It’s called Open AIM as It Relates to You. I’m about to run downstairs to catch Simon Willison’s presentation, and then we’re up. Then, it’s time to pack, then go out to dinner with Daniel, go to bed, wake up, and then come home!
Category: development
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The Coolest Thing Ever: Share Your iTunes Library Over AIM
The guys in the next row have gone and pulled off a truly killer app. I know the title gives it away, but it really works! Greg explains how it works, but I know you really just want to go download it.\
What does it do? It makes iTunes’ music sharing work over your buddy list!!! So, instead of being limited to sharing music across just your local network, you can now share your tunes with everyone in your buddy list who has the plugin. Unfortunately, it’s only for Windows at the moment… but I’ve promised a pizza to whoever ports it to OS X. -
The Ficlets Logo’s Story
Jenna Marino has written a fantastic blog entry about how she came up with the logo for ficlets. I love the logo so much, and a bunch of people asked me how we came up with it. Mostly, I’ve just shrugged and said “magic?” Now, you can get the real story from the designer who came up with it!
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Web 2.0 Expo: Bridging the Gap, OpenAuth and Widgets
Greg and I presented at Web 2.0 Expo today in a presentation called Bringing the Gap Between Desktop and Web. It went well, although we were hoping to have some more announcements to make. There was a lot of discussion of the widget space, microformats (which 99% of the audience hadn’t heard of which surprised me), a little on OpenID and I got to talk about OpenAuth! I’ve had to stay quiet about it for months now, but I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of AOL for doing.\
What’s OpenAuth It’s AOL opening up its authentication system to the web at large. We used it in ficlets instead of us having to come up with our own user system, maintaining all those passwords, writing code for encryption, sending those “oops, I forgot my password” e-mails, and re-inventing that wheel for the millionth time, I didn’t have to worry about it at all.\
I was able to integrate OpenAuth with Rails in about twenty minutes. And for those who don’t have AIM screennames, or don’t want them, we supported OpenID, which took about forty-five minutes to integrate.\
I linked to the presentation up there, but if you missed it, here are the slides. I mentioned my triple-headed widget that works in Dashboard, Opera and AIM Pages as well.\
Now, it’s time for me to go write some more stuff for the book and try to get caught up. -
Web 2.0 Expo – Making Lemonade
It’s been a wonderful (italics = sarcasm!) week so far. My second presentation at Web 2.0 Expo got moved to Wednesday at the last minute, and I won’t be here, so I’m not giving it. It’s a long and sad soap opera, and I’d rather not talk about it. But, instead of giving up entirely, I’ve decided to make some lemonade. Instead of doing the presentation (Microformats for Web Services and Portable Content) in a hallway at Web 2.Open, I think I’ll go to the Mashroom and see if I can get some help turning it into a Rails plugin. While I’ve launched a product on Rails, I’m no expert. I’ve been meaning to play with plugins, but haven’t had time (oddly enough, working on this presentation). I’ve zipped up the Rails app if you want to play with it. You’ll need to install the mofo and ruby-openid gems for it to work correctly (and you need a database for the profiles).\
What does it do? The main demo takes OpenID and after you log in, it grabs the OpenID URL looking for an hcard and pre-populates your profile with some selected bits of info. It was pretty painless to throw together, and I’d love to turn it into a plugin to make it even more painless. I think this could be a great alternative to CardSpace and the OpenID 2.0 attribute exchange stuff that’s still in the works. With delegate links, you could have multiple hcard “personas” that all point to the same identity provider but contain different profile information. Wouldn’t that be cool?\
In related news, I’m tired of conferences. I’d rather stay home, work and spend time with my family, who I feel is getting away from me. I’m missing too many of Brian’s little developments, the little things that kids learn on their ride from babies to little boys. He’s already a toddler and well on his way to kid-dom, and I don’t want to miss anything I don’t have to. Max gets smarter every day, and I want to be there to help answer questions.\
