prodigal friends return on sharebro.org

[Alex Chaffee]

The UI is still *horrible* but if you like, you can visit http://sharebro.org/auth and...

* It will redirect you to an OAuth page on https://accounts.google.com

* If you click "Grant Access" it will redirect you back to a sharebro.org which will show some stuff we can glean from Google

* For the moment, this access is only granted for the current session...

* ...but during that session, sharebro will fetch your "user info" (including email address and google user id) and your friends list (followers and followees both) and save them in a cloud database. 

* At the moment, nobody else can see this info (well, except me, but I promise to be discreet)...

* ...but once I add proper sharebro user accounts, they will connect to this data and reconstitute your Reader friends circle and allow you to share items with your friends again.

I know it's ugly and not very functional. Feel free to wait for the next rev. But even now it's a good idea to go visit the site to make sure your data is stored. Who knows when they will turn off the friends api!

http://sharebro.org/auth

Next up -- other than improving the UI -- will be associating with your friends' lipsumarum feeds and G+ posts lists as links. Unless someone's got a better idea?

And then either poking in a new "Shared" category into Reader like ridllr does, or exporting an OPML file with your friends' share feeds, wherever they may be.

  - A

-- 

Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com

http://alexchaffee.com

http://twitter.com/alexch

[Sarah Perez]

I don't know what you have going on here exactly, but I think I like it. 

[Alex Chaffee]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Sarah Perez <sarah...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't know what you have going on here exactly, but I think I like it. 

I feel the same way!

If you're still up, I *just now* pushed a new version of the experimental "googled" page which replaces the annoying JSON code with boxy HTML. It lists all your old Reader friends, with links to their old and some of their new share feeds.

The plan, such as it is, is to move the "lipsum" feeds into sharebro proper, and then maybe unify all your feeds into "sarah's shares", then allow you to publish to that feed from inside New Reader, and let your friends subscribe to not only "sarah's shares" but also a bundled-up "sharebros" folder...

...basically restoring what Google so callously stole from us.

Then once that's all ironed out, we tackle Comments.

Thence to Mars!

[alex kessinger]

So, I have been playing around with newsblur. I think it could be really usefull here. It has an API, and all that is missing is a people you follow section. 

What if we started to pool friends lists in one place, here and then find the intersection. 

Then if you let people designate there news shared items feed. It could be google plus, or posterous or hea.pe, it just needs to be a feed. 

From there you could do two things either then export an OPML file with all of your friends feeds, or using something like the. Newsblur API create the group o behalf of the user.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 9:57 PM, alex kessinger <void...@gmail.com> wrote:

So, I have been playing around with newsblur. I think it could be really usefull here. It has an API, and all that is missing is a people you follow section. 

What if we started to pool friends lists in one place, here and then find the intersection. 

Then if you let people designate there news shared items feed. It could be google plus, or posterous or hea.pe, it just needs to be a feed. 

From there you could do two things either then export an OPML file with all of your friends feeds, or using something like the. Newsblur API create the group o behalf of the user.

Sounds right. The dream is to have any RSS reader (NewsBlur, Google Reader, Reeder, HiveMined) both *share* and *subscribe* to individual or federated sharebro feeds. And API is my middle name.

The current experimental sharebro.org/googled page lists the few feeds I know about based on the limited user info I could get from Google OAuth. But imagine if in addition to (or instead of) all those weird little feed links, there was just one per user ("alex k's shares") and then a big "shares" that would export a cluster of all of them to your favorite reader.

Then on the reader app side, a share button that would hit an API with the source feed url, item id, and your name, to add an item to your "alex k's shares" feed (through OPML or a fancier API).

Then comments. And a Share bookmarklet as good as Posterous'.

And an actual account on sharebro.org that you could use so other sharebro users could find your posterous and tumblr and delicious and pasteboard and hea.pe and whatever other "link blogs" or "bookmark streams" or "tumblogs" or whatever they're calling them these days... as long as they are feeds and from you and I want to follow the links and notes you put in them. 

Until I unfollow you :-)

 - A

[Mike Whybark]

I'm still not ready to beta follow here but imagine me as that cut-in bespectacled and bebereted character actor from a b-movie beatniksplotation film leaping up from my coffee shop table shouting "GO, MAN, GO!" and snapping my fingers. Dig.

--
Mike Whybark - mwhy...@gmail.com

[colin j]

I am intrigued and will continue to read your newsletter.

[Hannah Waters]

The developer behind Newsblur is eager to add on social features himself.

http://blog.newsblur.com/post/11956240785/a-social-feed-reader

Hannah

[Juan Luis Chulilla]

What do you think about it? I'm not eager to use another cloud, privative service: I trusted Google and it failed after several years, so start another confidence cycle of trust is quite complex

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[Alex Chaffee]

BTW the http://sharebro.org/googled page now has photos!

Enough for this morning. The concept of a proper "sharebros" page is coming together in my mind...

