Personal access to profile data

[James Smith]

Hi there,

I just got a Current Cost meter in the post (www.currentcost.com), and
have a massive urge to hack around with it and do something cool with
the data. My first thought was to bung it into my an AMEE profile, but
that has raised a question in my mind...

If I (as a member of the public, i.e. no AMEE login credentials) want
to put data in my AMEE profile, how can I do that without using an
intermediate website? I can't use software on my local machine
(especially not open source software), because that would need a login
key which I don't have. I guess it just has to be done through someone
else's web-based software (so they have a key but I don't need one).

What's the thinking on this sort of thing? I guess it's a related
problem to sharing of profiles between different AMEE clients.

Unfortunately this means that in order to put data from my CurrentCost
into AMEE, I'm going to have to build a website in the middle to do
the work for me. Which is OK actually, that sort of thing isn't a big
chore ;)

cheers,
James S

[Andrew Conway]

Hi James

Good question.

The closest thing we have at present is the "user" area of AMEE - it's
like a wiki but for data rather than text:

http://wiki.amee.cc/index.php/User

Of course the difference between this and what you describe is that the
"user" area is for adding data items, not profile items. The latter
would require an intermediate website (perhaps using openID?) to handle
user identification as AMEE only stores anonymous profile UIDs.

Andrew

[James Smith]

Morning,

2008/7/30 Andrew Conway <and...@dgen.net>:
> Good question.

I thought so - a lot of the things I want to do with AMEE depend on
people being able to access their profile from various different
places, so I think it's quite an important issue... for me at least :)

> Of course the difference between this and what you describe is that the
> "user" area is for adding data items, not profile items. The latter
> would require an intermediate website (perhaps using openID?) to handle
> user identification as AMEE only stores anonymous profile UIDs.

Indeed. If you know a profile UID, can you read it from a using a
different set of login credentials? I assume the permission system
prevents this.

Here's an idea (probably a bad one, I've only just thought of it).
What if each profile had a unique auth token? So, if you access AMEE
with that authToken, it lets you access that profile and only that
profile? Sites could display the authToken for the profile they've
created for you, and any app could let you put in your token from
another site if you have one. That would let me create a profile
through (say) the Carbon Diet, then write to it with a bit of open
source software managing my local CurrentCost meter, and even view it
through other sites such as the Carbon Account.

LARGE DISCLAIMER: I haven't thought that through, so I'm not sure if
it breaks the anonymity and security built into AMEE, as well as the
security issue of having a great big key which you give out to
everyone and their dog. I'm also not at all sure it allows you to
merge profiles from different sites, which is another desirable
feature in all this. Let me think some more...

I didn't mean to get into the whole profile-access-sharing thing, this
started as a simple thought about hacking my energy monitor, but has
spiraled out of control into some fairly fundamental data-sharing
issues :)

cheers,
James