Chris Messina › Comments

My bank, Scandinavian bank Skandiabanken, uses the SIM card in my phone (by way of my service provider) to store an encryption key to log in to the internet bank. I just get a dial pad up on my phone when attempting to log in on the web, and enter my short master pin on the phone for this, but special SMS/texts are sent back and forth that logs me in on the web. I´m so happy to not have to do several long passwords and personal numbers on the web, or use special "calculators". - Thomas Bøhm

I think a necessary step is to work through how this will implemented; it's going to happen one way or another. I hate to say it, but resistance is futile at this point. - Chris Messina

Any favorite Open Id providers? I've been using Google, but want to use someone that does delegation with WordPress. - Crutis

I see what I did wrong, I was trying to use https://www.google.com/account... instead of http://www.google.com/profile.... Thanks for your help guys. - Crutis

No Shit. Note: I am not excepting myself. - Michael R. Bernstein

Absolutely, Chris. Educating users wasn't really getting anywhere, but shifting the default HCI protocol that sites incorporate definitely has. - Michael R. Bernstein

"Thanks for the write up, Nicola. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how both my little conventions have caught on — what was once just a little trick that I used myself became much bigger when I explained what, why, and how I was doing it! As for your proposal to add /like… I think you should start by using this convention and see if it makes sense to people, and if anyone starting imitating you. I’d also add your proposal to the microsyntax wiki: http://microsyntax.pbworks.com One point I’ll make about slashtags and pointers is just that: they’re intended to *point* at something else. In other words, they take an indirect object — whether an author, a recipient, or a source (among others). /like breaks that convention. I wonder if it wouldn’t be more readable to just add something like “*like*” to the end of your tweet? Or even just use a hashtag? (#like) In any case, feel free to add it to the wiki — and see if anyone else picks it up. Cheers!" - Chris Messina

We just need a logo now - need to get Chris Messina involved to design something :-) - Jesse Stay

This should be something for everyone though - Jesse Stay

"Hard to add much to what everyone else has already said, but congrats Joseph. It's been great working with you and I expect we'll be working even more closely in the future! Congrats!" - Chris Messina

"This is pretty cool... And, not to pick nits, but it's "hashtag", not "hash tag" (the space makes it look a little too drug-related!)." - Chris Messina

"No problem. If you were confused or had questions, you probably weren’t alone! Thanks for prompting me to write up some thoughts that’ve been on my mind lately! And, I’ll fix my spelling of your name… oops!" - Chris Messina

"Thanks for your post Karl. A couple things: * Stowe Boyd deserves credit for Microsyntax. I just pitched in in the beginning and document ideas on the wiki. I didn’t start the project. * Slashtags use a forward slash (”/”) — rather than a backslash — as you have in your examples. So, a response: The concept of the slashtag was really just me documenting what *I* was doing… not necessarily intending to tell other people what to do. Hey, if people copied me, I figured, they might as well “get” what I was up to. Hence my blog post. As with hashtags, I just started using them and didn’t wait for anyone to agree with me! Now, I did take a look at what people were doing, or what conventions already existed, which is a point that you made: “My suggestion to anyone looking to build tools that tease out meaning from the conversation that is happening on twitter should look carefully at the communication and social norms that are emerging and leverage that.” When I originally proposed hashtags,..." - Chris Messina

"Hey Aral, Thanks for the clarification. Sounds like we use the exact same process for microsyntax — fancy that! Microsyntax is essentially developed through an observe-initialize-refine-propose-iterate model, same as Twitterformats. Anyone can make a proposal, and anyone can create their own “slashtags”. Whether they get adopted is based on market penetration and adoption, as there is no central authority governing (or that *could* govern!) which tags will resonate in the wild. It does seem like Twitterformats are an attempt to define certain command-line-like actions for Twitter — though several proposals to that effect have already been made on the microsyntax wiki (though I doubt that many have really taken off). I’ll be interested to see how this effort evolves — as the microsyntax project (which was really started by Stowe Boyd — I just helped with some of the initial thinking!) is similarly intentioned! Cheers." - Chris Messina

"How is this different or completely to the existing microsyntax efforts? http://microsyntax.pbworks.com" - Chris Messina

