lindner

 At hi5 we've been busy busy busy getting OpenSocial up and running.  We released our developer sandbox, and are rapidly implementing features.  So check out the following URLs

• hi5 OpenSocial developer announcement
  
• http://sandbox.hi5.com/
• hi5 Platform Development Group

Also, here's a copy of my response to Tim O'Reilly's blog post:

OpenSocial: It's the data, stupid

Hi folks,

Good comments all around. However I'd like to posit that data access is _not_ the problem. We've had universal standards for years now with little uptake. Tribe.net, Typepad, LiveJournal and others have supported FOAF for many, many years, which encompasses the OpenSocial Person and Friends APIs. Not much has come of that -- there isn't a large enough base there to get people interested.

Now you have a broad industry consensus on a single way to provide all of the above plus activity stream data. You have a rich client platform that allows you to crack open that data and use it in interesting ways, and finally you have a common standard for social networks to interact with each other based on the REST api.

So Patrick's statement at the Web 2.0 Expo is correct, a app running inside a container only allows you to see what that container shows you. However that does not mean that a container could not contain friend references to external social networks via it's own federation mechanism. Movable Type 4.0 has shown that you can support any OpenID login in a single system, there's no reason to believe that social networks could not leverage OAuth to do the same.

And here's a final point to consider -- you have Myspace opening up to developers. That's huge. That alone is going to draw more developer attention to this problem than much of the oh-so academic discussions of the past few years.

I suggest people that _want_ OpenSocial to solve all the social graph ills get involved on the API mailing list and make sure that those elements are addressed as OpenSocial evolves.

There's a tremendous amount of momentum. Let's not waste this chance.

#hi5 #opensocial

Rapsnacks2

Update:  On the back we find the fine, fine web site http://www.rapsnacks.com/ (Enter if you dare!) and a bio of Romeo, a rapper I have never heard of, but my colleage Brett tells me was once a featured artist on Hi5.

#hi5 #rap

I'm happy to announce that Hi5 has Widget support.  Yes, I know that this is soooo last year. However there's a twist that makes it better.

We worked closely with Rock You and Slide to integrate tightly with our site, using open standards wherever possible.  For example, for slideshows we created Atom Feeds for each photo album, and a feed-of-albums feed for the list of all albums.  And when it came time to share profile information for horoscopes (birthday) and languages spoken we used FOAF.  Thus we get partners to adopt open standards, plus the work we did for them is usable by everyone. 

The only tricky part was authentication and authorization.  Right now it's using our own AuthToken implementation, but it could probably be done in a better way.  I looked into OpenID as a mechanism, but's way too end-user centric for this type of thing.

Coming soon we should have full Atom endpoints (both in/out with WSSE auth), OpenID provider, and a few other standards based things like XMPP vCard support.  All of this is being done with an Web Services Aspect Oriented toolkit called Enunciate, which has made writing these services a very enjoyable experience.

#atom #foaf #hi5 #openid #widgets

Earthquake in Peru, logins drop immediately.  Hope everyone is safe....

Picture 4

#hi5 #peru

Just caught up 10 days worth of Neighborhood posts.  I now have Vox fatigue combined with Vox guilt.  I didn't even read comments, for shame :(  After this post I'll need to check on the 'ol LiveJournal Friends page.  Don't even ask about the umpteem BlogLines blogs stuck at 200 posts...

Hi5 has a new Skins system that actually can make profile pages look good.  I had some input early on and made sure Vox and the SixApart styles were part of the inspiration.  It's coming out really well and we've received over 200 submissions.  Check out the snazzy new profile page?  Designers can check out the specs page.

Embeds are evil.  They mess up divs and tables and are often pasted in haphazardly.  Amit  came up with an amazing solution.  Use JTidy to clean up the user submitted content.  Tags match and broken html goes bye-bye!

Now back to the super-secret Hi5 Project Funk.

One Nation Under a Groove

Funkadelic

#design #hi5 #metavox #tidy

Picture 2

#365main #hi5 #outage

We're living on the edge over here at Hi5.  Our new Movable Type 4 base blog is now available at http://www.hi5networks.com/blog/

The whole company is getting involved and you'll see plenty of interesting information to come.

Also, from a technical standpoint, MT4 has proved a winner.  The memcached support in Data::ObjectDriver means that we can run via plain CGI, saving a bunch of time and effort to get this up and going.

We should have 3-4 posts per week.  Sadly I didn't get a chance to finish implementing userpics for MT4, but that should come shortly.

#hi5 #memcached #movabletype #mt4

Bighomepic

We had a great turnout at the latest PostgreSQL users group meetup -- around 35 people showed. (Oh and not the group of stylish "Hi5 folk" you see to the right :)

Ram and I went over the PostgreSQL based DB architecture we use at Hi5 after the obligatory pizza feed.  Quite an interesting crowd, some newbies, and some old hands.

My best line of the night was in response to a question asking us when we were going to use a specific feature -- my answer was that there were more people in the room than there were employees at Hi5.  :)

The complete presentation is online for the curious.

#hi5 #postgres #postgresql

I see that Hi5 made the list of Privacy International as posing a substantial threat to users' privacy.  I find that their methodology is extremely suspect.  I can't spot any consistency in the way they treat sites.

#hi5 #phishing #privacyinternational #security

It's been a lot of work, but Hi5 has now broken into the Alexa top 10, only 6 months ago we were treading water in the mid 40s.  We're quickly gaining on Orkut with Facebook nipping at our heels.

Graph

#alexa #hi5