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Analyst: Apple's limited 'low-end' presence a problemAnalyst: Apple's limited 'low-end'
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Then I stuck one tag on my work monitor, and another one at home.
Now I can just touch one of these tags with my phone, and a few
seconds later (some delays are involved with starting the Java midlet
and connecting to GPRS) the little box on the right changes to show my
location. Voila: NFC-powered presence.
Just touching. It couldn't be simpler.
Took me more time to take the pictures and blog about it than to actually write the app...
(Disclaimer: I work for the company, and I've been somewhat involved in giving birth to these babies. But I wouldn't write about it if it didn't give me the warm fuzzies.)
Though I'm not credited on the web page, I did have something to do with coming up with this new concept called MeNowDocument. Really I'm just the cheerleader/marketing guy and it was Joel De Gan, Chris Schmidt and B.K. DeLong. MeNowDocument is to Presence what PersonalProfileDocument is to About Me pages.
Chris Schmidt has now been working with that schema recently. he has some interesting insights below about......well just take a read. BTW Joel is also the guy working on the PeoplesDNS, who created some new kind of filters recently and who is implementing the php version of the FOAFnet APIs.
:-)
Here's Chris' post....
Metadata
, the quick and easy way. One of the biggest problems with FOAF is that it's difficult for
people to use quickly and easily. Even with the FOAF-A-Matic or
other similar tools, designed to make creation of RDF data simpler,
take a concentrated amount of time to use to create good
information.
Lately, I'd been playing with the menow schema that Joel
and a couple other people interested in FOAF came up with. The basic
idea behind it is to be able to describe yourself at the moment - an
instantaneous description of what you're doing. This fits in along
with other projects that I've worked on, such as Dashboard, where it
tells you more about what you're doing on the computer at the moment.
For example, a menowdocument could describe the fact that I'm out
driving with Jess, with a goal GPS destination: something that FOAF
typically doesn't do.
The MeNowDocument could be the first
step towards solving Neil's Where was Social
Networking? issue - how to connect the people better. The first
step towards connecting is getting the information in a way that
agents can understand it - and if both agents understand "late night,
10pm", then you're on your way.
Tired of all the problems
related to creating these things by hand, I wrote two bots, both
connected to the same backend for storage information. One bot hangs
out on IRC - in #pa, on irc.freenode.net. The other is on AIM:
menowbot.
These two bots aren't all that complex - in fact, the
next step will be to add a bit more complexity, in creating the
ability to alias different personalities together. The code for the
bots is available at http://crschmidt.net/pa/menow/ . However, what they do do is set up an easy way to add
information to a database without having to think about it much. It's
not completely simple yet - and it's not particularly complete, cause
you can add any predicate you want. However, for those people who just
want something to hang onto their data for them as a reminder to
others - something perfect for the quick "hm, remember this" note.
A quick transcript to demonstrate:
<crschmidt>
menow, menow?
<menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at
2004-06-01 19:17:33 menow:browsing = http://schema.peoplesdns.co
m/menow/
< crschmidt>
menow, forget browsing
<crschmidt> menow,
menow?
<menow> crschmidt : menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33
<crschmidt> menow, add writing dc:description post
about the bot
<crschmidt> menow, menow?
<menow>
crschmidt : menow:writing = dc:description post about the bot at
2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood = tired at 2004-06-01
19:17:33
Of course, no bot like this would be complete without
the ability to browse other people:
<crschmidt> menow,
crschmidt now?
<menow> crschmidt : menow:writing =
dc:description post about the bot at 2004-06-01 20:50:35 menow:mood =
tired at 2004-06-01 19:17:33
Lots of interesting uses, and I
plan to keep developing it, but I believe in "release early, release
often." So, here's version 0.1.
foaf:aimChatID=menowbot
foaf:nick=menow rdf:resource=irc://irc.f
reenode.net/pa By crschmidt@livejournal.com.
[Christopher
Schmidt]
chronicle.com/free/v50/i15/15b00701.htm
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After perusing the IETF's Working Group Guidelines and Procedures, I went perusing the web for charters to 'crib' from. I came across SIMPLE and XMPP.&n bsp; These are not just interesting from a potential future IETF bretheren point of view, but also from a basic syndication and API point of view. In particular, such protocols can avoid the scalability problems associated with a polling based architecture and can potentially navigate through gateways, firewalls and routers.
Authentication is the one area where I expect things to be different, but the uniform layout of the feed and entries are something that I don't expect to vary based on the transfer mechanism.