Other than Mashup Camps, and XTech (only because I already agreed to do it), I’m done until SxSW next year. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass to travel, and conference organizers don’t make it any easier. You’d think they’d treat speakers better, but they don’t. Yes, it’s a privilege to speak, but it’s also a huge commitment – both in time and money. They move your presentations around (without warning, or checking to see if you’re available), the network never works, and no one will answer e-mails (oops, here I go, I’m dwelling on this conference again). I’m tired and I need a break.\
So, if you’re going to Mashroom on Tuesday, come help.\
Update: I ended up not doing the Mashroom because I wanted to meet John Allsopp and see his microformats presentation (which was fantastic, and mine would have been a great sequel to it). By the end of that, I was tired and didn’t feel like writing code so I went back to the AOL booth to help out. -
Bloggers are Real People
I just read Kathy Sierra’s post about the death threats she’s received and I’m shocked. I’ve been on the web a long time, and see some really horrible stuff, but what never ceases to amaze me is how cruel people can be.\
For some reason when our interaction with someone is online and we’re reading text they’ve written or looking at pictures they’ve taken, we somehow think of them as less than a real person. They become their work, not the person behind the work – which is dangerous. It opens the door to this kind of thing.\
I don’t even know that there’s a solution other than education and treating this stuff like the crime that it is. Threats are not protected speech. They are threats, and that’s against the law. Just because you think you’re anonymous doesn’t mean you are. Just because someone shares things online – words, photos, videos, etc – doesn’t mean they’re not a real person with real feelings.\
For me, I try (and often fail) to think of what I write, especially in comments and e-mail, as something I’m saying to that person face to face. If I wouldn’t say it someone standing in front of me, I probably won’t post it online. It’s saved me a lot of embarrassment and problems over the years.\
I’ve lived my life pretty much in public since I started this blog about seven years ago. I never quite understood why others didn’t until recently. After talking to several women over the past year, I think I’m starting to understand, and it makes me really sad. I don’t know what, if anything, I can do to fix things other than doing a better job of following my own rules.\
Kathy, I think you’re awesome. Your blog is one of my absolute favorites, and you’re an inspiration to me and to my work (and ask the people I work with – I send out links to your posts all the time). Here’s hoping the idiots responsible are caught quickly and this ugliness is resolved so you can get back to doing what you love (assuming you love blogging and presenting). -
SxSW Interactive Recap
There’s so much to say about SxSW this year. It was a huge year for me personally, and I think for AOL as a company. First of all, AOL sponsored the conference, which makes me extremely happy. This was my fifth year coming to Austin for a week of geeking out with my “tribe”, and this year, I brought my work tribe with me. In years past, other folks from AOL have come, but this year was different, because we had an “official” presence at the conference. Also, this is the first year I’ve launched something at the conference and come with swag. And oh boy, did we launch it. We launched last Wednesday, and I left for Austin Thursday. We had some hiccups getting out the door and I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to say anything because the site didn’t actually work. Well… it works, and people really seem to be digging it. The response I’ve gotten talking to people about the site has been truly inspiring, and almost all the blog posts about the site have been great as well. If you want to follow along, check out the results on Technorati.\
On top of launching ficlets, and talking about it nonstop, I was on two panels, and did 20×2 for the first time this year. The first panel was Mr. McNally’s Ghost in the Machine: Spirituality Online, and I was honored to be a part of it. The folks on the panel with me were far more qualified to talk about the subject at hand that I was, but I had a great time at lunch with them, on the panel and dinner afterwards. I can’t thank James, Rachel, Gordan and Hussein enough. I was so inspired by their spirits, stories and openness. It was a truly great experience… and the panel went swimmingly. The only real “moment” I had was after the panel, a couple very neatly dressed guys came up to the table and introduced themselves, handing me their cards… “LDS Church”. I blanched for a sec, “Oh snap, they sent spies!”, but no, they’re very cool designers who work with Cameron Moll on the Church’s website. They were very nice, and I’m sad I didn’t get to ask them more about what they thought of the panel.\