"The documentation for an API can be copyrighted — and so can the code that implements it. While the functionality of an API is usually covered by patents, there is still definitely a question of whether Twitter intends to enforce any IP protections over its API, or the design thereof.You can also copyright the design of a menu, though I doubt the content would necessarily be covered. Oh, and FWIW, recipes are one of the few things that can't be copyrighted:http://www.copyright.gov/fls..." - Chris Messina

"Indeed, Identica does clone the Twitter API, and they too are operating in a gray area. I suppose they could assume that Twitter's ambivalence towards this equals condonement, but I wonder what would happen if, say, Facebook implemented Twitter's API as well. Perhaps Twitter would love for everyone to implement their API — and perhaps they'd be happy to give it away for free. I really don't know, which is why I echoed Dewitt's question.Copyright absolutely applies to APIs — and as Dewitt pointed out in his email — Twitter reserves their right to protect their intellectual property. Given this stance, it's worth having a definitive answer as to whether their protections apply to their API.It's one thing to implement support for the Twitter API in a client; it's another to use the design of the API in a competing or related product — and not expect Twitter to have some interest in that — especially if you call it "Twitter API compatible".I'm not interested in raising a false..." - Chris Messina

"Indeed, Identica does clone the Twitter API, and they too are operating in a gray area. I suppose they could assume that Twitter's ambivalence towards this equals condonement, but I wonder what would happen if, say, Facebook implemented Twitter's API as well. Perhaps Twitter would love for everyone to implement their API — and perhaps they'd be happy to give it away for free. I really... more... - Chris Messina

"I'm curious what the answer to @dewitt's questions will be: what is the license of the Twitter API? Is it copyright infringement for Automattic to mirror it in WordPress?http://groups.google.com/group... should hope not, but it would be very useful to have this issue cleared before people standardize on what it otherwise one company's presumed IP." - Chris Messina

Except that: (1) realize the author is highly financially motivated by public sharing and public social graphs; (2) the author talks about privacy as if it's a boolean, which is just plain wrong - even in the context of Facebook alone, Facebook has had, and continues to have (though less of), some notion of levels of privacy that may differ across various kinds of information; (3)... more... - LogEx

I support choice, but I also think that behavior is critical to look at, especially when you're talking about technology that many people don't understand. Look — if people WANT to invite their friends to all these apps (regardless of whether their friends want them to or not) and they make their friends list private — they've now just shot themselves in the foot unknowingly. How do you... more... - Chris Messina

"I reported this issue here: http://getsatis...llowing_via_sms" - Chris Messina

"@Michael Kozakewich: I’ve been meaning to redesign this blog for a while. I’ll make sure to separate the tweets from the local comments. Thanks for the suggestion." - Chris Messina

"This is certainly a daunting problem because there's very little opportunity to "sniff an app's behind" a la dogs. This means that we have to take the app at face value, with no real anchors to interpret contextual or rating information that's supplied with it. This has several problems, especially if the reviews are used to threaten a developer: http://www.flickr.com/photos...... Furthermore, awhile back I suggested that Twitter could use social indicators in the authorization flow: http://www.flickr.com/photos...... Certainly a possibility — but doesn't do anything w/ regards whether an app "keeps it promises" (which requires some kind of meaningful enforcement)." - Chris Messina

poor RSSCloud, its almost a rounding error - Mark

Again, I think the main point of the blog post was : real-time feeds (in general) are gaining traction. I will publish more details on how we measure the (raw) numbers in our December status. - Julien

"@Jack: It’s not perfect, but I use /me to add my own commentary (always the with slasher): Twitter v. Facebook http://bit.ly/7arqki /by @mjasay /me: sounds like “rather than do either, they’ll do s’thing else tht neither groks at all” I mean, you don’t need to be religious about using slashtags — they’re really just a useful way for adding more context to your post, or giving credit/pointing at people. I wouldn’t stress about “doing it wrong” — just focus on communicating clearly!" - Chris Messina

The path is getting people, companies, and technologies to adopt these things and getting the word out, I think - Jesse Stay