A few months ago I responded to a site that claimed The Internet is Shit with a reposte designed to illustrate that although our networks might contain difficult and unpleasant material, they also contain enough of value and facilitate enough legitimate and real communities to be able to state pretty conclusively that The Internet is not Shit. Note - not that it's perfect, not that it doesn't have flaws, not that bad things don't go on in it, but that pound-for-pound it's more useful and valuable and community-generating than it is useless or damaging or culture-destroying.
Over the last few days, the post has turned into a bit of an argumentative arena, with various posters weighing with positions on what constitutes utopian rhetoric versus what constitutes a reasonable and rational position about the possibilities of (among other things) online communities. Throughout this article various people - myself included - have stumbled in our logic, presented clumsy opinions and misunderstood each other. Nonetheless, I want to pick up one particular fragment of these arguments - a fragment that I feel strongly about and am prepared to fight vigorously about. It's about the authenticity or otherwise of online 'communities'. At a certain point in the debate, my sparring partner posts:
"We're not talking about abstract information - which is expedited magnificently over the internet - we're talking about flesh and blood people. An actual meeting is far more meaningful than tapping on a keyboard. It is substantially different. Physically congregating with other folk is the same as being on the internet as is reading a book about Tibet compared to actually going there. Or reading a menu and eating the food. You can't reduce and flatten the physical, sensory, emotional, kinaesthetic and social world in that way."
Now I'm going to agree with the premise that the particulars of the medium through which people communicate can add a timbre to a community and that they can faciliate certain parts of the exchange more effectively than others. On the other hand, I'd also argue that the qualities of the community space are supprted by the software that they run on, and that quite possibly that software hasn't yet - in the ten/twenty years that it's been being developed - quite achieved the elegance and sophistication that we take for granted in some other social spaces. But the one thing I will not stand for is this sense that online communities are somehow inauthentic because they are unphysical - or that the truncation in social 'signal' somehow reduces them down to a point of uselessness or redundancy. So excerpts from my reply follow:
Your analogies are hideously flawed for a start - if I communicate on the internet or by phone with someone, it's not like a transcript of that person or a decription of that person. You're talking as if whenever you talked to people who weren't present physically (say via the telephone), that what you were actually doing was listening passively to bloody recordings! Of course they're not - it's not bloody radio! People are talking to each other!
Now obviously there are things that you can do in person that you can't do physically online. It's harder to guage someone's mood, it's harder to have sex with them, it's harder to get intonation or a tone of voice. But it's still communication! And the possibility of community still exists! I mean, there are many circumstances in which certain elements of the experience an interaction can be truncated - if you're on a phone for example and can't see the person concerned, or if they're wearing sunglasses so you can't see their eyes, or if you're actually bloody deaf and are forced to lip-read, for Christ's sake! But none of these things stop the possibilities of communication, and none of them stop people being supportive, helpful, useful, friendly or even forming communities through them. I work on the internet, and often my first experience of people is online. Sometimes my only experience of them is online. And yet we can be friends! Most of them have helped me out in some ways in the past, and I've helped most of them out in the past as well. Those I haven't met, I'd like to and those I have I see regularly. But that our relationships have moved sometimes from purely online to a mix of both online and off doesn't mean they weren't real to begin with.
You talk about 'tapping on a keyboard' as if touching keys was the entire point. You're confusing the method of communication with the communication itself. It would be like me saying, "There's a substantial difference between communicating with someone (online) and just causing air to vibrate with your vocal chords". It's trivialising, innaccurate, clumsy and - frankly - stupid.
[I should apologise at this point for resorting to name calling in the final line - put it down to frustration.]
There's a lot more to the argument that's worth reading and talking abotu on the post itself, but I just thought I'd ask do people still think that the term 'online community' is necessarily an oxymoron? Do you really think that the fact you're interacting through your fingers dramatically limits the strength of the relationships you can make?
Charity Begins at Home. It Can End Online: Here's a fascinating story of incredible Web incompetence. A journalist tried to donate to the Cousteau Society but was thwarted at every turn by an abandoned site, a Flash site invisible to search engines (the link above), and an email delivery issue.
Why did I get no response to my e-mail? "E-mail is routed through France. That one went to the Paris office. The one person who picks up all the e-mail is the Webmaster," she told me. "He's supposed to forward anything in English to me. But he just left for the Red Sea expedition."
Bad design often has financial consequences.
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