January 13, 2004

from Jon Udell's weblog: yesterday I sat in on two fascinating demos. The first was with Bill Appleton, creator of SuperCard, whose new product, DreamFactory (see Paul Krill's InfoWorld article yesterday), offers a really exciting way to compose graphical interfaces that wield Web services. The second was with Mark de Visser and Kent Mitchell of Agitar, whose new product, Agitator, takes a dramatically innovative approach to the automation of software testing. As the first WebEx was ending, it struck me that I might have been able to record it using Windows Media Encoder. So I experimented during the second WebEx and sure enough, it worked -- apart from my fumbling of the audio, that is. In order to use such material, I'd obviously need to clear it with the presenters, but I expect that for briefings not under non-disclosure, a number of folks would be willing to let me post AV excerpts. I can't wait to try this! Updates: Ray Ozzie says that they're getting great results at Groove using Qarbon to capture software demos for Flash playback. In other news, the Agitar team has a blog. 8:33:11 PM     One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf. I've gotten the first taste of what this is like by reading the aggregator page on the Share Your OPML site. As new sites come on the Top-100, as the aggregated interests of the community shift, I automatically start reading sites I wasn't reading before. I don't have to do anything. I like this. So at last Thursday's Berkman meeting I asked two of our regulars, Rick Heller and Jay McCarthy, to start doing these reading lists, and Rick is ready with what he calls a list of "political blogs that provide a balanced diet of liberal and conservative views." Now I have more work to do, to create a user interface that lets Rick edit his list at will, and presents an easy way for you to subscribe to his list so he can automatically subscribe you to new feeds (and unsubscribe you from others). The technology is not that hard, but it's essential, imho. Two comments. 1. I'm talking with other developers about building around this idea, so there will be another round of open formats and protocols building on RSS, OPML and XML-RPC; and 2. No patents. [Scripting News] 8:21:12 PM     Sexual Services for the Disabled. When the taboos of prostitution and sex of the disabled meet, there's bound to be plenty of controversy. In Germany, the Dutch prostitute Nina de Vries stands at the center of this debate. She offers erotic massages to mentally retarded clients and trains others to do the same. Recently she attempted to create a network of sexual caregivers in Zurich and was rebuffed. The article describes her work and the issues involved. [kuro5hin.org] 6:52:09 PM     from Christopher Allen's site: Christopher Allen on Social Network Services… Posted Jan 11, 2004, 11:11 PM ET by Judith Meskill Christopher Allen, founder of Alacrity Ventures, an angel capital investment firm, writes a two part series in his weblog — Evaluating Social Network Services and Followup to “Evaluating Social Network Services”……… — on the accounts he has created with Ryze, Tribe.Net, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Chris reflects, on what works and what doesn’t work for him with each of these services. He concludes his first post with a description of what he feels would be “The Perfect Social Networking Service”: My ideal service would have the the multiple professional affiliation features of LinkedIn, but also allow me to show non-professional affilations. It would allow me to form intentional communities like Tribes.Net, but would also let me do a Wiki in addition to a message board. It would have meeting/party invite services like eVite, and blogging features like LiveJournal. It would have an endorsement system like LinkedIn integrated not only with professional endorsements, but personal endorsements as well, and you could even endorse intentional communities. It would let me better map and control my network, giving different friends different privileges. It would handle the release of my personal information like Ryse, but less clunky. What would your “Perfect Social Networking Service” look like? 5:19:54 PM

© Copyright 2004 Ted Ritzer. Last update: 01/02/2004; 1:27:31 PM.