Hello, so whats the plan, and a note.

[Alex Kessinger]

Hey,
Really excited. I am working on a couple of small tools my self,
and would love to help however I can. Just one note about the
sharebro.org website. I totally agree with your about the sexist
thing, but it muddys your message. I would wait until someone raises
that problem, instead of bringing it to the fore front right now. We
should be focused on figuring out how to get back our old
functionality.

[Alex Chaffee]

Point taken. I'll bury it in a FAQ once the site is more real --
hopefully later today.

Draft dev plan here: https://github.com/alexch/sharebro

I'll probably use that github repo to launch both the real
sharebro.org and whatever services we want to put on it. Probably as a
Sinatra/Erector/Heroku app since that's what I'm comfortable with.

- A

--
Alex Chaffee - al...@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

[Alex Kessinger]

Cool. I don't think its helpful to start anything with a fight about
technology. So whatever everyone else wants to use is cool with me,
but I don't use ruby stuff normally. I am a python/django guy. I have
written some ruby for rails, I will see what I can do though.

So, I know that the API hasn't been shutdown yet, but I do think they
are planning on shutting it down eventually. Hopefully after they have
created a write API for Google+. I think it would be a better goal to
create shared items feed without google readers help.

On Nov 4, 9:43 am, Alex Chaffee <a...@stinky.com> wrote:
> Point taken. I'll bury it in a FAQ once the site is more real --
> hopefully later today.
>
> Draft dev plan here:https://github.com/alexch/sharebro
>
> I'll probably use that github repo to launch both the real
> sharebro.org and whatever services we want to put on it. Probably as a
> Sinatra/Erector/Heroku app since that's what I'm comfortable with.
>
>  - A
>

> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Alex Kessinger <voidfi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey,
> >   Really excited. I am working on a couple of small tools my self,
> > and would love to help however I can. Just one note about the
> > sharebro.org website. I totally agree with your about the sexist
> > thing, but it muddys your message. I would wait until someone raises
> > that problem, instead of bringing it to the fore front right now. We
> > should be focused on figuring out how to get back our old
> > functionality.
>
> --

> Alex Chaffee - a...@stinky.comhttp://alexchaffee.comhttp://twitter.com/alexch

[Alex Chaffee]

I'm going to be writing up a more detailed plan soon but for now my roadmap is:

make sharebro.org a hub, containing sections for 

 * history/summary/important links

 * links to commentary (replacing my bloated http://alexch.tumblr.com/post/11868074433/why-i-love-and-how-i-use-google-reader )

 * links and reviews of 

    * alternatives

    * enhancements   

    * replacements  

* original development of the above, e.g.

  * bookmarklet

  * "share" button(s) inside new reader

  * comment syncing

  * personal share feeds a la http://www.google.com/reader/shared/alexch

  * semi-private share feeds

  * integration with G+, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, or wherever

I intend to delegate and borrow heavily, and avoid language wars. All the code I write will be open source, starting with http://github.com/alexch/sharebro, and with any luck this will be community-supported and free forever.

Also with any luck some of it will become obsolete if and when Google come to their collective senses.

Just so you know, my personal preference/bias is towards public shares and a pub/sub model. We are all peers and like it or not, we live in public. Might as well claim that rather than hiding from it. (Though I respect the idea of limiting one's audience and peer group too; I just think Circles went a bit too far in that direction.)

 - A

[alex kessinger]

So, your idea for sharebro is more then just a technical thing, you
also want it to be like an archive of the movement?

[Emmanuel Pire]

> We are all peers and like it or not, we live in public

Amen to that.

What you're describing is a platform that would replace Google in a way, not something truly open. I explain:

If we want Friends list to be handled by a service, then everyone must be using that service to get their friendlist handled automatically.

The way i see things, other readers and other apps should be able to use this as well.

Hey, what if sharebro.org is only a RSS hub. you can access it only through readers. if your reader do not implement our "protocol" then you can still follow our feeds (being hosted by us or not, other subject).

If your client do support it, then it can pull a friend list from us. what about that ?

--
Emmanuel Pire
Web development
http://lipsumarium.com/

[Alex Chaffee]

> So, your idea for sharebro is more then just a technical thing, you also want it to be like an archive of the movement?

