9 March 2003

Hey, neat, someone generalized my apology card idea. Mine are cooler, though, since they’re nicely printed on cardstock and I rubber-stamp the date on with one of those librarian date stamps.

And of course because I can use them for other things.

(How come people do this kind of thing without letting you know? I found out from my referer log.)

One of the things I’ve been hacking on with a high level of intermittence is my dashboard idea. The basic notion is automatic search of your personal information space as you go about your regular daily activities: reading and writing email, browsing the web, talking to people on IM (at least, these are my regular daily activities).

The dashboard in action.

I wrote some text about this project, but it was too long and boring for my blog, so I put it here.

The thing Miguel and I have been hacking on today is a free and open Friendster replacement. Partly because they are soon going to start charging people, and partly because we can do better.

The idea we have that they don’t have is: building an open, distributed system that allows public identity publication, so that you can syndicate yourself with XML the same way you syndicate your blog with RSS.

Right now we’re just dicking around in an amateurish way, mainly trying to figure out what ’select’ means in SQL, but soon the world will feel our power.

Syndicated identity visualization in your face.

Naturally, you want centralized servers to do things like anonymous messaging, notification, etc. So our standard consists of an XML schema and a server interface for all the interesting interactive services.

Unfortunately, we still need a nice web UI, and those are so boring to write. Miguel started on something using ASP.NET. Of course, we will build this into livejournal too. (Yes, I know about lj_connect; don’t confuse a butterfly for an owl).

In other news, I really have to stop reading news web sites late at night. They make me so angry these days that I can’t sleep, so I’ve been kept up till 8am by political rage a little too frequently.