I just realized that the current released version of RSS Bandit doesn’t have a working code name based on a character from the X-Men comic book. The previous 1.5.0.17 release was codenamed ShadowCat while the next release is codenamed Phoenix. Since the v1.6.0.x releases have been an interim releases on the road to Phoenix, I’ve decided to give them the codename Jean Grey retroactively. Now, on to the updates.

Jean Grey (v1.6.0.x) Update

The last bug fix release of RSS Bandit fixed a few bugs but introduced a couple of even worse bugs [depending on your perspective]. We’ve shipped version 1.6.0.2 that addresses the following issues

• Application crashes with AccessViolationException on startup on Windows XP.  
• Application crashes and red 'X' shows in feed subscriptions window on Windows XP.  
• User's credentials are not used when accessing feeds via a proxy server leading to proxy errors when fetching feeds.  
• Duplicate feed URLs not detected if they differ by trailing slash or "www." in the host name 
• Application crashes when displaying an error dialog when a certificate issue is detected with a secure feed.

The first three issues are regressions that were introduced as part of refactoring the code and making it work better on Windows Vista. Yet another data point that shows that you can never have too many unit tests and that beta testing isn’t a bad idea either.

You can download the new release from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/rssbandit/RssBandit1.6.0.2_Installer.zip

Phoenix (v2.0)  Update

I’m continuing with my plan to make RSS Bandit a desktop client for Web based feed readers like NewsGator Online and Google Reader. I’ve been slightly sidetracked by the realization that it would be pretty poor form for a Microsoft employee to write an application that synchronized with Google’s RSS reader but not any of Microsoft’s, even if it is a side project. My current coding project is to integrate with the Windows RSS platform which would allow one to manipulate the same set of feeds in RSS Bandit, Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007. The good news is that with Outlook 2007 integration, you also get Exchange synchronization for free.

The bad news has been having to use the RSS reading features of Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007 on a regular basis as a way of eating my own dog food with regards to the integration features. It’s pretty stunning to see not one but two RSS reading applications that assume “mark all items as read” or “delete all feeds” are actions that users never have to take. When you have people writing shell scripts to perform basic tasks in your application then it is a clear sign that somewhere along the line, the user experience for that particular set of features got the shaft. 

I’m about half way through the integration after which I’ll continue with integrating with Google Reader and finally NewsGator Online using an Outlook + Exchange style model. While I’m working on this, both Oren and Torsten will be mapping out the rewrite of the graphical user interface using WPF. I’ll probably need to buy a book on XAML or something in the next few months so I can contribute to this effort. The only thing I’ve heard about any of the various books about the subject on the market is that they all seem to have had their forewords written by Don Box. Does anyone have recommendations on which book or website I should use to start learning XAML + WPF?

Now playing: Eminem - Sing For The Moment

This past weekend I attended the O’Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp and got to meet a bunch of folks who I’ve only “known” via their blogs or news stories about them. My favorite moment was talking to Mark Zuckerberg about stuff I think is wrong with Facebook and he stops for a second while I’m telling hin the story of naked pictures in my Facebook news feed then says “Dare? I read your blog”. Besides that my favorite part of the experience was learning new things from folks with different perspectives and technical backgrounds from me. Whether it was hearing different perspectives on the social graph problem from folks like Joseph Smarr and Blaine Cook, getting schooled on the various real-world issues around using OpenID/OAuth in practice from John Panzer and Eran Hammer-Lahav or getting to ask getting to Q&A Brad Fitzpatrick about the Google Social Graph API, it was a great learning experience all around.

There have been some ideas tumbling around in my head all week and I wanted to wait a few days before blogging to make sure I’d let the ideas fully marinate. Below are a few of the more important ideas I took away from the conference.

Social Network Discovery vs. Social Graph Portability

One of the most startling realizations I made during the conference is a lot of my assumptions about why developers of social applications are interested in what has been mistakenly called “social graph portability” were incorrect. I had assumed a lot of social networking sites that utilize the password anti-pattern to screen scrape a user’s Hotmail/Y! Mail/Gmail/Facebook address book were doing that as a way to get a list of the user’s friends to spam invite to join the service. However a lot of the folks I met at the SG FOO Camp made me realize how much of a bad idea this would be if they actually did that. Sending out a lot of spam would lead to negativity being associated with their service and brand (Plaxo is still dealing with a lot of the bad karma they generated from their spammy days).

Instead the way social applications often use the contacts from a person’s email address book is to satisfy the scenario in Brad Fitzpatrick’s blog post URLs are People, Too where he wrote

So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know.  

