached someone inside or near del.icio.us, who fixed the problem. If so: thank you!

What means your data to you?

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:57:43 +0100

Right from the beginning of this project, we wanted the following to work:

You open an account on Identoo.com and add contacts and web accounts

You install NoseRub on your own server and import all your data from the Identoo.com account

Afterwards, all the people who added you as a contact, will seamlessly get your new profile URL

With NoseRub 0.6 we're now able to do this!

First of all, you export all your data on Identoo.com. You will find this tools in the menu Settings and there at Manage:

You will receive a JSON file with all your contacts, accounts and profile data. On your own server, you then simply import this file:

NoseRub then parses that file and displays, what you're about to import. If you confirm, all those contacts, web accounts and profile data is imported. Afterwards, you can use your new NoseRub installation, just as you did on Identoo.com.

In order to tell all your contacts, that you moved your profile, you then go back to Identoo.com and set a redirect to your new profile:

You now even can delete your account on Identoo and the redirect will still work.

We have to admit, that the whole redirect thing is currently not 100% perfect. We will change that and then, all the people who have you as contact, will not only be redirected to your new account, but also see your new profile url as their contact.

So, what means your data to you?

NoseRub 0.6a released

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:19:50 +0100

I just release NoseRub 0.6 alpha. You can see it in action on Identoo.com or can download the package here: noserub.com/downloads

If you prefer the subversion checkout, you can now update/checkout from the trunk. More information about the SVN-Repository can be found here: noserub.com/code

The main goal for this release was to add URLs as contacts. What does this mean? If you take an URL like http://tantek.com you will see, that his HTML output uses a lot of Microformats - of course, you say :-)

The great thing about this is, that he therefore makes it easy for NoseRub to get information about him (via hCard) and his web accounts (via XFN). Basically, NoseRub already did exactly that when syncing between different servers. We just need to do some minor changes to allow any URL as contact, but we also added support for the Social Graph API from Google. That means that NoseRub does not only rely on finding information through Microformats on that site, but also uses the data that Google's API returns for that URL.

Another good example for a great URL as contact is David's homepage. Working for SixApart, he uses the Action Stream PlugIn for MovableType. The great thing now is, that I can add him as contact on Identoo.com and follow his activities, without forcing him to use NoseRub for himself.

This is a big difference to eg. FriendFeed.com, where you can only follow people that use FriendFeed for themselves. As a matter of fact: each public friend feed URL is great for adding as contact in NoseRub. For instance Johannes Kleske (mostly german content).

Right now, NoseRub ignores any FriendFeed RSS-Feed. Not, because we don't like them, but because they duplicate content in a way, that we (yet) cannot filter them. So, if you add a FriendFeed RSS-Feed to your NoseRub profile and wonder, why it does not get updated: don't worry, you probably are better off, if you just add that URL as contact...

The second big thing in this release is covered in a separate blog entry. It is about being really portable with your data.

Just one quick note, why this release is tagged as "alpha": The two new features heavily use networking features that are difficult to test locally - especially, when you're just a bunch of people dedicating their free time for this great project. We don't expect any old features to be broken. In fact, we fixed some bugs. But the new features might have their problems that we wanted to verify in the wild. So, please be patient and report any problems. Either through the ticketing system, here in the blog, or in our discussion group.

NoseRub 0.6 preview

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:21:03 +0100

I talked about NoseRub 0.6 a few days ago and was very excited about it. Today, I made the first huge steps toward that release. The main thing we want to achieve with that is, that you can add any URL as a contact!

I repeat this, because it's so important: you will be able to add any URL as a contact!

What does this mean? This will mean, you can add davidrecordon.com as your contact and see what he is doing in your network's social stream. You also automatically get updates about new services he is adding to his site. You will also be able to add users from FriendFeed.com to your contacts and thus get informed about what is going on on their sites.

We do this by parsing Microformats information from these sites. Namely hCard and XFN. For even better results, we use the Socialgraph API from Google to examine the XFN.

On the screenshot in this post, you can see how this looks like. You see Davids photo there, as this is made available through hCard on his website. The broken image left to him is from brianoberkirch.com. That is, because we currently don't copy the images to our own server (but we will do! we are no traffic stealers!) and only David has the same naming convention for the small image, as NoseRub has :-)

You can also see David's updates in the social stream, as the updates from Jörg Kantel are. I just added his account from FriendFeed.com as my contact. We have to think about what to do with the feed from FriendFeed here, as we already accessed the single accounts. But this are just some minor issues that can be solved.

But what really important is, that this is a real distributed social network! And your contacts do not even need to know what NoseRub is. Just add them as your contacts and be able to follow their activities from that moment on. And if you want to, you just install NoseRub on your own server and no one but you has full control over your social network.

We want to release NoseRub 0.6 later this month. Although a lot of work is already done, we need to polish some things and also may add one or two surprises :-)

NoseRub 0.5.4 released

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:17:38 +0100

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 now on Identoo.com

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:24:47 +0100

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...

