A Short Story

"He raised the fragrant, steaming cup to his lips, the deep brown liquid the only color in a world of grey. In the back of his mind, a voice arose, unbidden: Can you feel its power?"

The Future of DiSo

Recently Chris Messina, my co-conspirator in the Diso Project, announced that he's joining Google as an Open Web Advocate. Shortly thereafter, Will Norris announced that he, too, had been hired by Google to work with Chris and fellow recent hire Joseph Smarr on a new Social Web team.

In his post announcing this new direction, Chris wrote:

I'm still hopeful about the future of my semi-neglected and half dormant Diso Project!

I'm still hopeful about the future of our project as well (subtle dig. :-)) and that's what I want to talk about now.

The Once And Distributed Future

Chris and I started the DiSo Project very late in 2007 after I approached Chris with an extended version of his WP-Microformatted-BlogRoll plugin. The initial inspiration was the idea of using the social graph inherent in users' XFN blogrolls as a data-source for whitelisting commenters on a blog (my DiSo post, Chris's DiSo post). Very quickly the ideas started flowing and merging, and we began to start seeing the potential for creating a social network platform driven by open standards and completely distributed -- no BigCo holding the reins or calling the shots.

We began to attract others in the open web community - Will Norris was the first, as an author of the WP-OpenID plugin, and others followed. Ralph Meier, Anders Conbere, Brian Oberkirch, Scott Kveton, Steven Weber - these folks and many, many more were early contributors to the discussions and ideas that have become the DiSo Project (the mailing list currently stands at 431 members!).

Current Affairs

Since DiSo's inception, there's been a LOT of movement in the Open Web arena, which has simultaneously advanced the goals set forth by the DiSo Project and drawn attention away from them. Individual goals have moved forward in leaps and bounds: the Activity Streams spec, for example, is approaching 1.0, and has been implemented across many of the large web services providers. Portable Contacts, a format and API for managing your contacts, was championed by Joseph Smarr and Plaxo, and has been implemented by Plaxo, Google, MySpace, Microsoft, and others.

At the same time, the difficult work of defining the glue layers has been going on around XRDS/XRD, LRDD, hostmeta, and webfinger -- the so-called "Hammer Stack" (after the indefatiguable Eran Hammer-Lahav). These formats and protocols are vital to the process of linking up the various parts that we already have: how do we get from a user's OpenID to her activity stream, or notification center, or <tomorrow's service here>? These discovery formats help answer these questions and have been a core goal of DiSo from the earliest discussions.

Notably, however -- the work in many of these areas has been driven by companies like Google, Plaxo, Microsoft and MySpace - large content producers that each have their own reasons and needs in defining how these specs should work and what should be included or excluded. It's awesome, and important, that they are involved, but for the hobbyist it can feel like sitting around while the large companies (with people to send to conferences, meetups, hackathons, mailing lists, etc) define what will be handed down the masses.

I'm not bashing these companies, or people like Kevin Marks, Joseph Smarr, Eran Hammer-Lahav, David Recordon, Martin Atkins, Monica Keller -- they have contributed countless hours and careful consideration to the discussion and development of these standards. But the fact is that indie concerns like code availability, validation services, test suites, etc can get lost in the shuffle while the large providers work out what will be implemented and when.

DiSo was begun with the hobbyist site owner very much as inspiration. The question now is this: with the advent of so many hosted sites/social networks/profiles, what is the best target to guide our efforts? What goals will most benefit the web as a whole? Specifically, what should be our goals - both technically and as a community - for the next 1-3 years?

Looking Forward

Clearly, the large hosting providers are learning lessons about the importance of open standards and an open web.

• Exhibit A: Google Buzz, which for all it's privacy or UI flaws is built on an impressive stack of open, social technologies. They're using Activity Streams, offering OpenID, using webfinger to aid in service discovery, and using the social graph API to autmatically find "claimed" rel=me links. This is the stuff we were envisioning back at Social Graph Foo Camp in early 2008, and Google has finally built it.
• Exhibit B: Google hired Chris and Will and Joseph, showing they are serious not only about open web technologies but about interfacing with the community as well.
• Exhibit C: MySpace provides a ton of Activity Streams data for their users and has been closely involved in that spec's development.
• Exhibit D: Facebook is hiring awesome folks from the Open Web community as part of their "Open Platforms" push.