I then thought of my first time using Twitter and Facebook, and how I didn’t consider them of much use until I started interacting with people I already knew that used those services. More than once someone has told me, “I didn’t really get why people like Facebook until I got over a dozen friends on the site”.

So the issue isn’t really about “portability”. After all, my “social graph” of Hotmail or Gmail contacts isn’t very useful on Twitter if none of my friends use the service. Instead it is about “discovery”.

Why is this distinction important? Let’s go back to the complaint that Facebook doesn’t expose email addresses in it’s API. The site actually hides all contact information from their API which is understandable. However since email addresses are also the only global identifiers we can rely on for uniquely identifying users on the Web, they are useful as way of being able to figure out if Carnage4Life on Twitter is actually Dare Obasanjo on Facebook since you can just check if they are backed by the same email address.

I talked to both John Panzer and Brad Fitzpatrick about how we could bridge this gap and Brad pointed out something really obvious which he takes advantage of in the Google Social Graph API. We can just share email addresses using foaf:mbox_sha1sum (i.e. cryptographical one-way hashes of email addresses). That way we all have a shared globally unique identifier for a user but services don’t have to reveal their user’s email addresses.

I wonder how we can convince the folks working on the Facebook platform to consider adding this as one of the properties returned by Users.getInfo?

You Aren’t Really My Friend Even if Facebook Says We Are

In a post entitled A proposal: email to URL mapping Brad Fitzpatrick wrote

People have different identifiers, of different security, that they give out depending on how much they trust you. Examples might include:

• Homepage URL (very public)
• Email address (little bit more secret)
• Mobile phone number (perhaps pretty secretive)

When I think back to Robert Scoble getting kicked off of Facebook for screen scraping his friends’s email addresses and dates of birth into Plaxo, I wonder how many of his Facebook friends are comfortable with their personal contact information including email addresses, cell phone numbers and home addresses being utilized by Robert in this manner. A lot of people argued at SG FOO Camp that “If you’ve already agreed to share your contact info with me, why should you care whether I write it down on paper or download it into some social networking site?”.

That’s an interesting question.

I realized that one of my answers is that I actually don’t even want to share this info with the majority of the people in my Facebook friends list in the first place [as Brad points out]. The problem is that Facebook makes this a somewhat binary decision. Either I’m your “friend” and you get all my private personal details or I’ve faceslammed you by ignoring your friend request or only giving you access to my Limited Profile. I once tried to friend Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (a former Microsoft employee who works at Facebook) and he told me he doesn’t accept friend requests from people he didn’t know personally so he ignored the friend request. I thought it was fucking rude even though objectively I realize it makes sense since it would mean I could view all his personal wall posts as well as his contact info. Funny enough, I always thought that it was a flaw in the site’s design that we had to have such an awkward social interaction.

I think the underlying problem again points to Facebook’s poor handling of multiple social contexts. In the real world, I separate my interactions with co-workers from that with my close friends or my family. For an application that wants to be the operating system underlying my social interactions, Facebook doesn’t do a good job of handling this fundamental reality of adult life.

Now playing: D12 - Revelation

Niall Kennedy has a blog post entitled Sniff browser history for improved user experience where he describes a common-sense technique to test URLs against a Web browser’s visited page history. He writes

I first blogged about this technique almost two years ago but I will now provide even more details and example implementations.
...
A web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer will load the current user's browser history into memory and compare each link (anchor) on the page against the user's previous history. Previously visited links receive a special CSS pseudo-class distinction of :visited and may receive special styling.
...
Any website can test a known set of links against the current visitor's browser history using standard JavaScript.

1. Place your set of links on the page at load or dynamically using the DOM access methods.
2. Attach a special color to each visited link in your test set using finely scoped CSS.
3. Walk the evaluated DOM for each link in your test set, comparing the link's color style against your previously defined value.
4. Record each link that matches the expected value.
5. Customize content based on this new information (optional).

Each link needs to be explicitly specified and evaluated. The standard rules of URL structure still apply, which means we are evaluating a distinct combination of scheme, host, and path. We do not have access to wildcard or regex definitions of a linked resource.

