Adhearsion - next killer app for Ruby?

Foo camp attendee Ben Black alerted me to Adhearsion, a framework for developing applications in the VoIP space. Think of it as a Ruby on Rails for telephony. Developed by Jay Philllps who got frustrated by the slow uptake of Asterisk.

Adhearsion is written in Ruby and lets those even without any VoIP experience write applications intuitively and productively or simply download and use a pre-written solution. With the framework extension architecture, VoIP functionality can now be actually traded around - an issue the VoIP industry has always suffered from.

A fresh, standard Adhearsion system out of the box does what many companies spend thousands on. It includes a wide - and growing - set of features that should not have to be rewritten for every business that wants to implement them. And yes, this is open-source.

Considering Microsoft spent around $800M on Tellme, I look forward to see what kind of applications this leads to, and what value they generate. We often forget the enormous market for telephone based services.

Perl on App Engine?

I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Google App Engine, but I haven't had time to get up to speed in Python. Today at OSCON I met up with Brad Fitzpatrick, who told me he had permission from Google to talk about and work on a Perl on App Engine project.

He makes it clear that,

I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support. They're just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined.

The plan is to harden Perl (one layer of defense in App Engine's hardened environment); implement Protocol Buffers and stubs of the backend services, so people can write App Engine applications on their local servers.

There is more information at Brad's LiveJournal, as well as the the Perl-AppEngine project. Capturing the creative spirit here at OSCON, Brad and I hacked together a new module that emulates a protected environment, Sys::Protect (generally good idea for any web application).

OpenID Foundation - Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo

I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as -- at least for me personally -- the hope that we will be able to get a decentralized federated single sign-on technology across the internet.

My experience from co-authoring djabberd, as well as working on systems with large amount of end users, has taught me the value of decentralized federation. Just as I have multiple different jabber ids or email address for different contexts, I also want to have different identities that I can use in different contexts across multiple sites.

From the beginning I was captivated by the promises of this system, and at Six Apart I worked to make sure it was available for widespread adoption. I would like to especially thank David Recordon for convincing me, and others to continue, and his tireless evangelization, which got him a 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award. It is fitting that he is now back at Six Apart.

I am very grateful to the entire OpenID Community, the rest of the Foundation board and supporting companies who have taken it this far in a little over two and a half years.

Brad Fitzpatrick created OpenID to solve the problem of people commenting between different installations of LiveJournal. Using a URL-based identity for blog commenting made perfect sense, as the identity you are commenting with is your blog. However, the URL-based identity does confuse people, and so at the Social Graph Foo Camp, Brad et al came up with a proposal to map email addresses to OpenID URLs. Perhaps the idea of just using your email address to login will be easier to understand.

Another area where we see innovation enabled is that OpenID does not specify how you authenticate to your OpenID provider. We have seen examples of this innovation including putting OpenID in cellphones, connecting it with the Estonian National ID card, older standards like Kerberos, new desktop authentication technologies, one-time-password tokens, and even new markets being formed around phishing resistant web authentication.

This kind of layered extensibility is why I find the design of OpenID so important, as I've written before. It is an enabling technology. The basic implementation allows exploration and I am looking forward to see what people can use it for.

Again, thanks all of you who made it happen.

Books that make you dumb

Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb.

He does this by cross referencing the 10 most popular books at every college, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score. He then presents it all in this nifty little visualisation.

I find it somewhat amusing and surprising that erotica takes top and bottom positions, with Lolita at the top and the author Zane coming in last (perhaps it says something that the lowest scoring book is actually miscategorized.) The book named "I don't read" also comes pretty far down.

In all, the results aren't that surprising, but as Virgil said to me; "but isn't it wonderful to have concrete data to back it up?"

OpenID 2.0 Final

The next version of OpenID, the open authentication system, is finally a released specification. As well as the technical work on the 2.0 specicifaction, the community has worked to ensure that OpenID is freely implementable, resulting in the execution of a non assert agreement by the contributing parties.

As a board member of the OpenID Foundation, I am grateful and happy of the careful work by AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID by respectively launching OpenID support in Blogger and by Microsoft Research. With support from these big vendors, many of the shipping open source reference implementations, I have big hopes for the adoption of OpenID as well as the technologies that will be built on top of it.

Late summer 2005, Brad Fitzpatrick at Six Apart came up with OpenID to facilitate authenticating your ownership of a URL to another website. The driving force behind this was to enable commenting across multiple blogging sites with the need for accounts on each of these services.

