What’s this?
Uno as Web2.0
Mar|28|2008
20 points to whoever knows what this picture means:
Microsoft invites: Pull your address data out of FB
Uno as Online
Mar|26|2008
The Facebook/MS Messenger product allows you to pull your contacts email address’s out of Facebook and displays the addresses in plain text, ready for scraping.
Now this might not seem like too big a deal - but remember that of all the things that you can’t get out of Facebook (their API is quite extensive) the email address is the one that’s obscured. Essentially this means that you can’t map your friends in Facebook to friends on another service - which means Facebook is giving lip-service to dataportability.
However, if you were in a good position with Facebook, say if you were Microsoft, and say, if you were recently involved in quite a big business deal, you might be able to say “Hey, give us that data”.
Which would then give you a screen like the one below:
So why is this important?
No other company is allowed to do this except Microsoft, and it’s not possible to do this without some kind of screen scraper. Obviously, if you are in bed with them you are allowed to.
Services like Outsync would have a field day with this data, but similarly, data miners could too.
But still it doesn’t do what I want it to do - I want it to show me who of my friends are already on MSN!
The last step is still a pretty idiotic mailer:
Ideally, this would have mapped to your service already, added the contacts and there you go. But I’m just idealistic.
Socialthing: winning
Uno as Identity, Online, Products, Web2.0
Mar|11|2008
I’m trying out Socialthing and I’m really impressed with the “adding your services” task. It’s pretty quick and easy and uses a really cool interface.
One of the most interesting pieces is that they grab your Facebook news Feed, or a part of it. You’ll see that you Socialthing stream is different from your Facebook stream (the FB part). I’m also quite interested in how they do this - there is not API hook for your newsfeed (remember, it’s the juice that keeps you on FB) and it’s against the Facebook ToC’s. So Socialthing, how are you doing it?
All this got me thinking: The best Authentication pattern for me was the Flickr one - Their OAuth pattern is the way all services should work. Why does Flickr support OAuth, as well as FireEagle, but not Delicious? Hrm…
Regarding FriendFeed - I was expecting SocialThing to work in a similar way. While I might not be friends with people like Chris Messina, Brian Oberkirch or Chris Saad, I still want to follow what they are doing - which is why I use FriendFeed. I thought Socialthing would do this, but at the moment there isn’t the ability to add “people who aren’t really my friends”. I like being able to do that. While I think there are similarities between Socialthing and Friendfeed as both are Lifestreaming apps, they serve different purposes. So there might be a little bit of a gap in there, somewhere that both these apps are missing?
Socialthing also has grouping (for e.g. Twitter Messages) - something that FriendFeed guys put out as a major thang - I think that’s like… Basics. Otherwise you can use RSS, no?
Either way, a cool service. Check out some of the design patterns here below.
Gmail OAuth
Mar|10|2008
This entire fiasco with Gmail is going to do wonders for OAuth. There’s no publicity like bad publicity. I claimed it a while back and I still firmly believe that if the services make your data portable through proper authenication standards, you wouldn’t need to screenscrape it with a user/pass.
W00t oAuth.
Wasa and Google Analytics
Uno as Online, South Africa
Mar|7|2008
Now that Google Analytics is looking to open up their analytics packages, I wonder how long it would be before you could grab that data and show it all in nice little user segments.
Taken the whole shebang lately with Wasa, you’d think that this would be a great tool to showcase your stats in some ranked way - very similar to the OPA.
Charl Norman being Meta or…
Uno as Online, Social Networks, South Africa
Mar|6|2008
For those of you that don’t know…
Charl Norman runs Bandwidth Blog and Blueworld.
I can understand the linking to your own sites on blogs you run, I mean, we all do that 
but Charl, why on earth would you bookmark your own post, about one of your own sites. Are you scared you’re going to forget?
Or are you doing the shameless self promotion gambit 