Our panel the next day was How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture. I wish I could say I thought it went well. I was disappointed in how I did and how I handled the distractions around the panel (and during, but I don’t want to talk about it here). I’ve heard good feedback from folks who said they enjoyed it, but I thought I could have done better. Alla, Arun, Greg and Steve were real troopers for agreeing to do it at the last minute.\
20×2 was Monday night, and as always, Jeff, Kevin and Mike Stephens were fantastic, and I was psyched to be part of the show. Better yet, folks laughed in the right places during the movie Max and I made! It was so cool seeing Max up on the screen, and hearing the applause afterwards.\
After that, I was free. I spent a lot of time in the AOL booth all week, and had a great time meeting folks, talking about ficlets, OpenID, AIM, WIM and all the other stuff that came up during the week. I didn’t attend as many panels this year as I have in the past (the four previous years, I skipped a grand total of one panel – this year, I made it to about 6 total between AOL booth time, preparing for panels or working on ficlets stuff).\
There are embarrassing photos and videos imminent of just how “free” I was. I have a horrible tendency at SxSW to lose all verbal inhibitions, and I just say stuff… sometimes really really horrible stuff. It gets worse when I have a “partner in crime” with me, or a giggling audience. Unfortunately, Monday and Tuesday nights, I had both. Monday night, after 20×2 (so, not only was I free, but I was still buzzed from the reaction to the movie), I inappropriately touched my food. I couldn’t help it, that chocolate shake was asking for it.\
Tuesday morning, I attended the panel Arun moderated: Browser Wars. He moderated a discussion between Brendan Eich from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from the IE team, and Charles McCathieNeville from Opera. It was a fantastic discussion, and he did an amazing job keeping all those egos in check, and asked some really good questions, that I think led to better questions from the audience. I think I’ll make him moderate next year if we do a panel again.\
Tuesday night was oh so much worse. Kevin Smokler had his annual Castle Hill Cafe dinner, and I was at a table with Brad Graham (partner in vulgarity) and the giggling accomplices: the Browns, Mike Tremoulet, Kathryn Wu and Dan Budiac, Nikolai Nolan and Anne. Except for Nikolai, we all had a hard time finishing our dinners and desserts because we couldn’t stop laughing. We were all crying, holding our sides, and had laughter headaches by the end of dinner. Folks were hesitant to take bites of their food, for fear that another round of guffaws would break out. I apologize profusely in advance. I think Nikolai got video, and it’s going to be really really bad. Hysterically funny, but wrong in so many ways. There will be a price to pay for it, and well, I said all that stuff, so I guess I’m stuck with it (damn, but it was funny). There were muppets in compromising positions, twisted takes on Mark Twain stories, Jewish gay porn, and a truly disgusting act with a plate of goat cheese (that one wasn’t me, I swear). I’ll post the pictures after my ribs had recovered.\
All said, it was a great time all week. I started a little slow, had one bad night, but the glee and successes more than made up for one bad day.\
I’ll tell you about the adventure on the trip home later… right now, I need some sleep!\
And here are all the pictures! -
I Can Die Happy
Ficlets is on BoingBoing today.\
Just found out, sitting in the airport, about ready to board. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face right now even if you punched me in the nads (not that you should try, you shouldn’t). -
Hello, Ficlets
It’s been a very long day, and it’s not over yet, but I couldn’t let the day be done until I posted about this. Today, we took the covers off of the project that I’ve been working on for the past three months: ficlets. It started as this little thing I was going to do all by myself to learn Rails, and ended up what you can see over on the site.
I don’t even know what to say about it, really. Cindy, Jason and I have been dancing around it so long on twitter, calling it Ape Shirt, that talking about it now in the open feels kind of weird. But, here we are. There’s more information about what it all means on the ficlets blog.
Ficlets is very much an experiment (we like to call it “a prototype we just happened to launch”), and this is our very first release (we’re the first product in AOL to roll out on Rails, so we’ve still got stuff to learn about it…). So, things may go weird and wonky from time to time. Just give it a minute, and then reload.
