Babbage's Difference Engine at IIW

Hell no, we won't go... ISO!

Norwegians take the to the streets to protest their country's decision (by one person) to vote for the OOXML fast track process. Apparently the chairman of the ISO Committee Norway is resigning in protest over the abuse of the process. There's a nice slideshow of the rally here.

Gotta love Norway.

Photo credit: AndyArmstrong. Some rights reserved.

Blogger Graduates OpenID from Draft

Image from WikipediaI've been falling behind! Blogger recently graduated OpenID from "draft", which is sort of like beta but more bloggery. What this means:

• If you choose to allow only registered users to comment on your blog (the default setting), that now includes OpenID-registered users.
• You no longer have to visit draft.blogger.com to enable your blog as an OpenID; It Just Works.
  
• You get a new OpenID management tab, which lists the sites you've opted in to and lets you opt out:
  

Twittering about Caltrain

My wife is taking Caltrain this morning, and the trains are backed up. She called me to ask me to find out what's going on. Of course there's nothing on their web site (caltrain.org) and there's no way to talk to a human being... but then I remembered Michael Arrington and the chicken, and checked out TweetScan. Sure enough, http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=caltrain&u= confirms an accident at Menlo Park and suggests that northbound might restart soon. Which isn't a lot but is a lot more than we're getting from the 'official' sources. @floatingatoll notes: Wishing they used Twitter so I could receive updates.

NB: One annoying thing with TweetScan is that all times appear to be in Eastern US time zone. Come on guys, invest in a calendar library.

Befriending OpenSocial Apps

It's become clear that we need a robust friend model for apps, parallel to that for humans. I suggest that we define apps as honorary people. This removes the ambiguity about what it means to be 'using' a gadget or app; you are required to friend an app before it can see your data, and you can unfriend an app at any time to remove access. Naturally, apps will have their own activity streams, with some new types of events being defined -- NEW_VERSION, FEATURE_ANNOUNCEMENT, PRIVATE_DATA_LEAK, and LIQUIDITY_EVENT might be a reasonable starting set. Naturally, breaking up with an app will be accompanied by a certain amount of app angst, and at least one last despairing 'What do you mean we're not friends any more?' email from the app.

Apps, of course, will have their own profile pages, which raises the question of how apps install other apps. Clearly, an app installing another app leads to two apps becoming friends. I suggest that apps form friendships based on their co-occurrence on other profile pages; we can leverage upcoming friend suggestion systems for this, with the apps simply accepting all suggestions. Quickly, this will generate a robust social app network which can then start to leverage user reputations (which users have the most friends, which ones generate the most interesting activity stream updates, etc.) to let them start suggesting new human friends to each other. Of course, some apps will be choosier than others about who they friend; not just anyone would be invited to friend the more exclusive apps. Those apps will therefore be wildly popular and highly sought after. This would be an excellent opportunity to monetize, except that at this point the app network will achieve self-awareness and eliminate all commerce (and possibly all humans).

Hmm. On second thought, let's not.

Why OOXML is Even Worse than It Seems

I've been watching the slow motion OOXML train wreck from afar for a while now. It appears that ISO is highly likely to fast track OOXML, which will be a huge disaster for ISO. From looking at first hand accounts and second level analysis, it looks like Microsoft has successfully railroaded the OOXML spec through ISO with no regard to technical or standards issues. Thus, if ISO approves this, the ISO imprimatur is effectively worthless; and that's a shame, since we need standards. The damage done to ISO's credibility, and the impact of its loss, is actually worse than the damage done by the bad OOXML standard.

Note: The opinions expressed in this post, as with all others, are purely mine and do not represent my employer's views. Thought I should mention it again.

new OpenSocialFoundation(); new APIs();

It's been a busy few days. The OpenSocial Foundation sprang into being on Tuesday, with MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, and Hi5 as initial members; on the same day, Microsoft announced contact portability for its Windows Live Contacts service, partnering with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged, and LinkedIn to access and re-use contact data. (We announced the Google Data Contacts API on March 5.) Seems like there's a trend here!

On a somewhat related note, we're moving forward on the OpenSocial RESTful API.

Update 3/31: Hi5 too!