Tessera at the Semantic Web Austin Launch Party

Ever tried to write an application that sits on top of a fine mist of questionably accurate factoids spread in varyingly dense clumps across the whole Internet? It's a pain. The {s,S}emantic Web is a terrible platform for applications. Developers need real APIs.

I'll be at the Semantic Web Austin Launch Party (Tue, June 17th) talking about Tessera, an experiment in wrapping the distributed social web (XFN, FOAF, hCard, etc) with OpenSocial, the API everybody-but-Facebook is using to expose out their social networking platform.

Tessera is nowhere near complete, but it's far enough along to run simple OpenSocial gadgets, and I hope to have the OpenSocial version of Popcitation up and running by tonight. Or not. But there's certainly enough there to make for some interesting discussion. Hope to see you in Austin!

Some Experiments with the Future of Social Network Technology

I gave a presentation at the recent Dallas Social Network Technology event (yes, we're still trying to come up with a good name. Pictures here.). We ended up with something just over twenty people, but it was exactly the crowd we were hoping for: developers, startup-istas, entrepreneurs and business people actually "doing something" with social network technology. A quick canvas of the attendees indicated that a get-together maybe once a quarter or so, with a meetup for beers slightly more often, might be about right. There was some talk from the general direction of Alamofire about a game-focused event sometime in the fall, and I suspect there will be another general event between now and then.



The presentation was combined with a live demonstration of the Popcitation Facebook application, and both a Google and Facebook login to the Popciation destination site. (All of it, but especially popcitation.com, is a development spike to test out new technology, there's a good chance it won't work quite right for you.) I got about 10% of an OpenSocial version done, I'll try to finish that up in the near future.

Closing thought: it would be cool to have an OpenSocial container with DISO as the backend, huh? Need to do some more research along those lines, for all I know that's the standard assumption...