0xDECAFBAD - Tag: social

Social Media Cyborg

2011-11-04T21:12:34+00:00

TL;DR: Since Google Reader lost it's sharing, I've decided to revisit my "social media strategy". I'm plugging lots of things into other things. I feel like maybe I should write about this stuff.

Started diagramming all my social media flows on LucidChart.

This is what I do for fun

Since I've mentioned in a few places that I'm a weirdo, I thought I might spend some time explaining exactly what I mean by that. You see, one of my hobbies is turning myself into a human content filter for friends on the web.

And, honestly, having my sharing habits shaken up by the Readerpocalypse makes it fun again.

The image over to the right is an attempt I made to diagram some of my social media flow. It's incomplete, though: I'm a cheapsake and ran out of free objects in my diagram. So, I had to leave out at least a half-dozen more services and a dozen additional connections. (LucidChart is very nice, by the way.)

In other words, ifttt.com is awesome

In particular, I've finally spent some time with ifttt.com. It's like Automator for the social web. It lets you define event triggers from one site that cause actions on another site.

So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible:

Pinboard bookmarks based on favorites from Twitter, identi.ca, YouTube, Last.fm, and my Kindle highlights. I'm turning my Pinboard account into both my personal social media archive and a Google Reader sharing replacement, and I don't even have to beg for new features at Pinboard.
Tumblr photo posts based on Reddit up-votes, Flickr favorites, and Pinboard bookmarks tagged "to:tumblr". Since creating it, I've left my Tumblr almost entirely neglected—but now with ifttt.com, I can route almost every nifty image I find over to that thing. It's the right side of my outboard brain to the Pinboard left.
Published items from from my private installation of Tiny Tiny RSS end up shared on Pinboard. This pretty much scratches my itch for feed reader sharing, since Google nixed those features from Reader.
Starred items from tt-rss get sent to Instapaper, so I can read them on my Kindle later. If email delivery of documents start working, then I'll have a personal long-attention span newspaper delivered regularly to that gadget.
Posts from Google+ get copied over to Facebook, because I don't want to pick sides.
In fact, almost everything I do everywhere eventually ends up posted to Facebook, because I almost never post anything in person over there. I do have friends and family over there and respond to comments, though.

What's the point?

The important principle here is that I'm lazy. If there's a single button to click somewhere that expresses my happiness about a thing, I'd like to click it and have that happiness shared and archived elsewhere without me doing much (or anything) more. The scheme I have now feels pretty good for that, and ifttt.com does a huge amount to help.

The other important thing is that I am at the center of these connections. I don't live entirely on any single service, and anything I care about is archived where I can easily grab it for backups or mashups. Should any particular service node in this web fail, I can probably do without, find an alternative, or build one myself.

My goal is to eventually replace as many of these nodes as possible with self-hosted or at least Open Source derived services. (Though, of course, I'm also lazy and my friends are where they are. So, that goal will take awhile.)

One more thing...

I've got an idea for my next book simmering. And, since I've so far managed to write books about the major things I've done for fun, I feel I'd be remiss if I skipped this stuff. I mean, I sort of covered the same ground all in my first and second books, but things have progressed since then.

What this means is that all the above feels like a warm up for the coding and prosing I'll need to do. I just need to get my shit together and carve out the time to make it happen.

Badger 2: Return of the Mustelidae

2011-07-18T15:03:13+00:00

TL;DR: A year ago, I said I wanted to build a badging service for the Mozilla community, so we could all celebrate how awesome we all are. Well, I putzed around and didn't get far, so I'm starting over with something more immediately useful.

(This is an awesome illustration by Sean Martell, used entirely without permission. I'll take it down if anyone gets mad.)

Almost a year ago, I wrote about building a badging service for all of Mozilla.

In a nutshell, I left the 2010 Mozilla Summit wanting to build a tool that empowered people to craft social objects representing achievement and gratitude, and give them to each other.

Since then, I've played around with a prototype in Django with Pinax. But, I abandoned that thing due to getting super busy with the Firefox 4 release. It also didn't help that I was a Django newb and that I got caught up in screwing around with shiny things like Pinax and Lettuce and neglected the actual feature set.

So now, finally, I'm picking the thread back up again. This time, with a little less ambition and a few more practical aims.

Make something more useful right away

While I have spent some dangerous time screwing around with shinies like Vagrant, Puppet, and Playdoh, I think I've gotten that mostly out of my system and have gotten down to work as of last night.

Rather than build a Grand Central Station for badges, I've reset my goals to a progression of practical results:

Build a reusable Django app that supports some basic use cases of creating and awarding badges to users.
Add Activity Streams narrating badge claims
Add support for PubSubHubbub with Badger activity streams
Add a REST API, maybe with OAuth
Accept badges for local users, via PuSH from external sites
See what the Open Badges Project is up to, and how Badger can fit in with their goals.

