Archive for December, 2008

Interoperability at work

December 29, 2008

At this point is clear we believe interoperability between Web Services through open API and standard protocols is key for the development of the Internet Platform. So I want to start writing about some simple example that should clarify how effective and powerful the Interoperable Internet can be.

A first – very simple – example comes from a feature we want to add to foldier. We want to automatically post on twitter a note when sPressing an article with a comment from within foldier. The comment used in foldier will be the post in twitter along the link to the posted item.

We don’t have this feature yet but a recent video from Robert Scoble about FriendFeed made me realize I could setup these three services (foldier, friendfeed and twitter) so to provide with a similar capability.

Here is how in two simple steps:

1 – Given an sPression in foldier import its RSS feed as a blog in FriendFeed.

In FriendFeed select Import site
Under Blogging click on Blog
Type (or paste) the URL of the sPression in the Blog URL text box
Click on Import Blog

2 – Setup your account in FriendFeed to post on twitter when new items from the added blog are found

Still in FriendFeed click on Account (on the top of the page)
Under the Feed Publishing section check the mark where it says Post my FriendFeed on Twitter
Enter you Twitter credentials and check the mark for the feed imported in step1

This setup will import the sPression RSS feed in FriendFeed and trigger a twitt message automatically when new items are discovered.
This very simple setup is possible because of the RSS protocol and the Twitter API.
Now, the RSS allows two services (foldier and FriendFeed) that don’t know each other to communicate effectively. If there was a standatd API for MicroBlogging and multiple services implementing it we could connect FriendFeed to one or more compatible MicroBlogging services.

With this setup we do not get the comment entered in foldier during the sPression of an item into the message in Twitter, we get the title of the article instead.
This is good enough for now, so check an example of posted Twitt from a published item in foldier here:
http://twitter.com/micurs/status/1085130756

Michele Ursino

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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More on the the Interoperable Internet: the rise of the Internet OS.

December 9, 2008

Michele UrsinoI am writing this post with Flock, a new web browser (yes another one) based on Firefox engine. In fact it is Firefox with tools attached to it.

One of these tool is a “blog editor” the allows me to write a blog and submit the content to a blog engine like WordPress.

The magic is performed yet again by an open standard API called MetaWeblog.

I believe in a few years we will see the emerging of we can call the “Internet API”.

That will be nothing less than a collection of API established as standard and used by most systems online.
This will create a “de facto” OS, totally hosted in the cloud. Writing applications on this platform will consist of connecting together “abstract” services (using standard APIs). The user will choose which concrete service to use with the application depending on personal preferences.

So, a blogging platform will connect an editor, a commenting system, a layout editor, an aggragation engine, a picture browser and so on. The user will pick the services she already use or will subscribe to whatever is more convenient.

No one will own this platform: no Microsoft,  or Google, or Sun, or Facebook or anyone else.

Foldier is moving in this direction. We believe in the Interoperable Internet and we will use standard API whenever possible. We will make our service interoperable offering our own API, and we will adopt standard protocols when they exist.
 
We believe this trend is strong and will get even stronger in the near future. Do you?

- Michele Ursino

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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sPressing media content

December 1, 2008

The latest release of foldier is introducing sPress: an application that allows any foldier user to produce ‘blog’ style pages with content collected from the Internet (blogs, Internet searches, Twitters, YouTube etc).

With this new version we improved the “Add to Foldier” bookmarklet as well.

( See my post: “Adding links and RSS feeds to foldier” to learn the basic of the bookmarklet ).

Now you can add media content to your sPression while you are surfing the Internet and without having to access foldier site directly. When you visit any web site you can click on the “Add to foldier” button (the bookmarklet) in your “Bookmarks Toolbar” to add that page to foldier.

Now we added some extra capabilities to allow this tool to understand “Media Content” embedded in the pages of some popular site. So, when you use the bookmarklet on one the following sites:

amazon.com  (amazon products)
youtube.com (video)
vimeo.com  (video)
viddler.com  (video)
slideshare.com (flash slideshow)
revision3.com  (video)
metacafe.com  (video)
hulu.com  (video)
funnyordie.com  (video)
flickr.com (video and photos)
docstoc.com (flash documents)

You will be prompted to choose the “Content” within the page or the page itself.

Adding a YouTube video to foldier

When you pick the content (a video or a product or a document) a representation of it becomes available as a separate entity within foldier. For example a video from YouTube becomes available as video object you can post in any of your sPression. This way, adding media to your sPression becomes as simple as clicking on a menu option!

To see an example check the “quick introduction video” posted on the sPression called “Who’s talking about foldier?” and try it for yourself by adding rich content into your sPressions.

Enjoy!

Michele Ursino

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