Niall goes on to describe the common ways one can improve the user experience on a site using this technique. I’ve been considering using this approach to reduce the excess blog flair on my weblog. It doesn’t make much sense to show people a “submit to reddit” button  if they don’t use reddit. The approach suggested in Niall’s article makes it possible for me to detect what sites a user visits and then only display relevant flair on my blog posts. Unfortunately neither of Niall’s posts on the topic provide example code which is why I’m posting this follow up to Niall’s post. Below is an HTML page that uses Javascript function to return which social bookmarking sites a viewer of a Web page actually uses based on their browser history.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">  
  <head>
    <title>What Social Bookmarking Sites Do You Use?</title>  
    <script type="text/javascript">
var bookmarking_sites = new Array("http://programming.reddit.com", "http://www.dzone.com", "http://www.digg.com", "http://del.icio.us", "http://www.stumbleupon.com", "http://ma.gnolia.com", "http://www.dotnetkicks.com/", "http://slashdot.org")


function DetectSites() {
  var testelem = document.getElementById("linktest");
  var visited_sites = document.getElementById("visited_sites");
  var linkColor; 
  var isVisited = false;

  for (var i = 0; i < bookmarking_sites.length; i++) {          
         var url2test = document.createElement("a");                
         url2test.href = bookmarking_sites[i];       
         url2test.innerHTML = "I'm invisible, you can't click me";        
         
	 testelem.appendChild(url2test); 

	 if(document.defaultView){ //Mozilla
           linkColor = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(url2test,null).getPropertyValue("color");

	   if(linkColor == "rgb(100, 149, 237)"){
	     isVisited = true;
	   }
	 }else if(url2test.currentStyle){ //IE
	   if(url2test.currentStyle.color == "cornflowerblue"){
	     isVisited = true;
	   }
	 }

	 if (isVisited) {           
	 visited_sites.innerHTML = visited_sites.innerHTML + 
	  "<a href='" + url2test.href + "'>" + url2test.href + "</a><br>"
	 }         
	 testelem.removeChild(url2test);            
	 isVisited = false; 
  } 
}
      
    </script>
 <style type="text/css">
   p#linktest a:visited { color: CornflowerBlue }
 </style>
  </head>
  <body onload="DetectSites()">
    <b>Social Bookmarking Sites You've Visited</b>
    <p id="linktest" style="visibility:hidden" />
    <p id="visited_sites" />
  </body>
</html>

Of course, after writing the aforementioned code it occured to me run a Web search and I found that there are bits of code for doing this all over the Web in places like Jermiah Grossman’s blog (Firefox only) and GNUCITIZEN. 

At least now I have it in a handy format; cut, paste and go.

Now all I need is some free time which in which to tweak my weblogt to start using the above function instead of showing people links to services they don’t use.

Now playing: Disturbed - Numb

I was recently reading a blog post in response to one of my posts and noticed that the author used my wikipedia entry as the primary resource to figure out who I am. The only problem with that is my Wikipedia entry is pretty outdated and quite scanty. Since it is poor form to edit your own Wikipedia entry I am at a quandary.

My resume is slightly more up to date, it is primarily missing descriptions of the stuff I worked on at Microsoft last year. Thus I saw two choices. I could either change the “About Me” link on my blog to point to my resume or I could implore some kind soul in my readership to update my entry in Wikipeda. I decided to start with the latter and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll be updating the “About Me” link to point to my resume.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to update my Wikipedia entry (not vandalize it ).

Now playing: Ice Cube - Ghetto Vet

Amusing. I wonder what kind of ads YHOO employees are getting in Facebook these days?

Now playing: Abba - Money, Money, Money

On Friday of last week,  brad Fitzpatrick posted an entry on the Google code blog entitled URLs are People, Too where he wrote

So you've just built a totally sweet new social app and you can't wait for people to start using it, but there's a problem: when people join they don't have any friends on your site. They're lonely, and the experience isn't good because they can't use the app with people they know. You could ask them to search for and add all their friends, but you know that every other app is asking them to do the same thing and they're getting sick of it. Or they tried address book import, but that didn't totally work, because they don't even have all their friends' email addresses (especially if they only know them from another social networking site!). What's a developer to do?

One option is the new Social Graph API, which makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful
...
Here's how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people's accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they've said they're friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site.

I talked to Dewitt Clinton, Kevin Marks and Brad Fitzpatrick about this API at the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp and I think it is very interesting. Before talking about the API, I did want to comment on the fact that this is the second time I've seen a Google employee ship something that implies that any developer can just write custom code to do data analysis on top of their search index (i.e. Google's copy of the World Wide Web) and then share that information with the world. The first time was Ian Hickson's work with Web authoring statistics. That is cool.