I am truly fortunate to work at a company where I can get away with stuff like this. This started as my own little thing to do on the side. When I realized that it was actually a pretty cool idea and that I didn’t have the time or talent to do it all myself, I presented it at a meeting, and the next thing I know, I’m working on it full time with a small team of amazingly talented people. It was a pirate project in the best sense of the word. We didn’t really do a project plan or start with a big committee. It was four people in a room, working towards something we were all geeked about. From the beginning, we treated it like we were in a startup, very few rules, no defined roles (except that I got two votes, and Kerry got three). It worked so well, and we had too much fun designing and building it.
I never imagined it would look so good, or be so much fun. For that, I have to thank the designers who worked most closely on it: Cindy Li, Ari Kushimoto, Jenna Marino, and Jason Garber, who did 99% of the markup (all the good stuff), the CSS and most of the javascript (I worked on it some, I swear). We make such a great team, and I’m so proud of the work we did. We had lots of other help too, from folks who helped design the stickers, buttons and shirts for SxSW: Shadia Ahmed and Jayna Wallace, to the folks who played around with concepts early on: Elisa Nader, Elsa Kawai, Tom Osborne and Justin Kirk.
There are tons of people to thank, and a lot of people helped out. We had tons of support and “air cover” from Kerry and text and language help from John, Amy, Suzie, Nancie and Erin. My pal Tony was an immense help figuring out how to deliver everything in working order to the Greatest Ops Guy in the World, Dan, and Kelly helped us bend a few rules to get all the other opsy bits in order at the last minute. We had legal help from Holly and Regina. And my bosses let me steal Jason, and go work on it, so big thanks to Alan and Bert too.
This has been so much fun, I think we should do it again. I have big plans for our little story site…
One last thing… if you’re going to be at SxSW Interactive this weeked, come find me. We’ve got some lovely stickers and buttons to hand out (while supplies last). I should be pretty easy to spot. I’ll be the big fat guy with the ficlets shirt on (well, for two days… ).
Now I have to go finish packing! -
Tell Us How You Really Feel
I hate it when people say “tell us how you really feel.” Hate it. Why wouldn’t I tell you how I really feel? You asked. Would you rather I lie to you?\
We’ve been having this internal discussion about passion, how to change things inside the company, and how things could be better. It’s been going on for a while, but a presentation I did with a bunch of pals last week (called Guerilla Web 2.0 – I’m going to see if I can release the audio and slides publicly) really sparked something, and I keep coming back to that statement (which people have said to me a lot recently, which is why it’s stuck in my head)… “tell us how you really feel.”\
If you want to change things, don’t stay silent. If you’re passionate about what you do or what you want to do, don’t hide it. The only way things change is if people speak up. I’ve had this quote from Angels in America on my phone for ages and peek at it every once in a while:\
bq. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens… the time has come.\
Now, that’s about something a lot more serious than technology, but the line has stuck with me. If you want something to change, don’t suffer in silence. If you want something to change, get off your ass and make it happen. If you can’t convince anyone, or fail the first time, then go back and find a new message that will. People assume that things are the way they are for a reason, and they’re just not. A lot of times, they’re an accident or an unintended consequence of another decision.\
There’s a flip side to that: that we need to “protect” management from issues. Nope. If something’s broken and it’s important, they need to know about it. They’re not fragile, nor are they immune from mistakes (and if they are fragile, they probably shouldn’t be managers). Most of them are human beings, and if they know something is broken, they’ll try to fix it. If they’re decent (and I think 95% of them are), they’d prefer to have happy employees than disgruntled semi-postal ones.\
The next time someone asks you to tell them how you really feel, tell them. Don’t be hostile, don’t embellish or hyperbolize, but dammit, tell them the truth. Nothing will ever change if you don’t. If we keep it to ourselves and suffer “secret deaths”, there’s no one to blame but ourselves. If we speak up, at least we’ve made the first step in making things better. If others fail to take that information and do something with it, it’s on them.