More like I want to move all those links I jammed inside http://alexch.tumblr.com/post/11868074433/why-i-love-and-how-i-use-google-reader into a sensible place, and also use that to flesh out the page design of the site.

[Emmanuel Pire]

Yeah, what about the design ? anyone wanna help about that too ?

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Alex Chaffee <ale...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So, your idea for sharebro is more then just a technical thing, you also want it to be like an archive of the movement?

More like I want to move all those links I jammed inside http://alexch.tumblr.com/post/11868074433/why-i-love-and-how-i-use-google-reader into a sensible place, and also use that to flesh out the page design of the site.

[alex kessinger]

So, if were talking a mostly static site we should totally use
something like http://octopress.org sites like dailyjs.org use it to
run community sties. I think it works really well, and very simple to
setup.

Design wise, I am a horrible designer, but I really like using things
like twitter bootstrap to get up, and running.

[Alex Chaffee]

OK, it's still ugly, but I got the content moved over and will soon start implementing my actual plan for the site. And fixing the CSS as I go. http://sharebro.org

I want the landing page to branch into 

 - briefly, what happened?

 - links and commentary

 - a matrix mapping individual "murdered features" to "solutions or workarounds" (which will include Emmanuel's userscript and rddlr and others)

 - plus a whole list of alternatives

I don't pretend to know what the right way to solve this disaster is, or even what several rightish ways are.

At some point I will reach out for design assistance but for now I am organizing my thoughts, plans and feelings via the web site itself, so forgive me if I'm vague and scattered.

[Emmanuel Pire]

Why not include the plugin on the page right now ? and promote sharebro.org - again as a way to promote our message. as soon as your page is "sexy" enough, I want to change the "Spread the word !" link in the plugin to sharebro.org

At this point the site could include a forum where sharebros can post ideas, and devs can discuss. or a link to some usergroup, but very visible.

One message that needs to be clear is precisely that we don't yet pretend to know how to solve this. but that we're working on it and we need all the help we can get.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Emmanuel Pire <pirem...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not include the plugin on the page right now ?

Cause I need to go eat dinner :-)

> and promote sharebro.org
> - again as a way to promote our message. as soon as your page is "sexy"
> enough, I want to change the "Spread the word !" link in the plugin to
> sharebro.org
> At this point the site could include a forum where sharebros can post ideas,
> and devs can discuss. or a link to some usergroup, but very visible.
> One message that needs to be clear is precisely that we don't yet pretend to
> know how to solve this. but that we're working on it and we need all the
> help we can get.

Check. I'll make the landing page clearer and point to the google
groups for discussion.

And include prominent links to your Share button as well as HiveMined
and Rdllr and others.

[Emmanuel Pire]

I like the fact that you want to propose different solutions, especially as we're 4 days young ! 

I'm also looking for other projects about this, and will continue to. Internet is so big... 

Will post if I find some real good open replacement.

And yeah, me too, f*** real life obligations, I need to go sleep (since I'm in Brussels) 

[alex kessinger]

So what do you all think of the octopress idea for running the main site. If we did that it would be really easy to use pull requests on github to manage the site.

[Emmanuel Pire]

If you ask me, it's too early to talk about framework/environment since we don't know yet precisely what we want to develop. All propositions are welcome though.

[alex kessinger]

Sure, agreed. Mainly I am talking about the static portions of the website and possibly the blog. Octopress would just be a very simple way to get the main site up and running.

[Alex Chaffee]

> Sure, agreed. Mainly I am talking about the static portions of the website
> and possibly the blog. Octopress would just be a very simple way to get the
> main site up and running.

The main site is now running at http://sharebro.org and served from
http://github.com/alexch/sharebro

I hadn't seen Octopress before. I like it, but Jekyll is still too
templatey for my tastes. I also like Erector and if you take a look at
the pages I've just pushed I don't think you'll find it too difficult
to patch. Maybe we'll launch an Octopress on blog.sharebro.org once we
get that far.