The idea here is to make Badger a practical, reusable, drop-in app for existing sites—preferably (but not necessarily) the Playdoh-flavored sites we're building at Mozilla. Then, incrementally and optionally empower a Badger-enabled site to become a badge hub by accepting reports of badge claims from other Badger-enabled sites.

Take baby steps to federation

So, for example, let's say we dropped Badger into a few sites like these:

At first, Badger would just augment those sites with badging facilities for their respective user bases. That could fill some needs right away.

Then, say we built a site that offered personal profiles to members of the Mozilla community. With the Activity Stream and PuSH augmentations, users could connect their profiles with each of the other Mozilla sites they use. That way, whenever they claim a badge out there, it gets delivered to their community profile.

Why bother federating at all?

If the only cross-site goal to build an all-in-one display case for badges on a community profile, I could just build JSON feeds and wrap them in a JS-based widget. In fact, a JSON-formatted Activity Stream will work nicely for that. Drop that into the profile page, and we're done.

There are lots of reasons to federate. But, at least one thing not supported by this solution are meta-badges. That is, badges awarded for badges.

Let's say you close 100 bugs on Bugzilla, answer 100 questions on SUMO, edit 100 pages of documentation on MDN, and author 100 add-ons. And, let's say you get badges on the respective sites for all of those activities.

Well, now, I'd like to give you a badge on your community profile for being a Mozilla Superhero. I could just do that by hand, having observed all your greatness. But, I'd rather the system just do that automatically.

If your community profile treated all your badges from your chosen affiliated sites as first-class citizens, then I could build the meta-badge trigger right there.

Of course, I could also write a program that monitors badge feeds from various sites. Then, use the community profile site's Badger API to issue a badge when the conditions are met. But, as maintainer of the monitoring program, I'd have to keep track of what feeds where count for which people, which could be a mess.

There's still some thinking to do here.

What about identity and co-opting badges?

I'm still thinking through how someone connects a profile to other sites. As in, how can Badger ensure that the owner of the community profile is also the owner of a badge claim feed on MDN? Maybe some kind of OAuth dance that results in a PuSH subscription between sites?

Consider the least-capable federation case: a Badger-compatible feed hosted as a static file on Amazon S3. And, by Badger-compatible, I mean an Activity Stream that contains badge claims. You shouldn't need my specific implementation of Badger-in-Django to produce one of those.

Although PuSH is still the ideal case (I think), occasional polling of an Activity Stream feed should still be supported. If a user connects that up to their community profile, we just have to take their word for it. We'd rely on community members to flag stinkers trying to claim badge feeds that aren't theirs.

Beyond that, there's probably some crypto-voodoo we can invoke here, for cases where badge claim validity really matters—as opposed to the fun and games I have in mind for Mozilla.

What about the Open Badges Project?

From various conversations over the past year, it sounds to me like the Open Badges Project is getting the parts in place to do even more interesting federation of badges that gives ownership of the badge hub to the user.

In that scenario, you have a backpack in your browser and can carry your badge claims with you between sites with no prior coordination between the sites themselves.

This sounds like something in which Badger should be able to participate, eventually. If not as a hub, Badger should at least offer the tools to create and award badges that work with the user-owned hub scheme.

So, what next?

Now that I've written all this out, I need to hack on it. If you're interested in this stuff, let me know. That way, it'll look like someone might actually find this stuff handy when I get something working!

Archived Comments

David Boswell
2011-07-19T01:18:24

Very cool to see an update on Badger. I'm definitely interested in this and would love to see something like this show up in the Mozillians phonebook that will be ready soonish :) David
Brian King
2011-07-19T15:12:01

Over at the Mozilla Reps program, we are discussing the possible use of badges - https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo
Gen Kanai
2011-07-19T15:48:22

Agreed with DBos. Would love to see Badger as an official service, especially with the new Campus Reps program that Jason Haas is rebooting as well as with the Mozilla Representatives program. Also you might get a badge for contributing to the Join Mozilla program? So many great uses for us.
interstar
2011-08-05T03:15:39

Hi Les, Very very interesting. I was just thinking that there needed to be something like the Open Badges project today. (I'd even got as far as knocking up a data-model in web2py.) And then I saw this. I quickly cloned and tried out your app with an ordinary Django project but it's blowing up without jingo and I guess other Playdoh related modules. Are you committed to Playdoh for Badger2 ?
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-05T18:05:31
  
  I'm committed to Playdoh insofar as my initial users will probably be my co-workers at Mozilla, who are all building Playdoh-based sites. But, there's no reason why it shouldn't eventually work with vanilla Django. It's using core template loaders and shortcuts, so switching over to standard stuff shouldn't be an issue for the views and models. I'm hoping at some point to put together some more Django-conventional template tags and templates toward that end, unless someone gets to it before me in a pull request (patches welcome!). Really, I think the template tags are the more important thing, since any templates out of the box will likely get overridden on a real site.
Dr. Nellie Deutsch
2011-09-02T14:07:45

I love the idea, Leslie. I've been heading a self-funded organization that provides free online professional development workshops for educators around the world since 2006. We need badges for our graduates. Let me know how I can be of help.