OpenID should be viewed as a core fundamental enabling technology. It allows the authentication and exchange of account data between un-related websites. Indeed, it does not attempt to solve higher level problems, such as authorization. Instead you can invision it as the underlying technology for interactions between social networks, like the interaction that Tim talks about in It's the data, stupid.

Platial acquires Frappr

In Brady's CFP for Where 2.0 he mentions the emerging importance of the Geoindex. In the -- to my knowledge -- first consolidation in the social mapping space, Platial is acquiring Frappr. Platial's community generated place data together with Frappr's personal location data combines into a larger geoindex allowing for a more personalised mapping environment.

Talking with Platial's CEO Di-Ann Eisnor, she mentions that they plan to integrate the functionality within the next months, and allow you to filter the place data based on your peers in Frappr groups. The combined sites have more than 100 million data points, 15 million unique visitors per month with 4 million maps created.

Advertisement with any user generated content is difficult, and I think that the increased reach and ability to target the ads to users locations and interests create a better proposition for advertisers. With an estimated 25% reach of all map widgets, Platial should become a larger player in the location related advertisement. Perhaps partly based on the ad network and technology provided by Mappam?

German and Japanese Wikipedia scanner

Time for more excitement on the Wikipedia front. Last week Virgil released the English Wikiscanner, as I wrote about previously. This week, it is time for German and Japanese edits to be exposed, with the newly-released German and Japanese Wikiscanner. Sadly, I don't read either German nor Japanese, but I am sure some of you readers do. If you find any nice ones, please post them in the comments. Thanks to a tipster, I know of this Scientology ping pong

Opening up the Social Network Graph

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick and Open Source Awards winner David Recordon just posted a manifesto titled "Thoughts on the Social Graph". Brad and David presented their work at Foo Camp and have been sharing it with interested parties over the last couple of months.

Their project attempts to solve the problem of multiple overlapping social networks. This overlap makes it harder to establish new sites, as people tire of rebuilding networks on each social networking site. As a non-profit and opensource project, it aims to be vendor-neutral and usable by all vendors.

Brad sums it up:

Users and developers alike are going crazy. There's too many social networks out there to keep track of. Developers want to make more, and users want to join more, but it's all too much work to re-enter your friends and data. We need to lower the amount of pain for both users and developers and let a thousand new social applications bloom.

All I can say is: finally!

Movable Type 4 Released

After a year since the previous release, today Six Apart released Movable Type 4. (Disclosure: I am on leave-of-absence from Six Apart, Radar runs on MT3.) As with previous versions, there are both commercial and non-commercial licenses. New is the upcoming Open Source version, which contains the core functionality of MT under the GPL.

Significant new features (som of which aren't in the GPL version) are centered around community building, with first-class support for comment conversations using OpenID and user registration. The new community pack delivers a social network in a box, allowing end users to create profile pages and rate others. This pack also allows administrators to promote commenters to authors. Hopefully this all will enable extended discussions on blogs and the development of dynamic commenter identities instead of just a name and email.

Six Apart has moved towards a Open Source tiered business model for MT. With Open Source, personal, and commercial licenses, Six Apart is paying homage to MT's roots as well as targeting commercial customers. Since MT's source is already open, I think this licensing approach makes a lot of sense.

As a user of MT3, I have often found the lack of integration of identity with opinion quite frustrating. Trying to keep up with comments and users, especially on older posts, is nearly impossible, and I would love to establish a deeper connection with people who regularly contribute good comments. Just recently there was a discussion internally on how we can associate identity with comments to solve this, Nat suggested:

I think comments needs a SERIOUS overhaul. Slashdot karma and moderation looks more and more attractive as the Polish human- submitted spams roll in.

Hopefully MT4 will help move blogs toward community environments, and I certainly hope we can do some of that on Radar.

Wikipedia is only as anonymous as your IP

Virgil Griffith, a good friend and fellow hacker, reminds us today that anonymity on the internet does not really exist. With his newly released search tool Wikiscanner, you can search an index of 35 million Wikipedia edits by IP, allowing you to find edits coming from within organizations like the CIA or the EFF (bonus if you can find something about Kevin Bankston smoking).

Finding out that someone from the Fox News network changed this:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was "literally laughed out of court" and that "wholly (holy) without merit" is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

into

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

is quite amusing.

Time for crowdsourcing to find the gems in there and report them over at Wired's wikiwatch.

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