Category: supernova

I Left My Bowels In San Francisco

I’ve been good, I swear. Maybe it was the carpaccio last night. Maybe it was the chocolate mousse. Maybe it was something else, like the amorphous blob we had for lunch yesterday. Anyway, I skipped the end of Supernova today to spent some quality time with the hotel bathroom.\
But, yesterday was good. Rohit Khare gave name to a game I’ve played before, and we had a great time playing at lunch: Acronomious. Given a word, you have to come up with the most implausible acronym for it, extra credit for recursion (using the acronym in the acronym, for exmaple: Bases Around Strategic Emplacements). I met the guys from Netvibes, and we had a lovely conversation about building modules, and we talked about how similar our approaches to development are. It was fun, and they’re the friendliest Frenchmen I’ve ever met. The day before, I met the guys from ATTAP and we had a lovely talk about their new open source javascript framework: Jitsu. It’s definitely something worth keeping up with.\
Last night, I went out to dinner with Kristin and Jessica and we had a lovely time at The Steps of Rome (where we had the carpaccio, the best bruschetta ever, and some lovely prosciutto and mozzarella). The food was amazing, and surprisingly cheap for the quality and quantity. After dinner, we walked around Little Italy for a little while, and got dessert at Stella’s Pastery. Yummy yummy chocolate mousse!\
This week has been pretty good. Mashpit was a great experience, and will help me in a couple weeks. We’re running an internal Mashpit at AOL to work on module, and it was nice to get a “real” Mashpit experience under my belt before I try to replicate it at work.\
The Supernova workshops on Wednesday were very interesting, and I think our Decentralized Data panel went really well, and so did my short talk on Modular Web Development that I hope to expand into a real proposal or set of best practices. I get to work on refining it a little bit more before Mashup Camp. The panels yesterday were a disappointment. It was mostly “my company believes in these buzzword and I’ll say them over and over again and ignore what anyone else is saying.” The best stuff was happening in IRC, where the snark overflowed.\
That’s what I’ve been up to this week. Tomorrow, it’s back home for a little while before Mashup Camp, and then I’m really taking the rest of the summer off from traveling.

Got Shwag?

Shwag

Shwag\
They’ve actually given me shwag this time! Since I’m the shy retiring type and don’t like going up to people and shoving crap into their hands, I’m going to make you come to me. I’ve got cool little AIM Running Man pins. If you want one, find me at the conference and I’ll give you one (or two if you’re nice). I’m the fat guy…

Notes from Supernova: Personal Infosphere

This panel’s all about how we can keep up of all the information that comes in every day. We’re\
h4. Dalton from imeem

  • We’re reaching some limit as to the amount of information we can handle.
  • imeem creates both an IM client and web client
  • Instant messaging is useful as a communications tool, but about presence. Presence is actually the most important part of IM clients.
  • They’ve got real-time notification of new blog posts, profile updates, etc.
  • They have groups to “aggregate people around particular topics”
  • Trying to manage all forms of digital information, can pull in data from other services
  • They have a unified tag space across media types (eeenteresting). I wonder how that plays out with users. People tag different content differently, do users of imeem use consistent tags across media?\
    h4. Yael from eSnips
  • They have mainstream users, not teens.
  • Social, but focused on content, not people
  • It’s for sharing interest and passions but lets you go one step further\
    h4. Ben from Plaxo
  • 5 year-old company
  • Synchronized address book
  • People have on average:
    • 3-4 phone numbers
    • 2-3 e-mail addresses
    • 2-3 physical addresses
  • And this information is always changing
  • 33% of mobile phone numbers and 24% of e-mail addresses change annually\
    h4. Tariq Krim from Netvibes
  • Create a single place for your entire digital life. Another personal portal.
  • They have an open API for module developers.
  • They have a public wiki for users to request features and report bugs
  • They have a really cool live translating tool
  • So they want to use “open standards”, but didn’t really say which ones\
    h4. Hans from Plum
  • Connect with each others “heads”, not with dates.
  • Collect data of all types and drop it into buckets
  • “Communities of Knowledge”
  • Tiny little application that runs and allows you to add anything you read into a collection.
  • Wow… this is really cool. Collect anything from your desktop and throw it up into a collection. Neato.
  • Everything is indexed and searchable.
  • Works great on the Mac too. Yay!!
  • Also allows you to connect to people with similar collections to yours.
  • They dig microformats as well.
  • They use Amazon’s S3 for the data.\
    h4. Discussion
  • Collaborative Filtering
    • imeem uses collaborative filtering to decide how popular or “good” something is. Compared to PageRank
    • Plum called on “big” companies like Yahoo and AOL to come up with a good scheme for licensing documents or declaring document license. Time to go read up on rel license, isn’t it?
  • Lot of talk of ownership while avoiding completely the topic of lock-in and open API’s. Oh well, we’ll talk about it in the next panel.