I'll have to get back to you. Sorry to disappoint... :( - Chris Messina

"Wow, thanks Louis! High praise coming from someone who tracks this industry as close as you do! I think my perspective is able to mesh both my understanding and appreciation of design along with the quasi-benefit of having never worked directly *for* a big company, but having worked *with* so many. One of the things that I feel I'm able to do with many of these technologies is synthesize the goals and motivations of many different stakeholders and try to come up with something that the market will actually adopt. And since I do this with little to no resources, it means that the thing itself needs to be pretty compelling without a whole lot of hoopla or marketing! I guess my early days with Spread Firefox taught me that message. Anyway, thanks for reading my stuff and providing your thoughts on it!" - Chris Messina

So, how important do you think it is to expose as much content and functionality as possible *without* requiring a login? For example, Amazon.com seems to do rather well by this tactic. - Michael R. Bernstein

Chris - WOW, fabulous blog post - great insights :) - Susan Beebe

"This is awesome. Totally something that needs to come out of Flash and into the browser!" - Chris Messina

"ClaimID is an OpenID provider, however, they only support the 1.1 version of the protocol — they also seem to no longer be actively maintaining ClaimID. Rather than seeing this as a “duplication”, it’s just another place to have a public profile on the web. See also: http://hi.im, http://identoo.com, http://chi.mp, and a dozen others." - Chris Messina

The interesting thing is that I used my personal domain, http://dewitt.unto.net/, as my OpenID, and delegated to Google as my OpenID provider. View the source of http://dewitt.unto.net/ to see how easy it was. Inspired by: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - DeWitt Clinton

Wonderful - Brett Slatkin

If you read one post on OpenID and where it might go (and might need to go), start here. - DeWitt Clinton from Bookmarklet

IMO in the future there will be no sign in buttons - you use your information card and it auto-provides context, logs you in, and gives you the experience you want. All via OpenID, oAuth, etc. but the user won't even know that. - Jesse Stay

"Contrary to MG’s point — OpenID has gone mainstream, in a similar way to IMAP or SMTP. That is, it’s powering the identity and single sign-on transactions of millions of people everyday — but, to MG’s point — they just don’t know it yet. The more often you see the “sign in with your X account”, the more OpenID is creeping into the everyday web user’s experience. This is certainly a good thing, considering the fact that OpenID is an open protocol that anyone can implement. The problem is that we’re running up against what we call the “NASCAR problem” — where, because “OpenID” as a concept and brand hasn’t been well socialized — we’re putting companies and corporate brands in place of people’s names and faces. Thus, rather than signing in to leave this comment as “Chris Messina, who hosts his account with Facebook”, I would be clicking the Facebook Connect button — signing in first as a Facebook user, and second as an individual. This duality won’t scale — and requires a word to..." - Chris Messina

I think this will become visible to the users when Action cards start to be more widely available. Also, the <input type="openid"/> tag in HTML 5 will help with that. - Jesse Stay

Amazing to read multipage essays about the strategy of a web browser on a laptop. - DeWitt Clinton

The manifestation of the Googlebot in your home will be the other “hand to reach out into reality”: http://www.ftrain.com/robot_e... - Amit Patel

<h2>How Hubbub Works</h2> There are three parties in the Pubsubhubbub model. There's a Publisher (FeedBurner, for example), and a Subscriber (perhaps Netvibes) and the communication is facilitated through a Hub (Google's AppSpot Hub is the demo and most popular Hub so far). The publisher knows that every time new content is published it's going to notify the Hub - the Hub that gets notified will be declared at the top of the publisher's document, just like an RSS feed URL. So the Publisher delivers new content to the Hub and then the Hub will deliver that message immediately to all the Subscribers who have subscribed to recieve updates from that particular publisher. This is very different from the traditional model of a subscriber polling a publisher directly every 5 to 30 minutes (or less) to check and see if there's new content. There usually isn't and so that model is inefficient and slow. Hubbub is nearly immediate and only takes action when something important occurrs. It's... more... - Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall, I agree with you on this. Chris is indeed opening our "third-eye" on the range of use cases for this. It is a powerful "atomizing" protocol delivered with very simple underlying technology. I've been looking at XMPP, AMQP & a Comet-derivative for an application that may now be accomplished quite simply via PubSubHub / PuSH. It would also be great if Chris could also get Jyri to comment over here with his views. - http://twitter.com/AAinslie - Alexander Ainslie