Google I/O Bootcamp Notes

#iobootcamp on twitter

05/18/10

Social 101: Buzz

The Conversational Web

• Previously there was more consumers of content than creators
• We believe you should have interactions across the web regardless of where its posted or where you’ve entered the web

Google Buzz

• Baked into gmail, where you are spending a lot of time already
• Keep track of whats going on and not losing it all
• Post to Buzz widget, can put on your own site
• Buzz andorid app, and html5 app

Relevant Technologies

• Enough to get a frame of reference for later in the sessions
• Atom (and friends) … xml format for syndicating web content … great for blogs … doesn’t go much further for that … so extensions were added
• Like an image inclosure …
• Atom + MediaRSS … eg adding height and width of image to be displayed correctly
• Atom + GeoRSS … Location is becoming more important, most devices have data … to add geolocation data to Atom is GeoRSS … point and feature name …
• Atom + GeoRSS + Portable Contacts … common format for importing address book … uses “poco”
• Atom + Threading … To create real conversations about this, not just posts … this specifies this is a reply to this post … Here is the post and point to comments … OR …. I am a comment in reply to something else … it can be a video in reply to another video (e.g., youtube, etc).

Activity Streams

• What are the right things to add to Atom to capture whats going on in applications today (streams)
• Its not so much about the content, its the actions on the content that is important
• What do these feeds have in common? (showed actoin lists, like uploaded videos, updates, uploads by a person, favorites of video’s uploaded by person, etc)
• Not many things in common
• The conversational web is not just about the content, its sharing the video … its not just sharing but also letting people know that you “favorited” the content, etc… doesn’t really fit well in the Atom model
• The examples are two same action on two different sites, the other two are two different actions on the same site
• How do we get away from these dumb feeds, add some more meta data, to do interesting things
• Actor + Verb + Object (start simple)
• Ted committed revision 42
• Cami favorites a video
• Ted friended Cami
• Atom + Activity streams (showing how to do this)
• What does adding this additional meta data buy us?
• We are still early in it, havn’t seen a lot of applicatoins doing interesting things on this
• But you can image, like an app that wants to Pivot on these things (e.g., one object tyep is “reviews”)
• Show me all of my “Reviews” regardless of where I created the reviews.
• Or show me all my “Favorites” regardless of where I favored them.

Salmon

• I have my blog with comments and Likes
• I want my blog to get as big an audience as I want, so I syndicate to Buzz, FriendFeed, etc.
• Each of them have their own comments and likes
• We are fracturing things
• You want to engage people where they are and comment there, but it would be nice to have that content to come back to your initial place of post
• Salmon does that, allows comments and likes to swim upstream
• When someone leaves a comment, it will notify my initial site
• It can go for any object that is taken on any object
• This works cross sites, like mentioning an individual with an @ sign, (he mentioned clickset users, status.net and they use salmon and have cross mentioning) … Buzz will be supporting this hopefully in the not so distant future
• Check out Bridging the Islands 3-4pm room 9 hosted by creator of Salmon (TASK)

PubSubHubbub

• You’ll hear a lot about this this week
• It hits the core of a lot of what Google is doing, beyound google
• Its part of making the web faster
• Its enabling the realtime updates of things like appfeeds
• Your rss reader keeps checking with your blog for updates, it keeps checking (e.g., once an hour maybe)
• As a site owner, I’d love for them to stop hammering me … one or two users is not a big deal … but many “the thundering heard” will tumble your site on godaddy …
• The idea solution is a different model
• Replaces your blog with a HUB
• Your blog posts to the Hub
• The Hub pushes it out to the subscribers
• Ream app Wed 4:15 pm -5:15pm same room as SALMON

Oauth

• Password anti-pattern (e.g., entering in your twitter u and p, or email u and p to set up an account and import your contacts) … gives away the keys to your kingdom …..
• Your valet key for the web
• Valet Key (limits speed to 20 mph, limit total distance to 20 miles, reistrict access to the trunk and glove box)
• Oauth Token (limited to particular app, what data applicatoin can access, how long the data can be accessed, revokable)
• “Find your friends the right way…”
• From twitter takes you to Google, it tells you what the app wants and will do with it
• e.g., asking for one time access
• Then goes to flickr and they match your contacts with people on flickr

Big buzz announcements tomorrow you may want to go to that session …

On Thurs there is a building on buzz session ….

Q: why not use (couldn’t hear, xmtp)

A: We don’t believe in having data in silos. We wanted to use existing standards. There was a project called Diso that was all about distributed social network of sorts. The most distributed is everyone is their own node. The other extreme is having one huge network. We were building a lot on wordpress. With that in mind specifically, we choose (couldn’t hear) instead of (couldn’t hear xtmp). Another issues is OneSocialWeb. XMTP is what they are building on. Similar to what DISO is trying to do.

Q: Who are the early adopters?

A: ActivityStreams (Myspace and facebook have done some work with it; Microsoft life is using ActivityStreams) … they are not all 100% compatible with each other. Slight different implementations. 6Apart CEO is the primary editor of the spec. Facebook is involved. MSFT is as well. Lots of collaboration there.

Q: Can PubSubHubbub support authenticated feeds?

A: Not yet, its at the top of our TODO list. Oauth will be a prime way to deal with authenticated feeds. It will probably be address with PubSubHubbub. Today there is no good example of what that will look like. If you have a good idea, please join the community and add your thoughts on how that should work. (Said the issues is something about being able to trust the source or something …).