Erector can also wrap static template lanugages pretty well with a bit
of work, e.g.
https://github.com/railsbridge/installfest/blob/master/cases/workshop/resources.mw
turns right into
http://installfest.heroku.com/workshop/resources

and supports fun DSL-y extensions (like "custom tags" but much more
powerful) e.g.
https://github.com/alexch/sharebro/blob/master/lib/links.rb shows off
the "section" and "item" macro elements defined in
https://github.com/alexch/sharebro/blob/master/lib/sections.rb

so it's certainly not incompatible with a more pagey templately or
even CMSy solution. But I don't envision too many pages appearing on
sharebro.org.

===

Back to the original question: What's the plan?

The plan is to make a plan, but also it feels like 4 things jump out:

1. solve "what is a shared feed"
1a. a server-side shared feed system, a la Emanuel's userscript
1b. an in-Reader solution, a la Rdllr's feeds or the other guys's bundles

2. enhance Emanuel's userscript (that adds a "Share" button and a
"Find Friends" box) to use the answer to #1

3. new "Note In Reader" bookmarklet (which I strongly feel should just
be called "Share"), again integrating with the answer(s) to #1

Later, we can do a rdllr-style "import from Reader" wizard that brings
people over with minimal hassle. But I'd like to nail down the system
a bit more first -- I heard lots of "I did Rddlr but confusing things
happened" and I want to minimize that.

Also Alex K, you wrote a great blog post breaking down Reader's social
features. I'd like http://sharebro.org/features to echo that. I'd love
it if you can proofread and enhance that page based on your article.

[Emmanuel Pire]

The ridllr approach (boy, what a name!) is very interesting, but still relies on Google technology.

This is why we have to decide: do we want to fix only gReader or do we want to make a new share protocol all reader apps could use ?

i'm in favor of the later one.

Their idea to import from old friend list is just genius. didn't think of that, will bring something up in the plugin to do that as well.

The "Share" bookmarklet will need to rely on server-side hosted feeds, a la Emmanuel, as you say because: ok, you pressed share, but where does it go ? need to go to some place at some point.

We don't want many bookmarklet to show up, with diffenrent hosts, because then the community will scatter. finding friends in 10 different services will be a pain.

Still, 1 server should not store the feeds I think. More like 1 server should "rule them all" but not "store them all". users should still be able to decide where the host their feed (any blog system that has an api basically).

2 solutions for the bookmarklet:

- we store everything at sharebro.org or lipsumarium.com

- we wait till we figure out a way to "redirect" your post to your feed, hosted wherever you like.

About the CMS discussion, we should not run into cms war. I agree with alexch, their won't be so many pages. And we can actually code HTML ;) if we get a blog, then the discussion will reopen.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Emmanuel Pire <pirem...@gmail.com> wrote:

The ridllr approach (boy, what a name!) is very interesting, but still relies on Google technology.

This is why we have to decide: do we want to fix only gReader or do we want to make a new share protocol all reader apps could use ?

i'm in favor of the later one.

I feel we can do both. The pressing need is to get "Share" and "Friends Shared Items/Comment View" back in to New Reader. But we can build the backend in a general, open way.

 

Their idea to import from old friend list is just genius. didn't think of that, will bring something up in the plugin to do that as well.

 

The "Share" bookmarklet will need to rely on server-side hosted feeds, a la Emmanuel, as you say because: ok, you pressed share, but where does it go ? need to go to some place at some point.

We don't want many bookmarklet to show up, with diffenrent hosts, because then the community will scatter. finding friends in 10 different services will be a pain.

Yeah, I've been mulling this over. That's one reason I want the bookmarklet to just say "Share". Have a default, but let the user choose where to share to.

Also -- and this was my idea from years ago when I first registered onefeed.org -- it'd be great to allow *discovery* (and subscription) of a user's various feeds in a unified manner.

 

Still, 1 server should not store the feeds I think. More like 1 server should "rule them all" but not "store them all". users should still be able to decide where the host their feed (any blog system that has an api basically).

Dave Winer has been working on a system for distributed feeds. I don't know enough about it to know if it's appropraite for this task.

