Last month I was fortunate enough to attend Social Web FooCamp at
O'Reilly HQ in Sebastopol, CA, a follow up to Social Graph FooCamp in
2008. I can't express how inspiring such events are, being able to have
a continuous, in-depth conversation with so many bright minds about so
many topics that keep you busy on regular days,
and more. I'll give a quick overview of the whole trip, and then go
into depth in a series of posts.
My trip started with a visit to friend and former Jaiku colleague Andy
Smith, who was kind enough to take me in at Houseku.
As soon as I landed on SFO, I got an SMS from him to make a detour to
his office. Besides meeting a bunch of Andy's fellow googlers, I got to
spend some time with Brett Slatkin talking about
PubSubHubbub.
The next day I got a ride to Sebastopol from Edwin
Aoki. After a trip full of interesting conversation, we
arrived at the O'Reilly offices. Sebastopol was a lot warmer than San
Francisco, perfect for camping. Lots of familiar faces, but also a lot
of new ones. During the Friday evening, apart from the general
introduction, I didn't get to any sessions, but instead spent talking
to a bunch of people on XMPP,
Publish-Subscribe
and the work I am doing on federating social networks under that name
Open-CI at
Mediamatic Lab.
The next two days were filled with sessions and hallway talk on
OpenID, OAuth, different approaches to Publish-Subscribe and inter-site
communication, resource and service discovery and service scalability.
While most of the topics were similar to last year, I was glad to share
what we've done at Mediamatic Lab over the past year, while learning
how others have fared. We used these technologies to
make a true federation of social networking sites where you can make
cross-site relations between people and their social objects. Some of
our discoveries there we're shared among the participants, while others
had interesting other approaches.
Especially interesting to me was a session on OAuth and OpenID
where I could explain how we tried to improve upon the user experience.
Both technologies have a bad reputation in this area. With some smart
defaults and trust between sites, we could eliminate some of the
screens. There was talk about using pop-ups in some situations, either
as lightboxes or as new (small) windows. In our experience the former
can't be used if you want to do SSL (since you can't validate the
address and certificate). The latter was deemed confusing in our user
tests. Research is still ongoing, I suppose. The other issue had to do
with presenting OpenID providers. We currently use a drop down, but
that doesn't scale up very nicely. Logos might work, but in the end has
the same issue.
I also got to show Blaine Cook the code I wrote
recently to make it easier to write XMPP publish-subscribe enabled
services (code-as-a-node), that has been included in the recent Wokkel release. In turn, Blaine shared his thoughts on
simple
addressing on the web and we got to hash it out with a bunch
of people like Brad Fitzpatrick, who also organized
the pubsub shootout session. Finally, Eran
Hammer-Lahav showed his work on XRD.
I'm pretty sure I forgot to mention a lot of things, but when it
comes back to me, I'll write about it some other time.