Now back to the Google Social Graph API. An illuminating aspect of my conversations at the Social Graph FOO Camp is that the scenario described by Brad where social applications would like to bootstrap the user's experience by showing them their friends who use the service is more important than the "invite my friends to join this new social networking site" for established social apps. This is interesting primarily because both goals are currently achieved by the current anti-pattern of requesting a user's username and password to their email service provider and screen scraping their address book. The social graph API attempts to eliminate the need for this ugly practice by providing a public API which will crawl a user's publicly articulated relationships and then providing an API that social apps can use to find the user's identities on other services as well as their relationships with other users on those services.

The API uses URIs as the primary identifier for users instead of email addresses. Of course, since there is often an intuitive way to convert a username to a URI (e.g. 'carnage4life on Twitter' => http://www.twitter.com/carnage4life), users simply need to provide a username instead of a URI.

So how would this work in the real world? So let's say I signed up for Facebook for the first time today. At this point my experience on the site would be pretty lame because I've made no friends so my news feed would be empty and I'm not connected to anyone I know on the site yet. Now instead of Facebook collecting the username and password for my email address provider to screen scrape my addres book (boo hiss) it shows a list of social networking sites and asks for just my username on those sites. On obtaining my username on Twitter, it maps that to a URI and passes that to the Social Graph API. This returns a list of people I'm following on Twitter with various identifiers for them, which Facebook in turn looks up in their user database then prompts me to add them as my friends on the site if any of them are Facebook users.

This is a good idea that gets around the proliferation of applications that collect usernames and passwords from users to try to access their social graph on other sites. However there are lots of practical problems with relying on this as an alternative to screen scraping and other approaches intended to discover a user's social graph including

• many social networking sites don't expose their friend lists as FOAF or XFN
• many friend lists on social networking sites are actually hidden from the public Web (e.g. most friend lists on Facebook) which is by design
• many friend lists in social apps aren't even on the Web (e.g. buddy lists from IM clients, address books in desktop clients)

That said this is a good contribution to this space. Ideally, the major social networking sites and address book providers would also expose APIs that social applications can use to obtain a user's social graph without resorting to screen scraping. We are definitely working on that at Windows Live with the Windows Live Contacts API. I'd love to see other social software vendors step up and provide similar APIs in the coming months. That way everybody wins; our users, our applications and the entire ecosystem.

Now Playing: Playaz Circle - Duffle Bag Boy (feat. Lil Wayne)

A few days ago I got a Facebook message from David Recordon about Six Apart's release of the ActionStreams plugin. The meat of the announcement is excerpted below

Today, we're shipping the next step in our vision of openness -- the Action Streams plugin -- an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web. Now of course, there are some social networking services that have similar features, but if you're using one of today's hosted services to share your actions it's quite possible that you're giving up either control over your privacy, management of your identity or profile, or support for open standards. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web. And of course, you also have full control over showing and hiding each of your actions, which is the kind of privacy control that we demonstrated when we were the only partners to launch a strictly opt-in version of Facebook Beacon. Right now, no one has shipped a robust and decentralized complement to services like Facebook's News Feed, FriendFeed, or Plaxo Pulse. The Action Streams plugin, by default, also publishes your stream using Atom and the Microformat hAtom so that your actions aren't trapped in any one service. Open and decentralized implementations of these technologies are important to their evolution and adoption, based on our experiences being involved in creating TrackBack, Atom, OpenID, and OAuth. And we hope others join us as partners in making this a reality.

This is a clever idea although I wouldn't compare it to the Facebook News Feed (what my social network is doing) it is instead a self hosted version of the Facebook Mini-Feed (what I've been doing). Although people have been doing this for a while by aggregating their various feeds and republishing to their blog (life streams?), I think this is the first time that a full fledged framework for doing this has been shipped as an out of the box solution. 

Mark Paschal has a blog post entitled Building Action Streams which gives an overview of how the framework works. You define templates which contains patterns that should be matched in a feed (RSS/Atom) or in an HTML document and how to convert these matched elements into a blog post. Below is the template for extracting and republishing del.icio.us links extracted from the site's RSS feeds.

delicious:
    links:
        name: Links
        description: Your public links
        html_form: '[_1] saved the link <a href="[_2]">[_3]</a>'
        html_params:
            - url
            - title
        url: 'http://del.icio.us/rss/{{ident}}'
        identifier: url
        xpath:
            foreach: //item
            get:
                created_on: dc:date/child::text()
                title: title/child::text()
                url: link/child::text()

It reminds me a little of XSLT. I almost wondered why they just didn't use that until I saw that it also supports pattern matching HTML docs using Web::Scraper [and that XSLT is overly verbose and difficult to grok at first glance].