This is all great news, but there remains some concern in my mind about who is going to represent the independent developers, the hobbyist site operators, and a growing third group: users who are happy not having to run the whole shebang themselves, but who still want to be able to exercise more control over their online presence and identity.

I see several areas where I believe the DiSo Project should be active over the next couple of years. First, we should continue involvement in standards groups like microformats, ActivityStreams, webfinger, XRD, etc. Secondly, we should be supporting the platforms that independent developers are building on, i.e. Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Django and the like, and especially supporting efforts to build working code that implements these standard protocols. Thirdly, we should be pushing hard for independent validation sites like feedvalidator, where any implementation can be tested. This is incredibly important as it brings transparency and accountability to the process, and it puts independent implementations on equal footing with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the other companies that are so involved in the standards process.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and complete a series of shorter posts, expanding some on these goals, and delving a bit more into what technical challenges remain, and how we can begin to think about them.

Lastly, I want to thank Chris Messina and Will Norris in particular for embarking with me on this (perhaps Quixotic) quest to do our part in opening up the web. And I want to thank every one of the 430+ developers, site operators, advocates, and tinkerers who have taken the time to follow - and participate in - our vision.

Save the Cheetahs!

The Cheetah Conservation Fund is holding a Run for the Cheetah in Phoenix in April, and my Cheetah-obsessed daughter is trying to raise $200 (or more!!) to help SAVE THE CHEETAHS! Kindly consider donating a few $bucks to help her out?

I am excited because I'm going to do the Run for the Cheetah! When you sponsor me, your donation will help the Cheetah Conservation Fund with their work in saving the endangered Cheetah! I'm trying to raise $200 to help save cheetahs. Please consider donating $5, $10, or more to help me reach my goal. -- Addy's Giving Page

Go! Now! Help save the Fastest Land Animal In The World!

Google's New <link>: Status Updates

WARNING: Massively Nerdy Content Alert

More exciting for me than yesterday's announcement of Google Buzz was today's announcement by Brad Fitzpatrick (mailing list post and tweet) that Google has just turned on webfinger support for all Google Profile / Gmail names.

So, I downloaded my webfinger doc (pasted here) and took a look. Most of it is as expected, but, with the launch of Google Buzz, Google has added a new <link> rel to the mix: 'updates-from'. It looks like this:

<Link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2010#updates-from' 
    href='http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/115863474911002159675/public/posted' 
    type='application/atom+xml'
/>

It's a link to an Atom feed of updates - really, a status feed, in the general micro-blogging sense of the term. It's almost exactly what I was evangelizing in my Status Autodiscovery post a couple months ago, and it's awesome to see someone doing something about it. (I'm not claiming any influence AT ALL over Google's decision here, just noting the similar solution to the problem of status discovery). Note that Google linked to the updates feed itself, which I think is a better idea than my more general approach of linking to the updates pages on Twitter or identi.ca. In addition, the Buzz update feed is an Activity Streams feed, though it's also valid Atom (as the mime-type suggests).

Obviously, the next logical step (hopefully) is for Google to give us a way to set the value of that connection to Twitter, or Identi.ca, or some other source of updates. With that, we can really see the "decentralized, standardized, open, Free, free... protocols" vision that Brad describes come to life.

An Invitation to Indian Cooking

I've hubristically titled this post after one of my favorite Indian cookbooks, and I hope that you'll forgive me since it's such a perfect fit for this post.

I discovered Indian cuisine while in school - there was a wonderful Indian couple on staff, and she made the most aromatic, colorful, and delicious meals. They were spicy but not overwhelming, varied in preparations and techniques, and as interesting to look at as they were to taste. I was hooked.