At first we should do what you did: just store and serve an RSS (or Atom or JAS) feed per user. Eventually we could introduce a level of indirection and point or hand off to other feeders. E.g. posterous or tumblr or feedburner (*) 

(*) btw feedburner got bought by Google in 2007 and their API is being retired :-(

2 solutions for the bookmarklet:

- we store everything at sharebro.org or lipsumarium.com

- we wait till we figure out a way to "redirect" your post to your feed, hosted wherever you like.

Yeah, like that :-)

[alex kessinger]

Hey,
cool, so just to see what it would look like I hooked up octopress.
Running a static generator to make websites has made a ton of things
so much easier, but if everyone doesn't like it I get it.

Sure, I don't mind looking that page over.

Lastly, I sadly think that the best solution long term is going to be
to get away from google infrastructure completely, but I think there
are a couple of polyfills for the time being.

[Emmanuel Pire]

 Yeah, I've been mulling this over. That's one reason I want the bookmarklet to just say "Share". Have a default, but let the user choose where to share to.

Agree 100%. still, we should keep the wonderful "1 click share", so not a "send to" like, where you should click to select where to send. so yes, a default host (sharebro.org) or any other blog if you want, but you set this once for all in your settings at sharebro.org

And why to redirect feed ? because we want to know they exist, so friends can find friends, or yes even some discovery channel (lol) with trending sharebros, categories... would be great :)

Do you have links to Dave Winer work ?

So, solution 1 or 2 for the bookmarket or both ? yeah, both is better i guess.

[Alex Chaffee]

btw I just checked the Posterous bookmarklet and it's great... does everything we want, except it only goes to Posterous on the way out. Much better usability flow than the Tumblr one too.

Dave Winer's concept is called "River of News" and it's hard to find a single URL source for it. Here are a few:

http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews

http://river2.newsriver.org/

http://daveriver.scripting.com/

http://scripting.com/stories/2009/09/02/isRiverOfNewsEnough.html

[alex kessinger]

Yea, I am actually working on a bookmarklet right now for
http://hea.pe I am trying to create a tool for someone to replace the
note in reader part. I also support an email to rss option. So
basically you will be able to create a rss feed from pages you
bookmark, and things that you email.

At first I think something like http://ifttt.com can help to route the
items to other places, but I want to use webhooks to allow anyone to
send the items to them selves. Also I could probably work with
posterous, tumblr, twitter and such.

I am planning on having the bookmarklet work almost exactly like the
google reader one with title, selection, note. Mayby not tags to being
with, but I will support those in time as well.

[Alex Chaffee]

On Nov 5, 2011, at 4:32 PM, alex kessinger <void...@gmail.com> wrote:

> am planning on having the bookmarklet work almost exactly like the
> google reader one with title, selection, note. Mayby not tags to being
> with, but I will support those in time as well.

Check out the new Posterous one; it's really something else.

Don't forget "source"... and if you please, "destination". Then the user can choose which of many sharepits to drop it in-- sharebro, posterous, tumblr, pinboard, HiveMined, G+, or some combination.

If you do that I'd love to assign you the Share bookmarklet task in sharebro ... Though I'd love to write it myself of course. Delegation is hard :-)

[alex kessinger]

Yea. I am really look hard at extending from RSS into share with
anything. Although, ifttt.com does a great job right now of routing
everything, but it would be nice to be able to choose where you want
it to go to as you share something.

Right now it does keep track of the 'source'. In the RSS feed it just
points directly at the article that you shared.

[Les Orchard]

On 11/7/11 12:13 PM, alex kessinger wrote:
> Yea. I am really look hard at extending from RSS into share with
> anything. Although, ifttt.com does a great job right now of routing
> everything, but it would be nice to be able to choose where you want
> it to go to as you share something.

Not sure if this is any help, but:

I use tags like "to:tumblr" and "to:instapaper" on items I'm posting to
pinboard.in.

Then, in ifttt.com, I have tasks that look for new items in the feeds
for "to:tumblr" and "to:instapaper" and repost things to the respective
destinations.

I'm not sure how that translates into maybe a more user-friendly feature
for sharebros, but free food for thought anyway

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

[Emmanuel Pire]

Tagging where you want to send (assuming you're geek enough to have multiple public feeds) before send is a thought I'll take with me for a walk.
But I think posterous' bookmarklet has the good idea with it's "auto post everywhere" feature.