seanmonstar

Android Babel API?

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:31:19 -0700

The communication situation on Android has gotten worse with the introduction of Google+. We used to have just Messaging (SMS), and Gtalk, and then they added Messenger. And they did this after Apple introduced iMessage, which simplified messaging. It seemed so counter-productive. So when I read things like this, I jump for joy:

Rumors have been swirling that Google is working on a cross-platform messaging service called Babel that will tie together all of its existing communication products, from Google Talk and Hangouts to Voice and Google+ Messenger.

It sounds like it could fall slightly short of everything that I would hope for, though. Android is in a perfect place to make their system even better, for everyone, not only when in Googleland. Android already has an API to allow any app to sync their contact details into your People app. What if they made a communication API, that any app could tie into, that would allow you to use just the native Android communication app, and be able to talk to everyone on all platforms. It could be SMS, Gtalk, WhatsApp, and Facebook, and I wouldn’t have to care how.

Someone on the Android team, please do it!

Additionally, this global app needs to behave similar to Facebook’s new Chatheads. Being able to keep browsing and doing other things while my chat is minimized, and then opening it partly to answer, and get right back to it: that is the way messaging must work on Android going forward. No butts.

I’ve always enjoyed Android messaging more than iOS, and a big reason is because the Android Messaging app shows the person’s picture next to their messages. For that reason, I’ve always assigned people I message frequently with a photo, if they haven’t chosen one themselves. This new API (call it Babel) would be really push it into the new age of text communication.

Persona Beta 2

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:55:50 -0700

Persona Beta 2:

Oh yeah! So excited about all this hard work the team has put in. And it feels so good to know I helped on these features:

Use your Existing Accounts. We’ve bridged yahoo.com, but of course we built an open system: any domain can now become a Persona Identity Provider so users can reuse their existing accounts on any site that uses Persona.

Built Into Firefox OS. We built in support for Firefox OS and made Persona much faster on all mobile devices. This gives Firefox OS apps an even better experience when using Persona.

The Real Firefox OS Mission

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:00:20 -0700

The Real Firefox OS Mission:

Clearly, we hope Firefox OS in itself helps a lot of people. But here’s the real mission:

In this sense, Firefox OS is as much a project to improve the Web as it is a project to build a new mobile operating system. Every Firefox OS API Mozilla can get adopted by other major browsers makes it easier for developers to convert vanilla Web apps into “native” Firefox OS apps, and vice versa. Even if Mozilla’s OS never gains significant market share, the effort to flesh out a complete set of Web standards for mobile computing will help to push the Web forward.

And:

Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards.

Information Obsession

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:41:00 -0700

I’m a week late to the “Google Reader dies” news, but I wanted to collect my thoughts and read other people’s knee-jerk reactions first.

I am quite interested in human data consumption. Obsessed, even. Like, I constantly re-analyze my current setup, making sure I’m getting all the information I want, while keep as much junk out as possible. Maybe sometimes also re-analyzing my obsession with information obsession.

My Current Digs

I subscribe to high signal-to-noise blogs where I want to read just about every article using RSS. These are typically opinion blogs where I enjoy reading what the author has to say. Pretty much nothing in here talks about the latest news. Of all the available choice, I’ve always used Google Reader, since… eh, who’s kidding who, there was no other proper choice. It had the added benefit of being syncable with Flipboard, Feedly, and any other mobile feed reader I tried.
I get my latest news, and otherwise follow “blogs” or personas that post interesting links via Twitter. This seems like the least-worst way to battle all the noise, since I only have to see 140 characters to decide if it’s interesting to me. Plus, if it’s not, I don’t need to bother with “Mark All as Read” bah-log-na.
That’s it.

With Google Reader dying, I need a new place to move my “must reads” RSS subscriptions. Some of the Internet seems to think we shouldn’t need that anymore, but I’ve always seen my consumption as being from 2 buckets: high-signal must-reads, and abysmally low-signal may-be-interesting-but-oh-god-I’m-sinking snacks.

I’ve put a lot of thought into this obsession, and have 2 key objectives when it comes my reading: try to never miss anything I’d truly enjoy, and ruthlessly remove anything that I won’t enjoy.

To that end, a couple years ago, I started working on my own idea of a feed reader, that would try to solve these issues, and not just be a simple interface on “dumb pipes”.

feedmonstar

You’ve likely heard of Fever. It has a cool concept of grouping sites together when they share links to a “hot” topic. I found this to be genius, but then was quickly let down when I wished it would do more. I didn’t want a separate list of what’s currently “hot”. I simply wanted to read my list at the end of the day, letting a tool group up articles that were talking about the same thing. That way, I could read them all at once, or skip them all at once, and have them removed from my river of news.

Additionally, I wanted something like Google Reader’s “Sort by magic”, only that was magical about you, not the greater hive mind. So many times, it would tell me that an article on Smashing Magazine about “Top jQuery Plugins” was the most important thing to read. Clearly, it knew nothing about me.