Damn kids! Get off my web!

2007-05-16T17:31:13+00:00

Scott Burkett, Stop Twittering and Go Solve a Problem: "Aside from aesthetically looking like something a 12 year old cobbled up, the entire tool seems utterly pointless to me."

For Scott, Twitter probably is pointless at first glance. And that's because no one's talking to him. Really, this should be a FAQ for all social media, to be read by all journalists and commentators: Listening in on random strangers' conversations is more likely to be boring than not, and that's what you're doing if you just go to twitter.com and start clicking around. But, to assume because you're bored that the service as a whole is boring is, again, to be one of the Blind Men with an Elephant.

Twitter becomes immensely interesting when it turns out that you've amassed a group of contacts who tend to run in similar circles as you, because even their off-handed remarks and random burps have a decent chance of surfacing something interesting or entertaining. When it's good, this sets up a nice ambient chatter like sitting in a coffee shop filled with just your kind of people.

This same "I'm bored, so it's boring" mistake has popped up again and again - applied to blogging, MMORPGs, social bookmarking, MySpace, what have you. Replace "bored/boring" with "confused/confusing" or "annoyed/annoying" and you've got my own early reactions to MySpace.

But, really, it's not addressed to you if there's a buzz and you're not groking it. That's a clue that you're probably missing something. Granted, people can be insane, but it really is more likely that you're missing something - even if it's just that there's a particular brand of entertaining insanity in progress to which you're not attuned.

Archived Comments

CraigM
2007-05-16T21:46:56

No, I'm pretty much missing out on the appeal of MySpace and Twitter, but that's because I'm an electronic hermit. Welcome to the Social? Screw that. Welcome to my front lawn, kids, and you're welcome to get off of it. :)

All kidding aside, I think there's plenty of room for any kind of project people want to put together. I thought KDE and GNOME were silly for trying to recreate CDE, but they saw further than CDE. Had I been vocal, I might have dissuaded someone from contributing to the project. What kind of an asshole would I have been had I kept one of the main developers of these projects from developing? So, if Twitter, MySpace, Live Journal, or one of the hundreds of other social networks speaks to someone, by all means have fun. Me? I might check out Twitter. Most of the bands I like have MySapce pages now, so I think it'll be inevitable before I start a MySpace account.

Heck, it took me a while before I started up my Last.fm account, so one thing at a time. :)
CraigM
2007-05-16T21:53:52

Oh, and my lovely corporate overlords think Twitter might lead to dating or personals, so they've helpfully blocked it. They're so thoughtful.
Scott Burkett
2007-05-17T04:05:21

Interesting post, but I should clarify a few things.

First, I never used the words "boring", "confused" or "annoying" in my post. I simply stated my own dislike of the tool. Twitter is a very polarizing tool - if you find value in it, great. But neither of us are alone.

Second, I am a big MMO guy, and use plenty of other social media tools (hell, my last two startups were community/social media plays.)

Third, the whole point of my original post was to point out the very old business trap that a particular young entrepreneur was about to fall into.

If you get value out of Twitter, great. That wasn't my point.

Cheers. Scott
l.m.orchard
2007-05-17T06:51:11

@CraigM: Being a digital hermit, now that's a perfectly fine and reasonable excuse to miss out on Twitter and MySpace. I'm mostly an introvert in person, but somehow am semi-extroverted online to compensate. Some people don't need that. :)
l.m.orchard
2007-05-17T07:26:41

@Scott Burkett: No, you didn't use “boring”, “confused” or “annoying” - though others have. What you said really prompted me to comment on what I've seen happen over and over again, so it's not just (or even mostly) you.

Though, when you write "stop worrying about creating mindless tools to keep track of everything your friends are doing, and start solving real problems" - I have to respond that keeping track of everything your friends are doing is a real problem some people want solved. :) Now, whether there's still room in that market beyond Twitter... well, I dunno. I have a hunch yes, that they're onto something big - but I'm not personally putting money down on it.

On the other hand, the point I take your post otherwise is that just being a copy-cat isn't enough. Twitter's addressing a problem for some people. That problem might have room to be solved more effectively. But, if you can't figure that out, or if the problem's really not that deep, then yeah: Find something else to make.
Steve S
2007-05-24T14:38:59

Twitter is in no way useless, simple maybe but not useless. I agree completely. It seems that their is a distinct lack of patience among the web going public when it comes to certain technologies. If it doesn't immediately wow them with AJAX then it serves no purpose.