Ma.gnolia: All Andrew Dayton's Discussions

New post by jean philippe g in "Beta Testing"

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:54:37 GMT

At Feb 19, 11:54 AM jean philippe said...

hi guys test this new Beta web service http://www.rec2mail.com/gb this is a complete video communication center customizable by the user himself

have fun
jeanphy

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 06:30:05 GMT

At Dec 07, 10:30 PM William said...

Good point. Since I'm in Beta, I kind of like the fact that the audience is fairly self-selecting. It lets me focus on working out the bugs.

Just to give you guys an update, I have mainly been working on data quality issues this week. I have filters that each property is run through to normalize them, and I've been tweaking those based on what I'm seeing come through. I've also made some small cosmetic changes, like allowing users to expand the "note" property. That one's for you Chris. If you haven't cleared your cache in a few days, you might get an updated client if you do so now.

New post by Andrew Dayton in "Beta Testing"

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 23:27:28 GMT

At Dec 07, 03:27 PM Andrew said...

I think a lot of the ambiguity and confusion about using Wikidentity is probably pretty closely tied to abiguity and confusion about what exactly things like microformats and OpenID are and what they will/should be in the future. Because this stuff is not fully established (although it is definitely headed in that direction), you will probably have to communicate a lot more to the average user about what exactly is going on.

Think about when RSS was first becoming adopted, nearly every site advertising an RSS feed would also have a "What's RSS?" link (and many still do). Because the technology you're using is in it's early stages, you will probably have to be part developer and part educator.

Anyways, that's my two cents. Overall I think you have done a damn fine job so far, and this is a beta version after all. Anybody who is using Wikidentity right now will probably know this stuff -- or at last be interested in researching it.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:01:40 GMT

At Dec 05, 11:01 PM William said...

Thanks Jonathan. With regards to the icon opening the hCard, it's working for me, but if you were trying to click on the top-most hCard in your first cited URL (for Jeremy), it might be unresponsive if it's under the flash window, which is intercepting the click. If you minimize the client, and then click it, it should work.

Zeldman's got a weird hcard in there. He is denoting his name w/ the <family-name> and <given-name> properties, which are supposed to be sub-properties of 'fn' or 'n', but then he's got "Daily Report" in a span with both "fn" and "n", which is why Daily Report is coming up as his name. I'm discovering that there is definitely some fuzzy logic in the parsing of hCards, and thats assuming that the implementation is correct. I think "fn" is supposed to trump, but my parser might need a little love too.

As far as the simplicity of the UI, I agree that there are places it can be refined, which will hopefully become clearer with use.

New post by Jonathan Broad in "Beta Testing"

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 04:51:51 GMT

At Dec 05, 08:51 PM Jonathan said...

I've looked into Eastmedia's implementation of both client and server a bit; I figured that's what you were using, as a Rails shop. I guess it's no surprise that it was a consensus move.

I've done some dinking about and have some notes for you. Quickies: the embedded 'view hCard' link doesn't work when the name is also a link: http://adactio.com/journal/1122/. Somehow, Zeldman's about page stopped using hCard, but your parser still show something: http://www.zeldman.com/about/ (from http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-examples-in-wild, which I'm using for my testing).

I think the UI (I'm using the FF plugin) is gorgeous. I second some confusion about what the widgets do. You may want to simplify and focus. What really needs to be there, when I'm just browsing on a spur-of-the-moment pivot from someone's blog, for instance? I don't have an answer yet, but I'll let you know if I feel a stronger opinion comin' on...

Another +1 on weighting the XFN, or even defining a distinct tier of relatedness on that basis.

Cohabitating the same URL is pretty weak sauce when it comes to relationships, especially given the way hCard lends itself to use in directories of all sorts. Same first letter of the last name do not buddies make. Reminds me of how frustrated I'd be when a googlewhack turned out to be just another dictionary... (does that reference date me? jeez, 32 is the new 60 in web-years...)

New post by Todd Sieling in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 23:47:39 GMT

At Dec 05, 03:47 PM Todd said...

+1 for that weighting - the contact relationship is significant and should be communicated upward in some sense.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 23:13:52 GMT

At Dec 05, 03:13 PM William said...

Looking into XFN relationships is on my list of post-beta tasks. Finding people on the same page is a quick/cheap way to determine relatedness. Maybe an XFN relationship could be weighted more heavily that simply occupying the same URL.

New post by Larry Halff in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 23:07:03 GMT

At Dec 05, 03:07 PM Larry said...

Have you looked at using XFN to ascertain relationship? As you know, Ma.gnolia just rolled out rel=contact on our members' home and contacts pages.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:42:36 GMT

At Dec 05, 10:42 AM William said...