NoseRub 0.5.4 just a few blocks away

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:16:48 +0100

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)

Google's SocialGraph API

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:15:39 +0100

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.

NoseRub business cards arrived

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:11:43 +0100

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...)

SocialGraph Foo Camp in Sebastopol, CA, USA

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:49:30 +0100

From Feb 1st to Feb 3rd, I will attend the SocialGraph Foo Camp on the O'Reilly Campus and look forward on meeting a few interesting people there.

In the meantime, we're working on some new features inside NoseRub, although we currently don't come so well along, as we planned to. Partly this is because I'm currently without internet connection at home, but this will hopefully find an end tomorrow. Yippeah!

We already implemented a nice Set my Location feature and also the beginning of tags for contacts. Like XFN, but you will be able to define your own tags, too. This will only be the beginning, as you also should be able to define privacy features based on this tags.

And we changed the way you can add accounts. We build an auto discovery of services, so you only need to provide an URL to your del.icio.us profile and NoseRub will automatically know what to do with it.

Currently, the privacy features on tag based relationships are the most important things, next to real data portability. That means we hopefully soon will be able to im- and export your complete NoseRub profile.

Stay tuned ;-)

NoseRub admin access. By database or file?

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 22:58:48 +0100

I'm thinking about this for some time now, but don't know the definite answer, so I woud like to know you opinion.

It is all abot an admin area for NoseRub, where the admin can manually refresh caches, delete users, etc.. But how should this be managed?

Should there be stand alone admin accounts?
Should this be in the database?
Should the admin login be defined in config/.php?
Should there just be a special hash for admin work?
Should every registered user become an admin, when another admin says so?

For now, I prefer to have the information in a file, because I think it is more complicated to get write access to the filesystem that to the database. As I think it should be possible to have more than one admin account, I currently would prefer an array of usernames and md5 passwords in config/noserub_admins.php.

What is your opinion?

NoseRub 0.5.3 released - Security Fix

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:48:47 +0100

Please update to the newest trunk release, when you use the subversion repository. In any other case, please update to NoseRub 0.5.3. You can download it here: http://noserub.com/download/

The security problem itself is descrbed here:
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2007-12/att-0604/seclog-2007-001.txt

Thanks to Felix for figuring this one out!

Wanted: PHP programmer to add "Groups" to NoseRub

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:06:15 +0100

This is something, I really would like to see in NoseRub, but as there is so much to do right now, I will try it this way. If you are interested, or know someone who is capable of helping and also has some time to spare, please contact me, or forward this post.

The idea is pretty simple: I want to add "interest" to a profile, for instance Apple, Scuba Diving, Nintendo Wii and CakePHP. For every interest, there should be a "group" within NoseRub. That means some kind of message board.

In order to have a real distributed solution, where people from different servers can join such groups, this should be based on Usenet technology. I will set up an INN on groups.identoo.com and any NoseRub instance could contact this server. Just like a newsreader. That solution also allows several groups.* servers, because NNTP (the Usenet protocol), supports exchange of posts and groups between servers.

That would make it possible to have a group CakePHP on groups.identoo.com, but also on groups.media-adventures.de. The posts would be exchanged across the servers, so users on Identoo can share the same posts with the guys on media-adventures.

Another idea would be to tag items on your already present feed. For instance a link from your del.icio.us feed or an image on your Flickr account. When they are tagged with an interest, those items would show up automatically in that group.

Although NoseRub is implemented in CakePHP, you don't neccessarily need to be an expert in CakePHP. Good knowledge of PHP and web protocols would be enough. We could implement some kind of library first, before adding the real functionality into NoseRub.

So, please spread the word. I think this is a really interesting project and highly valuable to NoseRub and therefore the idea of a distributed social network - something we all want to have...

BarCampLondon roundup

nospam@example.com (Dirk Olbertz) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:47:14 +0100

I had a great weekend at BarCamp London , which was sponsored by Google and "BBC backstage". BCL3 was located at Google's London offices and I'm really glad, I went there.

I held a session about NoseRub, I already posted a small snippet out of that session, although the sound quality isn't always that great.

I'm not too sure, if many people afterwards had a look at NoseRub.com or Identoo.com, but I took a lot of information back with me.

For instance the good talk with Tom Morris, who does a few great things with FOAF and hopefully can show me a few good sites about extending FOAF for NoseRub.

I also have to admit, that I did not knew Ian Forrester before the event (and he even attended BarCamp Berlin!), but was happy to see his session about DataPortability. When I go through that site, I have to nod all the time: we already have all the standards we need to give the user back the control over his/her data.

Tom Morris, who I mentioned above, already thinks about doing SemanticCamp in London. Not quite sure yet, if I will attend, but London is a great city to visit, so why not? :-)

Meanwhile, Daniel started implementing the ability to specify the quality of a contact. This will be the first step towards privacy settings, which will make NoseRub even more usefull. There's currently no timeframe set for that, but with christmas and everything not too far away from us, I guess it will not happen this year. But doesn't that make 2008 even more thrilling? :-)