2 more tasks until OpenQabal 0.0.3 can be released

Finally getting closer and closer to getting this OpenQabal release out. The last two tasks to do are: A. verify the new SQL which includes a "seed" admin user, and B. make the install/config/uninstall scripts and any utility scripts working on Windows. Most of that stuff is in Ruby so it should be pretty portable, but there are some Bash scripts which will need equivalents written as DOS batch files. Ugh. Still, this stuff should be done soon, maybe tonight, which means the release should happen in the next day or two.

In other news, I've started working on getting setup with Amazon EC2, in order to host a "demo" instance of OpenQabal.

And after that, I think I need to go on holiday for a while. :-)

Syndicated 2008-05-04 21:46:48 (Updated 2008-05-04 21:49:26) from openqabal

OpenQabal Update

Ok, the new OpenQabal release that was mentioned a few weeks ago is *finally* eminent. No really, it's coming soon. The big hold-up turned out to be a bit of Roller integration that had been overlooked. Getting single-sign-on and integration with the centralized identity stuff working using Acegi and CAS takes care of web access; and that stuff has been in place for a while now. But at some point we realized that API access for posting new blog entries also needed to be wired into the new authentication stuff. And that's a whole new can of worms.

Basically, deciding to implement that in this release meant moving forward with implementing an initial version of what we're calling the IdentityEngine, which will eventually be the centralized source for all things identity, vis-a-vis OpenQabal. Even for OpenID logins or other logins using an external authentication provider, OpenQabal has to keep track of that that that such-and-such identity exists, and map it to resources, etc. So getting this piece in place was kind of a big deal, even if this first cut at it is fairly naive.

Anyway, with that in place and API access now working, the last things left to do before a release are basically all "fit and polish" work. Clean up some loose ends here and there, more testing, tweaking the SQL scripts and the install scripts. Oh, and the install stuff needs to be tested on Windows and any relevant tweaks made. At any rate, if things go well, look for the new release maybe this weekend, or early next week.

Syndicated 2008-04-29 04:09:50 (Updated 2008-05-04 21:50:28) from openqabal

Update on my Data Portability presentation @ "Refresh The Triangle"

So apparently there was some miscommunication or whatever, and I'm not going to be presenting at this month's Refresh The Triangle after all. I am, however, now officially "on the hook" to present a talk on Data Portability at the September "Refresh" meeting. The actual date will be Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008. Location TBD, as far as I know. Check the Refresh website for more details.

Syndicated 2008-04-16 19:28:00 (Updated 2008-04-16 19:28:46) from openqabal

Google is now an OpenID provider: Use your Google account to sign into any site that accepts OpenID

It appears that Google is now an OpenID provider, which means you can log into any site which allows OpenID logins using a Google account. This is a pretty big win for OpenID in terms of putting even more momentum behind the protocol. Of course the truth still holds - as said before - that "it doesn't matter if everybody and their brother is an OpenID provider, if nobody allows OpenID logins." But the number of sites that do accept OpenID appears to be growing and an endorsement by Google can't hurt in terms of encouraging others to move in that direction.

Unfortunately this blog itself doesn't actually support OpenID logins, which is something of a bummer. It'll be fun when we reach a point where we can go "self-hosted" using OpenQabal and use this blog as a place to play with some of the new and nifty stuff coming down the pipe. With some luck, that'll happen before the entropic heat death of the universe. <big-grin / >

Syndicated 2008-04-09 04:10:24 (Updated 2008-04-09 04:11:55) from openqabal

The Economist: Social Networks Are Not A Business

Just stumbled across an interesting article from The Economist which makes an case that social networks, ala Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, etc., are not a business. Or rather, that the "social network" per-se is not valid as a business model in and of itself.

From the article:

Social networking appears to be similar in this regard. The big internet and media companies have bid up the implicit valuations of MySpace, Facebook and others. But that does not mean there is a working revenue model. Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, recently admitted that Google's “social networking inventory as a whole” was proving problematic and that the “monetisation work we were doing there didn't pan out as well as we had hoped.” Google has a contractual agreement with News Corp to place advertisements on its network, MySpace, and also owns its own network, Orkut. Clearly, Google is not making money from either.

Facebook, now allied to Microsoft, has fared worse. Its grand attempt to redefine the advertising industry by pioneering a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon, failed completely. Facebook's idea was to inform a user's friends whenever he bought something at certain online retailers, by running a small announcement inside the friends' “news feeds”. In theory, this was to become a new recommendation economy, an algorithmic form of word of mouth. In practice, users rebelled and privacy watchdogs cried foul. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, admitted in December that “we simply did a bad job with this release” and apologised.

Of course the point here isn't to disparage the usefulness of social networks, in fact, they article goes on to elaborate on how ubiquitous social networking (as opposed to "social networks") may become (emphasis added):

So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

Coming up for air
But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Of course this closely parallels what Om Malik was saying a while back in his Are Social Networks Just a Feature? article. Specifically, Om says "It is time to rethink the whole notion of social networking, and start thinking of it as a feature for other online activities. "

Needless to say, we here at OpenQabal agree, and are one of a handful of projects working on creating software to support "social networking as a feature." That's not to say that when OQ is finished you couldn't take it, put an instance on the public 'Net, and position it as a Facebook competitor. It's just that we think doing so would be a really bad idea, if you plan to make money.

Syndicated 2008-03-30 09:48:41 (Updated 2008-03-30 09:52:02) from openqabal