So that was the goal of feedmonstar, and the prototype really started to do just that in an alpha state, before I got busy at Mozilla, plus my server was having issues as my “magic” sorting required a lot of memory to dynamically sort, score, and group the feed on each request.

If that sort of thing interests you, get in contact with me. I still have all the code, and could be bothered to set it up on another host to try and work on, if there’s interest.

Hey -o-, let’s go!

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:03:52 -0800

Hey -o-, let’s go!:

David Storey:

Only one browser engine remains where the dominant contributions come from an independent vendor who don’t have a vested interest in a large native ecosystem.

It’s a much more thorough breakdown of why Opera’s switch to WebKit isn’t a good thing.

Opera Switches to WebKit

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:53:08 -0800

Opera Switches to WebKit:

This is not something to celebrate.

Sure, everyone thinks that since WebKit is currently rocking it, that everyone should just switch to it, and stop “wasting” time competing. The truth is, that’s what happened to IE6. It was the new hotness when it came out, but without competition, it sizzled.

A more recent example: CSS gradients. If there were no competing browsers, the de-facto standard of gradients would be what the WebKit came up with, instead of the saner version in the specification.

An Introduction to Persona

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:49:36 -0800

An Introduction to Persona:

I wrote a guest post for @davidwalshblog about how to get started using Persona.

Crappy Computers

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:00:15 -0800

Crappy Computers :

Lukas Mathis says crappy computers are only for pros:

In reality, it’s exactly backwards: proficient users can deal with a crappy computer, but casual users need as good a computer as possible.

I see the point, and agree to an extent. At the same time, nerds like us care about what processor is going to have it’s bits flipped over and over. Normal users don’t need to care about that nonsense.

When someone starts to ask me how much RAM they need, or how many “googlebytes” the processor should be, I stop them right there. If the computer has 6GB or 8GB, they’re not going to really care. If the computer comes with i5 or an i7, they’re likely not going to care. I say that at this point, computers are fast enough what you want to do with it; now you need to make sure the actual interacting with it is enjoyable:

Play with the touchpad, use some gestures.
Type a couple paragraphs with the keyboard, and see if you like the keys.
Pick it up, and see if you wouldn’t mind carrying all the weight in your bag.
Look at the battery life, and see if it will stay alive longer than you plan to be away from a wall socket.

Tent.io

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:14:00 -0700

With the recent actions of Twitter, there’s a lot of interest in finding the right answer to our social status. We realize that there is a great deal of importance to our shorter status messages, and don’t want them “owned” by a company that is more interested in its own well-being¹ than our ability to share them. It’s part of our identity. It’s becoming increasingly fundamental, such that we’ve started to look elsewhere.

App.net isn’t the solution. Besides the points I made previously, App.net is in the same group as Twitter: it owns our status messages inside a vault, and we simply hope that it will be more trustworthy than Twitter was. That can’t be the right way.

As I said previously, we need a de-centralized open standard, like e-mail or RSS.

Enter Tent.io

Tent.io is a realization of that promise. I can run my own Tent server, and host and publish my own status messages on my own property. You can do the same. And our friends who aren’t as technically-savvy can use a hosted provider that’s perhaps offset by ads. We can all subscribe to each other, and see each others statuses, just like we currently can on Twitter.

The first client to consume this new Tent protocol is Tent.is. They describe the both of these like so:

Tent.io is a protocol like email, and Tent.is is a service like gmail.

Anyone can setup an account at tent.is right now. I could then setup a Tent server at tent.seanmonstar.com or something, and we could still follow each other seemlessly. This is huge. This is The Way forward.

Here’s an example with systems we already have: My friends can set up a blog on wordpress.com or tumblr, and I can subscribe to their RSS feed in Google Reader. In turn, I can host a blog myself, and my friends can subscribe to my RSS feed in whichever reader they’d prefer. This is what Tent.io is, but with less friction, a little more structure, and some privacy controls. It’s clearly much more than a simple Twitter clone.

You can continue to use App.net all you like², but please realize that Tent.io is the real solution, one where a single company no longer owns our status and identity.

To be fair, most companies must put their own well-being above everyone else, in order to survive. ↩
It would be interesting if App.net were to switch their back-end and become a premium client for Tent.io. Pay to use it, because it’s a better client, or something. But then, it’s part of the solution. It’s helping make this de-centralized. ↩

Persona Beta 1

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:21:39 -0700

Persona Beta 1:

The Identity Team has released Beta 1 of Persona:

For the past year Mozilla has been working on an experimental login system that completely eliminates passwords on websites while being safe, secure, and easy to use. Today we’re casting off the “experimental” label and announcing the first “beta” release of Persona.

This super exciting¹, and only the beginning. This step is letting website owners know that they can start using it reliably on their websites. We won’t change the API.

Next steps include:

Empowering Identity Providers (IdP) to authenticate their own users, like Gmail, Yahoo, or your own private email, instead of depending on the Persona verification.
Getting browsers to implement the dialog and API natively.

Yes, we hope to eventually remove ourselves from it all.

I may be a little biased. ↩