Although this is a pretty cool tool I don't find it interesting as a publishing tool. On the other hand, it's potential as a new kind of aggregator is very interesting. I'd love to see someone slap more UI on it and make it a decentralized version of the Facebook News feed. Specifically, if I could feed it a blogroll, have it use the Google Social Graph API to figure out the additional services that the people in my subscriptions have and then build a feed reader + news feed experience on top of it. That would be cool. 

Come to think of it, this would be something interesting to experiment with in future versions of RSS Bandit.

Now Playing: Birdman - Pop Bottles (remix) (feat. Jim Jones & Fabolous)

Given that I work in Microsoft's online services group and have friends at Yahoo!, I obviously won't be writing down my thoughts on Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. However I have been somewhat amused by the kind of ranting I've seen in the comments at Mini-Microsoft. Although the majority of the comments on Mini-Microsoft are critical of the bid, it is clear that the majority of the posters aren't very knowledgeable about Microsoft, it's competitors or the online business in general.

There were comments from people who are so out of it they think Paul Allen is a majority share holder of Microsoft. Or even better that Internet advertising will never impact newspaper, magazine or television advertising. I was also amused by the person that asked if anyone could name 2 or 3 successful acquisitions or technology purchases by Microsoft. I wonder if anyone would say the  Bungie or Visio acquisitions didn't work out for the company. Or that the products that started off as NCSA Mosaic or Sybase SQL have been unsuccessful as Microsoft products.

My question for the armchair quarterbacks that have criticized this move in places like Mini-Microsoft is "If you ran the world's most successful software company, what would you do instead?"

PS: The ostrich strategy of "ignoring the Internet" and milking the Office + Windows cash cows doesn't count as an acceptable answer. Try harder than that.

Now Playing: Birdman - Hundred Million Dollars (feat. Rick Ross, Lil' Wayne & Young Jeezy)

As I'm getting ready to miss the first Super Bowl weekend of my married life to attend the the O'Reilly Social Graph FOO Camp, I'm reminded that I should be careful about using wireless at the conference by this informative yet clueless post by Larry Dignan on ZDNet entitled Even SSL Gmail can get sidejacked which states

Sidejacking is a term Graham uses to describe his session hijacking hack that can compromise nearly all Web 2.0 applications that rely on saved cookie information to seamlessly log people back in to an account without the need to reenter the password.  By listening to and storing radio signals from the airwaves with any laptop, an attacker can harvest cookies from multiple users and go in to their Web 2.0 application.  Even though the password wasn’t actually cracked or stolen, possession of the cookies acts as a temporary key to gain access to Web 2.0 applications such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.  The attacker can even find out what books you ordered on Amazon, where you live from Google maps, acquire digital certificates with your email account in the subject line, and much more.

Gmail in SSL https mode was thought to be safe because it encrypted everything, but it turns out that Gmail’s JavaScript code will fall back to non-encrypted http mode if https isn’t available.  This is actually a very common scenario anytime a laptop connects to a hotspot before the user signs in where the laptop will attempt to connect to Gmail if the application is opened but it won’t be able to connect to anything.  At that point in time Gmail’s JavaScripts will attempt to communicate via unencrypted http mode and it’s game over if someone is capturing the data.

What’s really sad is the fact that Google Gmail is one of the “better” Web 2.0 applications out there and it still can’t get security right even when a user actually chooses to use SSL mode. 

Although the blog post is about a valid concern,  the increased likelihood of man-in-the-middle attacks when using unsecured or shared wireless networks, it presents it in the most ridiculous way possible. Man-in-the-middle attacks are a problem related to using computer networks, not something that is limited to the Web let alone Web 2.0 (whatever that means).

Now Playing: 50 Cent - Touch The Sky (Feat. Tony Yayo) (Prod by K Lassik)

Obviously, this is the top story on all the tech news sites this morning. My favorite take so far has been from a post on Slashdot entitled Implications for open source  which is excerpted below

A consolidation of the Microsoft and Yahoo networks could shift a massive amount of infrastructure from open source technologies to Microsoft platforms.Microsoft said that "eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity." Yahoo has been a major player in several open soruce projects. Most of Yahoo's infrastructure runs on FreeBSD, and the lead developer of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, works as an engineer at Yahoo. Yahoo has also been a major contributor to Hadoop, an open source technology for distributed computing. Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com] has more on the infrastructure implications.

I listened in on the conference call and although the highlighted quote is paraphrased it is similar to what I remember raising my eyebrows at when I heard it over the phone, given my day job.

What a day to not be going into work...