Neat, sounds a little like FriendFeed but you don't have to aggregate
yourself? Yeah no login ever is ... radical but pretty cool.
- Luke
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 26, 2008 3:47:33 PM EDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bloglines - announcing whoisi
Bloglines user ianb ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) has sent this item to you,
with the following personal message:
Not exactly Melkjug, yet somehow vaguely similar... maybe better to
get ideas from as a result.
That it doesn't require a login is kind of nice.
Christopher Blizzard
I love you.
announcing whoisi
By blizzard on whoisi
I’d like to announce the general availability of a project that
I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last few months:
whoisi.com.
As a disclaimer please note that this project is not related to the
work that I do at Mozilla nor is it endorsed by my employer in any
way. It’s a completely independent project.
If I had to describe it in one sentence I would describe it as a
site that lets you easily keep track of what your friends are doing
on the Internet via RSS feeds - but with some twists.
First and foremost the site is organized around people. Everyone has
an entry that gives an overview of what they are doing on the
internet - weblog posts, flickr photos, etc. But that entry is
created entirely like a wiki. Anyone can edit anything. If you
notice that your friend’s entry is missing a twitter account or a
flickr account you can add them. No asking them to sign up for yet
another fracking account somewhere. It’s entirely up to the
follower to manage their friend’s entries.
This flips the usual model of the social networking site on its
head. It’s up to followers to keep track of their friends and the
accounts they happen to have. I tend to say that most social
networking sites these days are organized around accounts instead of
people, and tend to have all of the pain that requiring accounts
creates - you have to convince your friends to participate and set
up accounts, remember another password and then they have to come to
the site often. It’s a system that creates winners and losers
because there’s only so much attention available in the world.
Whoisi tries to avoid that whole problem by using a different model.
In this sense, whoisi is very different. And is really an
experiment. I have no idea if people will like this model or not or
how they will react to it.
A screenshot from the everyone page.
I currently use the site to keep track of 309 people, which adds up
to 728 feeds in total. That includes flickr accounts, twitter
accounts and web feeds. Imagine what that would look like in a feed
reader. Totally insane, right? But not with this site. I can keep up
with what’s going on without it being a completely overwhelming
experience. And not one of those people was required to create an
account for me to keep up with what they are doing.
So let’s take a quick walk through the site and its main features.
Wiki-like editing
Nat Friedman’s entry in edit mode.
I think that one of the most powerful features of the site is the
fact that anyone can edit anything. Anyone can add another site
under a name, anyone can remove a site that someone else has added
that’s wrong and anyone can add aliases and group information to
any entry.
I got sick of discovering friends on various sites by accident and
having to add them. The knowledge of where people have accounts is
stuck in too many people’s heads and this is just a tool to move
that information into the world. For those of us who lead pretty
public lives and interact with a lot of other people who do the same
and post a lot of different places, this can be very handy. In this
sense it’s a single source for your and your friend’s online
personal profile and no need to have that person create an account.
The flip side of this is that the site is open to defacement or
people adding entries that you might not have expected. Wikipedia
has the same problem. On the defacement front, I’m collecting
history data so that I can provide history for a particular person
and it should make it easy to undo damage created by would-be
vandals. I just haven’t added the History link to a person yet.
On the privacy front things are a little bit more tricky. I’ve had
some pretty strong reactions to this site by people who were very
surprised to find their information collected in one place. I don’t
actually think that whoisi is any worse or better than Google in
this sense, except that it does make some things a little more
convenient. Search that’s centered around people and their
activities is one thing that whoisi enables. I’m not entirely sure
how to balance that against privacy concerns. But I’m open to ideas
on this front and how to manage privacy better. Right now it largely
punts on the issue and assumes that public information is public
information.
It’s important to realize that one of my design goals with whoisi
was to deal entirely with public data. There’s no way to add
password-protected feeds or hidden feeds. They have to be as public
as any search would reveal. It’s just gathered around people
instead of activities. A different noun than what Google searches on.
One click to follow
Searching for Thomas Hawk
One of my design goals was to let people using the site to stay as
anonymous as possible. To this end, there’s no requirement that you
make an account before you start following people.
If you search for someone and you want to follow them just click on
the little “Follow Person” next to their name. That’s it. The
information is referenced with a cookie and no other sign-up is
required. No need to sign up for an account you need to delete
later. If you want to remove your association with the site, just
remove cookies for whoisi.com from your browser.
