Research about Social Desktop

There is an interesting research paper about the Social Desktop: ContactMap: Organizing Communication in a Social Desktop. The authors investigate which social information on the desktop would help users to improve communication and other social tasks. They also come up with a prototype which looks pretty interesting.

Users in your neigbourhood

Another use case from Frank's keynote: Users in your neighborhood.

Design Decisions

I took some preliminary design decisions for the implementation of the Open Collaboration Services client library:

• Separation of transport and content
• Abstract implementation of transport using kio_http as backend and configurable URI schemes for the REST access
• Job-based transport API
  
• Concrete implementation of content classes providing a C++ native interface to the application. Maybe look into code generation for these classes.
• Value based API for content. Possibly with implicit sharing.
• Don't care about caching for now. Look into using Akonadi for that later.
• Implement an id based relations API on top of the data objects. Maybe Nepomuk can help here.
  

OpenSocial

OpenSocial is an API created by Google to provide a standard way to embed small apps in social web sites. It specifies a container format for embedding HTML and Javascript in a site and specifies an API how to access the site through Javascript. This way it's easily possible to write small apps which interact with the data about people and their activities which is provided by the site.

With version 0.8 OpenSocial also specifies a REST API to access container servers. This makes it much more interesting as it's not tied into specific web sites, but the data gets accessible much more widely, especially on the desktop. I still have to find a site which actually implements this API, though.

Open Collaboration Services API

On freesektop.org you can find the specification for the Open Collaboration Services API. It provides a REST interface for accessing user and content data. It's already implemented on www.opendesktop.org.

Hackweek 3

Next week is hackweek time again. It's the third SUSE hackweek, which means we are doing this for more than a year now. Hackweek has created lots of interesting projects and some of the results have significantly improved our distribution.

Last hackweek I was too busy with other interesting stuff, but this time I will fully participate again. The project I plan to work on is the Social Desktop. That's inspired by the keynote Frank Karlitschek gave at Akademy this year. He proposed some ideas how to get the community on the desktop, how desktop applications could be enriched by making use of the data and functionality which is available on community web sites like opendesktop.org.

One example he gave was an about dialog on steroids, which would provide more info about the people behind the applications, and would also give users a way to become a "fan" to visibly be part of the user community of an application.



Another interesting use case Frank presented was integration of online content in the help center. Lots of info about how to use application is in online forums these days and it would be great, if the user would get more direct access to this info by integrating it into the help center.



Frank has already implemented a first version of the API on opendesktop.org, so what we now need is a client implementation on the desktop. This involves questions like how to best access the REST API, how to handle authentication through OpenID, and how to make the information accessible in a useful way for applications to use it. I'm looking forwared to work on findind answers to these questions.

Hack Week Recap

Hack Week ended two weeks ago, but I didn't find the time to write down some finalizing thoughts up to now. But here we go now:

Hack Week was an tremendously great experience. It was amazing how much creativity was set free. A smart move was the free breakfast for all which lead to people coming early to the offices, having a healthy meal and start hacking. It was in general a very positive atmosphere. I guess everybody enjoyed it. One frequent meme was "Do it again". Let's hope this will work out.

Two other statements I heard quite frequently were "My project turned out to be more difficult than I thought." and "I found a project which already does what I wanted to do." Both is good, because it shows that people were ambitious and the free software cosm provides a lot of solutions even to ambitious projects. Of course many developers found challenges which weren't solved before and did great work on them.

My own project was not as successfull as I would have liked. I discusses a lot of ideas and wrote some decent code, but I didn't get it to a really useful state. Garrett did some more work on the user interface which already looks quite nice and collects some useful data. We need to connect our two parts together, though, to achieve a richer experience for the user. I realized that this project has a lot of potential during the Hack Week. There are so many interesting things you can do with it (provided it works at some time) and when talking to others about the project, many exciting ideas came up. So I'm looking forward to spend some more time on this project.