@Andrew

So when you boot the client, you're seeing the cards pulled from the current page. The "lookup" button is used to do a search on that name, which often returns more information about the person, because the data is a convergence of n-number of vcards. So, you could view the vcards on a page w/ no connection to the Wikidentity server, but you couldn't do a lookup. In some cases the info will be the same, just because there is only one or two hCards collected for that name.

Related means other people who are related to that person. The way this is determined is by shared citations. You'll see a lot of Magnolia users related to each other, because they are found on the same page. The number represents the # of citations that they share, and clicking the name shows you the citations that they share. (When I say citation, I just mean URL).

As far as the name "Wikidentity," I used "wiki" because people using the client are contributing to the content by submitting hCards, and the resulting profiles are the culmintion of multiple submissions, rather than one source. I was kind of interested in this idea, because there are a lot of people scrambling over how to control our identities. In contrast, I want Widi to create identities based on a consensus of whats out there. It might also encourage people to create hCards to associate info with their profiles. I understand the confusion, because I'm using the name much more in spirit than in function. I also registered microdentity.com just in case this was a stumbling block. :)

@Chris

I just heard that Technorati was doing Identity provision last night. It seems like a natural fit for them.

New post by Chris Messina in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:26:17 GMT

At Dec 04, 11:26 PM Chris said...

Hey William -- sorry for blowing your cover... ;) I didn't think anyone who you wouldn't want to see this would find out about it.

Oh well -- best to dive in with both feet anyway.

I'll do some poking around -- am really excited that you force OpenID -- did you know that Technorati is now not only an OpenID consumer but an iDP as well?

New post by Andrew Dayton in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 06:51:23 GMT

At Dec 04, 10:51 PM Andrew said...

Looks good! I think you're really on to something here - taking the bookmarklet to a completely new level. I think you did an especially stellar job of designing the UI.

I did have a few usability issues though: sometimes it's not totally clear what's happening. What exactly is being looked up when I click on 'lookup', and where is it being looked up? What exactly does the 'related' tab mean -- how are these relationships established? A lot of this probably has more to do with how I understand (or don't understand) how microformats and OpenID work -- but I think some of it could be made clearer.

Also, more of a question of sematics: how does the 'wiki' part of the name play into this? I'm not totally seeing the correlation. Maybe I just have a limited understanding of what 'wiki' means though.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:49:28 GMT

At Dec 04, 09:49 PM William said...

Feel free to spread the word. There don't seem to be any imminent catastrophic melt-downs, from what I can tell.

I can't take all the credit for OpenID at Ma.gnolia though. Chris Messina and Larry were both all about it, and I helped implement it. The OpenID Consumer Plugin should also be mentioned. Its used both at Ma.gnolia and Wikidentity.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/OpenID+Consumer+Plugin

New post by Jonathan Broad in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:11:22 GMT

At Dec 04, 09:11 PM Jonathan said...

BTW--mind if I clue a few folks in? Can your server take another user or two?

New post by Jonathan Broad in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:08:28 GMT

At Dec 04, 09:08 PM Jonathan said...

I wondered who was behind the move to OpenID at ma.gnolia... I've been avoiding getting one, but for this, I'll bite the bullet. (Ask me sometime about my reservations about it...)

This is good foo! A firefox extension (just installed) and everything. Awesome. I'm very impressed. Happy to pitch in; hopefully I'll uncover a bug or two for you.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 01:39:09 GMT

At Dec 04, 05:39 PM William said...

Well it looks like Chris blew the cover by posting it to the Microformats group ;) so no-need to keep it hush-hush anymore.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:49:08 GMT

At Dec 04, 02:49 PM William said...

Ma.gnolia is such a wealth of hCards, its the perfect match for this kind of thing. I wish more sites would get in the game, since its such an easy feature to implement.

New post by Todd Sieling in "Beta Testing"

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:49:01 GMT

At Dec 04, 01:49 PM Todd said...

It's looking pretty sweet. Nice to see a bit of Ma.gnolia in the screenshots there. Will you be hooking us up as a great place that uses hcard and other microformats when the cool kids come to rain their love upon you?

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:33:44 GMT

At Dec 04, 10:33 AM William said...

BTW, I'd appreciate a little discretion about this project while the kinks are still being worked out. It's only operated under the load of 1 user so far.

New post by William Lindmeier in "Beta Testing"

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:22:39 GMT

At Dec 04, 10:22 AM William said...

Wikidentity is an app I put together that scrapes hCards from the pages that you browse and sends that data back to a server to make it searchable. It merges hCards that likely refer to the same person into 'profiles', which are what come up in the search results.

Wikidentity (View Details)

Today I launched the basic set of features (view and search), and I'd appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or beautification recommendations before I make the site more public. If you're using the bookmarklet for Safari, there is a bug where the client isn't always visible on the first click... so you've got to click it 3 (and only 3) times. :/

Thanks!