If you need a link to log in later to the site from another
computer, there’s a link on the right hand navigation that will
provide the links needed to do so. I suggest that you mail them to
yourself. (People already have email accounts - why should I require
that they sign up for another one?)
No account required
As per the previous entry about following people, there’s no
account required. Much like wikipedia, it’s possible to edit any
entry. To this end, it’s driven using CAPTCHAs and that’s it.
Also like Wikipedia, I collect and log information about changes and
the originator, including source IP information and will expose that
information in history logs. It’s just a feature that I haven’t
added yet. But the data is being collected.
To allow people to take the role of curators, I will probably allow
people and editors to self-identify if they choose in the future.
But that’s down the road. For now it’s about the barrier to entry
and being a public resource. And not requiring accounts feels like a
big part of that.
Time-based following
I have a strong distaste for classic RSS readers. They are cluttered
and have odd workflow, largely based around the original 3-pane
design of mail readers. People aren’t Inboxes. People that don’t
post very often take up as much room in the interface as those who
do post often. That combined with the mail-like read/unread status
often drives people like me to RSS bankruptcy. That’s why the
following interface on whoisi is time-based. Originally seen as part
of Mugshot and now more recently withFriendFeed, time based
interfaces are all the rage. And for good reason - they work well.
As I said earlier I follow more than 300 people on the site and I
usually look at it a few times a day. I can scan through what’s
going on very quickly, ignore stuff that doesn’t look interesting
and then move on. The amount of time that I have to spend scanning
through what other people are doing on the web (a big part of my day
job, as a matter of fact) is vastly reduced. I’m much more
effective with whoisi than without.
Aliases and groups
One of the things that annoys me about just about every social
networking site that’s out there is that there’s always a gold
rush to get nicknames and urls. Whoisi takes a different approach.
It lets you define multiple names for someone.
These can be other versions of the same name like “Chris
Blizzard” vs. “Christopher Blizzard” above but it can also be
short nicknames used on various networks. Above I have
“mozilla:blizzard” defined. This is because I use the nickname
“blizzard” on Mozilla’s IRC server. The fact that it’s just a
pair of text strings separated by a colon means it’s really
flexible and extensible to just about any group you want.
Whoisi’s search is also aware of this when you search using the
search box. For example, if I search for “blizzard” on the site,
the search knows to look on the right hand side of the colon to pick
out a username or nickname. You can also search for
“mozilla:blizzard” or any other network:nickname combination that
you want. A very useful feature that I haven’t seen other places
and something I’ve always wanted.
This also leads to an interesting side effect. We now have ad-hoc
groups. Want to find everyone who is associated with Mozilla? Search
for “mozilla:” without anything on the right hand side of the
colon. Or “gnome:“. You will get everyone who has a mozilla: as
part of their alias. This is a pretty underdeveloped part of the
site and something that has a lot of potential.
You also might notice that I have an entry above that just says
[EMAIL PROTECTED] This is me just playing with events. One thing
I’ve always wanted is the ability to say “I’m going to be at
this event and I would love to see others who are doing the same.”
In this sense it’s like saying “I was @ FISL 2008.”
I would love to have a system that lets me see who is going to show
up at FISL 2008 (like my example above) or GUADEC 2008 (I just added
an @guadec2008 alias to my name, actually.) From there it would be
great if I had a way to keep track and see what was going on - where
people are meeting, what they are thinking, and I had a way to
expose that to conference organizers or participants. Once again,
it’s all ad-hoc and self-organizing and a very early thought. But
it’s neat if you can do this with very simple systems. Another
thing to look into down the road.
Everything is a tiny url
Lots of people use tiny urls to share information on twitter and
other networks. It’s convenient to have a small URL to paste. So if
you’re viewing something through the follow interface everything
has a tinyurl you can reference. For text links it’s the little
link that says something like “26 minutes ago” and for images
it’s the link for the image itself. (I couldn’t find a clean way
to do tiny urls for images that didn’t involve an ugly link for
every image so every image is a tiny url.)
One of the big complaints that people have about tiny urls is that
they don’t convey much information. And too many innocent people
are being Rick Rolled. There’s an API that lets you look up a tiny
url and get information of the target. (Here’s a sample script that
calls the API.) I imagine that people could write extensions that
could look up the target if you saw a whoisi tiny link on a page.
All tiny links start with http://whoisi.com/l/HEXID - very easy to
identify.
Small, fast page loads
Minus the JS that the site uses, which should be cached after the
first load, pages on the site are very small. The home page is 1.5k.