After Jodi and I got married, we contacted our Indian friends again looking for her wonderful Palak Kheema (Spinach and Ground Beef) recipe. In addition to emailing us the recipe, shortly thereafter she sent us as a gift a most wonderful cookbook: Hamlyn's All-Colour Indian Cookbook. In its pages we found many concise recipes that we've come to love: Green Chicken Curry (the curry is green, not the chicken - I know what you're thinking), Lentil Curry, Koftas (Indian meatballs), and many more.

The Green Chicken Curry from that cookbook is a favorite of our family, and feeds 6-8 people. It's not terribly spicy, doesn't use any "curry" spices (typically cumin, turmeric, cayenne pepper, and a host of incidental spices), and you can easily adjust the number of chilis used. Even my "I don't eat green stuff" father really enjoyed it!

Another cookbook we came across (I don't remember if we bought it on a recommendation or if it was a gift) was Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking. This remarkable tome is part cultural reference, part auto-biography, and part cookbook. It has no photos (in the 1974 reprint we own), but reading the recipes, chapter introductions, and other descriptions will fill your head with the sights and (imaginary) smells of Indian home cooking.

The recipes are longer than the concise ones in the Hamlyn book - Madhur's koftas recipe has an ingredient list that's a page long (broken down into sections for the meatballs, the stuffing, and the sauce) and the directions are another page and a half - but the results are wonderful. You do have to make sure you read the recipes through a few times before starting; more than once I've gotten most of the way through a new recipe and - right as the family was coming to the table - realized that the second to last step is "simmer for 25 minutes". D'oh!

If you've got a taste for Indian food, and are interested in learning how to both cook Indian and understand more deeply the flavors, techniques, and ingredients involved, let me invite you to pick up these two fantastic books. The All-Colour Indian Cookbook will give you tons of recipes that are short enough not to intimidate, and Madhur Jaffrey's book will give you the depth of understanding that adds richness to every dish you attempt.

Good luck!

I would SO watch this show. Rat Pack / Ocean's 11 meets Sci-Fi. Heck yeah!

 (link)

Everyone Else

Why Apple's typically faithful fans are up in a snit about the iPad, and why they're going to sell a ton of them.

No time to post. Imagine a blog post here about why Apple's core supporters are mystified and/or up in arms over the iPad, and a clever Venn diagram showing the overlap of professional designers, web designers, and unix-lovers; and a non-connected circle labeled "everyone else". Then imagine a circle labeled iPad that completely surrounds "everyone else" and barely grazes the others. Discuss.

 (link)

On Ports and Crumbs

As expected, there are practically no buttons and openings on the iPad. -- Andy Inahtko

Of course Steve Jobs never met a port he didn't want to remove, but ports on the iPad strike me as the kind of thing that dust, dirt, and toddler crumbs would quickly clog, when you consider the ways in which the iPad will be used. Perhaps not such a crazy idea, leaving them out?

iPad As Creator's Platform

Tim Bray tweeted today about the iPad as a content delivery platform:

the iPad looks cool. They'll sell a ton. I might get one. All I said that is it's a delivery platform not a creator's platform.

I can see Tim's point, but I'm also already getting ideas for creative apps that would be awesome on an iPad:

• DJ-ing, 'natch. The iPad's large touch surface is ideal for a next-generation DJ app. Anyone remember that music composition app that used physical objects on a projection surface a few years back? Hello, iPad. (Anyone got a link to that I'd love to add it here.)
• Photo montage/composition: Imagine an app that lets you pick images from the Photo app, then montage them, using your fingers to wipe out or blur edges, apply effects, re-order the photos in the overlay.
• Diagramming/mind-mapping: OmniGraffle on the iPad - select shapes from a menu/sidebar, tap to select, pinch to resize, rotate, drag from one to another to connect with arrows.
• The above, but for interior design/space-planning. Bonus: drop perspective-scaled images of products onto pics of the client's home/space and pinh to rotate/resize to fit. I imagine interior designers falling all over each other for an app like that - easy to carry, show to clients.

These are seriously the result of 2 minutes of thinking. The iPad is going to be HUGE for creators and creative work.