 - A

[Les Orchard]

On 11/9/11 10:10 AM, Juan Luis Chulilla wrote:
> What do you think about it? I'm not eager to use another cloud,
> privative service: I trusted Google and it failed after several years,
> so start another confidence cycle of trust is quite complex

The nice thing about NewsBlur is that you can get the source code for
from github [1] and run your own server. So, if it ever goes away, the
software is still available.

That, and he charges money for a premium account, so that makes me think
I'd be more of a customer than for Google :)

[1]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

--
m...@lmorchard.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist

[colin j]

+infinity to being a customer.  tell me how much it costs and tell me what kind of margin makes it worthwhile to you as a project.  this kind of thing should be scalable, right?  grow the service, decrease the cost to the user?  there's a natural incentive for the user to proselytize.

[alex kessinger]

I was about the say the same thing, about it being open source. That
doesn't save the problem of unifying the conversation, or the problem
of single point of failure but it helps.

Also trust is a tricky thing. I don't think you should trust newsblur.
It's not that they aren't trustworthy either, it's just that a system
should never have a single point of failure. It's okay that newsblur
is a buisness entity. The most important part of the new system is
that it needs to be distributed. If you don't have one point of
failure then you can always route around a bad actor.

I think you can start with newsblur as the base of anything new you
do, and you just need to layer some things on top. Social is a given,
and the dude behind newsblur has made this a priority but how do we
make social distributed?

I have started making my own tools in the wake of readers
disappearance(http://hea.pe). If others find them useful I want them
to use it, but I don't want them to 'trust' me. Right now the best
way I know around this problem is that I use webhooks to distribute
any information back to them that I gather for them. In this way in
realtime I am replicating any state I keep about a user to a place of
there choosing. I also export all shared items as an rss feed which
again a user can place where they want.

So, if you accept this idea of using webhooks to replicate state
through a distributed system then we might be able to start thinking
about comments as something that gets replicated between systems.

For what it's worth there is already an open protocol that tries to
distribute comments it's called the salmon protocol.
http://www.salmon-protocol.org/ Google had backed it for Buzz, and who
knows they might bring it back for Google+.

If newsblur had a way to distribute comments to other systems I think
we might be able to build a system on top of that.

I do want to point something out. All this openesss, and distributed
software is cool but it's not easy. I have a strong feeling that the
first site that creates a fully integrated solution, even if it isn't
distributed, is going to get the lion share of the google reader
Diaspora.

If our idea is to build the biggest community of previous google
reader users we might want to focus on integrating everything first,
and then working of distributing the system.

First somehow make it distributed. When

[colin j]

Trust is less of an issue if you can align consumer and producer incentives.  In a case where you get economies of scale, this works out really nicely.  And I think that's the case here.

[Samuel Clay]

Hey folks, NewsBlur's developer here. All this talk of having a decentralized social sharing experience is a bit over-whelming. I work on NewsBlur in my free time. I am excited about creating a shared experience in feed reading, but I don't think decentralizing it is the way to go. Paying for a premium, hosted experience is clearly the winner, since it gives incentive to the business to make more features, and open-sourcing the software gives the users incentive to continuing using the service, as they can splinter and host their own experience.

Tying those decentralized hosts together is a task for the ages. I don't think I'm going to even attempt to make that happen. But I am more than willing to take input on what you want as your social feed reading experience to be on NewsBlur.

Just note that I was never a Google Reader user. I was on NetNewsWire (backed by newsgator, and when it switched to Google Reader, I started work on NewsBlur). So my experience has never been social. 

My plan is to build commenting and sharing into a shared feed that is asymmetric -- anybody can follow your shared feed and you can follow anybody else's shared feed. One shared feed per user means simplicity. No private groups, sharing between multiple groups, and privacy settings beyond all or nothing. I feel this simplicity will work best for new users and  in terms of providing a consistent and unambiguous sharing experience. Think of it as Twitter for feed sharing.

That's my idea, and I'm hoping to build it in the next couple months. I'm also open to feedback. And you should follow me on GitHub to watch this all happen in real-time: http://github.com/samuelclay.

[alex kessinger]

So, I actually totally agree with what Clay said, and I think that if
comments get into the mix on shared feed Newsblur could really scoop
up a lot of the reader users.

That being said, Newsblur is open source, so we shouldn't stop
thinking about a decentralized systems if people want to think about
it.

I don't think it's easy, and there is no magical solution out there
right now but it's not impossible.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Nov 9, 2011, at 12:50 PM, Samuel Clay <con...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My plan is to build commenting and sharing into a shared feed that is asymmetric -- anybody can follow your shared feed and you can follow anybody else's shared feed. One shared feed per user means simplicity. No private groups, sharing between multiple groups, and privacy settings beyond all or nothing. I feel this simplicity will work best for new users and in terms of providing a consistent and unambiguous sharing experience. Think of it as Twitter for feed sharing.
>
> That's my idea, and I'm hoping to build it in the next couple months. I'm also open to feedback. And you should follow me on GitHub to watch this all happen in real-time: http://github.com/samuelclay.

Funny, cause that's exactly what I intend to do. :-)

Some people will want privacy options. I'm punting on those for v1 and maybe forever. Shares want to be shared!

-A