The follow page is 10k. Pages for individual people range from 6-8k
in size. I wanted small fast page loads which is one of the reasons
why the site is so incredibly simple and text-based.
It also means that at least for viewing that the site works very
well for mobile phones. (Editing right now is pretty AJAX-heavy and
I don’t have cgi-based fallbacks in place yet so editing from
anything other than an iPhone is dicey at best.) I’m hoping to have
more interfaces for mobile in place, including an iPhone interface
at some point. I use it from my T-Mobile sidekick all the time and
people have told me that it works very well on their iPhones.
Another reason that the site looks the way that it does is that I’m
a huge fan of simplicity and good use of negative space. The data
should stand on its own and boxing and colors should not detract
from what the real focus of the site is - what people are doing.
Open API
I’m a pretty big believer in Open Data. To that end one of my rules
for this site is going to be that if there’s information that
anyone explicitly adds to the site, they should be able to extract
it and use it for any purpose they want. So one of the APIs that I
have in place lets you extract the entire person and site database.
(Here’s a sample script that does just that.) After all, I have no
idea how long this experiment will last, and neither do you.
The APIs aren’t documented yet, but how they work should be very
easy to decipher from the test scripts and the JSON-encoded output.
Also, if you pass in something wrong the server will return an
inelegant 500 code as opposed to useful error text. I’m not lazy -
just busy.
As another example, here’s another script that will extract
information for a single person based on their ID. And another one
that will map urls you run across to entries in the database. (Note
that the last script doesn’t work in every case yet because of feed
services like feedburner that generate redirects so the final url
that you might see in your browser isn’t the one that actually
exists in my database. I plan to fix this by following those
redirects at some point to make this a more useful service.)
But that’s just a taste of what I would like to do with the API. I
think that taking this open approach will make the service more
useful to people over the long run and might let people do things
I’ve never even dreamed of. I believe that the best way to help
people and learn about what people really want out of a site like
this is to let go. The web survives on the oxygen of open data.
It’s a fundamental component of the web’s success and deeply
affected my thinking in building this site.
Supported sites
The number of sites that are supported by whoisi right now is
actually pathetically small. I support flickr, picasa, twitter,
linkedin and then any generic rss or atom feed. Those sites
represent the vast majority of what my friends use. I plan on
expanding that to include things like amazon (for wishlists), pownce
and a bunch of other stuff like digg and reddit if those make sense.
I would also like to know what other people would like to see on the
site. Something that would enhance their experience instead of
making it too noisy. That’s going to be a delicate balance.
Note that I’ve actually seen people add del.icio.us and last.fm
links. They are just RSS feeds. And they work pretty well. They show
up on the everyone page from time to time. Feel free to add them if
you want. When it comes time to add support for them I’ll convert
them to something that looks decent.
RSS Feeds
I haven’t added them. And I’m not sure what form they should take
yet. Should you be able to get an RSS feed for everyone you’re
following? How about for a specific person’s complete feed?
Here’s the problem. If you want an RSS feed for a specific person,
why not get it from them directly? I’m not adding much value by
acting as a middle man in this respect. In fact, it could be argued
that I’m removing value since those people might lose statistical
information that they are gathering.
I’m pretty happy being the place that keeps track of where you can
find people but tracking them using RSS might still be best done
with RSS from that site. If someone wants a completely different
interface rather than an RSS reader like I do, I think this site
does well. But why dis-intermediate people from their audience?
Of course, this is only half my brain speaking on my topic. The
other half says I should just add feeds for everything and be done
with it. Because it’s really useful for people. So I might just
ignore everything I just wrote and set up RSS feeds for people to
use. I’m like that. Let me know what you think on the topic. I’m
all ears.
Note that I will be adding feeds for “recent changes” to the
site. Not necessarily for content, but for new sites and people that
have been added. I’m sure that people will find that interesting
and that’s specific to the site itself. Really useful.
So what’s next?
Really, that depends on what people do with the site. There’s a
bunch of stuff I know needs to be done. History links for individual
people. A “recently added” link on the nav bar that shows you
recent people that have joined and recent sites that have been
added. The Follow page really needs to have sites that are added to
people you’re following as part of the flow. And also some tools to
make it easier to discover who is on the site that you might be
interested. i.e. import my twitter contacts or something like that.
A lot of people would argue that those things should have been done
before the site launched. But I’m a real believer in release early,
release often. So I thought I should put my cheese out there in the
wind and see how people react.
Thanks, and I hope that you find the site as useful as I do.
Comments
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