For now, since the Google+ API is read-only, I’m borrowing inspiration from Luka Puši?’s GPlus Bot and Dmitry Sandalov’s Twitter 2 Google Plus script.

This means emulating the Google+ mobile web experience using Curl.

WPGPlus adds a box to the post edit screen where you can choose yes/no for publishing to Google+, as well as a place for a message to be used in the body.

(If you provide a Google+ message it is used; if you provide a post excerpt it is used; otherwise post content is used).

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think!

Google’s new offering, SideWiki, makes Brands in Public look very web 1.0. Why make consumers come to a third party site just to see all the comments about a brand, when you could put them right next to the brand’s site?

SideWiki, which requires installation of the Google Toolbar, lets you add comments to any web page. You can comment on the page as a whole or on specific highlighted text within the page.

Here, for example, is the Ford Motor Company home page with SideWiki showing (click for full size):

Ford.com with Sidewiki comments showing

Those of you who’ve been “on the internet” for a while will recognize the concept – it’s not really a new idea, having been tried by Third Voice (in 1999!), Me.dium, and even Microsoft (“Smart Tags” anyone?).

However, it now has the force of Google behind it – and it links those comments to your Google Profile, providing a nice centralized view of your activity, as well as the ability to share those comments via email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Will brands rebel, chafing at the idea of random internet users leaving post-its all over their carefully controlled and designed brand presences? (See the discussion at Google Webmaster Help – only way is to block all users with the Google Toolbar, which is rather like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face).

Will brands embrace the opportunity, adding SideWiki into their social media monitoring tools, responding to comments, and claiming the top spot on all their pages? (Sidewiki allows the page owner to rank comments, including putting the official page owner note at the top of the list).

Jeff Jarvis at first saw Danger in Sidewiki, writing:

Google is trying to take interactivity away from the source and centralize it. This isn’t like Disqus, which enables me to add comment functionality on my blog. It takes comments away from my blog and puts them on Google. That sets up Google in channel conflict vs me. It robs my site of much of its value (if the real conversation about WWGD? had occurred on Google instead of at Buzzmachine, how does that help me?). On a practical level, only people who use the Google Toolbar will see the comments left using it and so it bifurcates the conversation and puts some of it behind a hedge. Ethically, this is like other services that tried to frame a source’s content or that tried to add advertising to a site via a browser . . . .

So this goes contrary to Google’s other services – search, advertising, embeddable content and functionality – that help advantage the edge. This is Google trying to be the center.

One can definitely see Google asserting a direct relationship with the end user here, and disintermediating the hosting site – whether you provide comments or not Sidewiki will provide them for you.

It feels different than Disqus or the other examples since it happens “on” your domain – or at least appears to. Is there some fundamental line crossed when third parties operate on your domain without your consent?

If so, what about GreaseMonkey, or AdBlock Plus, or Stylish, or any of the other browser plugins which change the look and feel or functionality of sites?

Sidewiki is yet another reminder that the user is in control of the experience, not the marketing team – how will brands react?

I landed on the Firefox Google homepage, as I always do in a new browser window – http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official is the address, I believe it is the default shipped with firefox.

But look at what I see in the upper right hand corner where my email address should be (click on the image for full sized one):

Google Homepage Issue

Very strange. I tried, just for investigation, clicking into “my account” or some of the other google services – I don’t seem to be actually logged in as someone else. Anything which would require login actually asks me to login and doesn’t prefill the box with stephenandmandy or anything. But it is really odd to see someone else’s email in that upper right corner.

Anyone else seeing this?

(For the non *nix folks in the audience, whoami is a shell command on most unix/linux systems that tells you what user account you are currently logged in as – or, as the man page so concisely puts it:

whoami — display effective user id

Try it on your local *nix box today.)

Hybrid (photo by Burning Image)

Late last week, Plaxo and Google unveiled an implementation – currently in limited testing mode – of OpenID and OAuth working together to create an improved user experience. In essence, the implementation affects Gmail users receiving invites to join Plaxo Pulse. They call this a “hybrid approach” and I think it will have a significant impact as it significantly simplifies the flow.

Plaxo created a custom landing page, based on knowing that the user received the invite at a gmail address, which means that the user has a google account, which means that the user also has an OpenID. (It wasn’t clear to me if the landing page is triggered by a query string parameter or wholly different url embedded in the invite itself, or by a referrer check or the like).

Given that knowledge, the landing page offers just two choices: one big button labeled “Sign up with my Google Account” and a non-graphic link which says “Or, use another address.”

If the user clicks “Sign up with my Google Account,” they get the optimized flow, and get a consent page served by Google which tells the user what they are being asked to consent to, including their gmail address and a request to allow Plaxo to access their Google contacts.

What’s great about it is that when the user accepts, they’ve used OpenID to authenticate to Plaxo based on their Google Account, and they’ve used OAuth to authorize Plaxo to access their Google contacts – but the process never mentions either standard. It’s two great things which are even better working together, and it creates a better user experience.

Technology, like design, is at its best when it disappears.

Peanut Butter Cup Heart (photo by Bob Fornal)

Of course, similar kinds of behavior can be accomplished through Facebook connect – but the difference in this case is that both Plaxo and Google are big supporters of the concept of the “open stack.” All the technologies involved are open, in the sense that they can be implemented by any party (and in fact have associated open source libraries in multiple languages to ease that implementation). To top it off, the whole implementation itself is being released as an open source project called step2.

This means that the same approach – requesting an OAuth token (access to some particularly scoped functionality, like Google contacts access in this example) as part of an OpenID authentication exchange – can be (and most certainly will be) used by Plaxo with other webmail providers, by Google with other social networks / membership sites, and in contexts where neither Google nor Plaxo have any involvement.

For more info:

• Plaxo Blog post – “Introducing Two-Click Signup“
• Google Data APIs blog post – “Bringing OpenID and OAuth Together“
• Watch Google and Plaxo developers discuss the integration on Episode 26 of Social Web TV (and then subscribe to watch the whole series – unfortunately not yet compatible with Miro so you have to go to the site to watch)
• Check out the step2 project on Google Code
• Google’s Federated Login API may be the simplest way to add OAuth and OpenID interaction with Google

Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that – basically anywhere they use the word “attached” – if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?

Xefer has created an intriguing mashup using data from the Twitter API, a Yahoo! Pipe to some basic transformation, and the Google Chart API to display results:

To get your own, just replace with your twitter username to the end of this url: blog post describing the project:

The most interesting aspect of this project is that, other than the static files being served up by xefer.com itself, no other server-side processing is being done here; all the processing is being handled by Yahoo Pipes and Google, and of course Twitter itself which is ultimately hosting the raw data.

Who knew I tweeted so much on Sundays?

Note that the data seems to be, as per the comment on the blog post, in GMT, so you’ll need to do offsets in your head for your local timezone.

Ryan Barrett, one of the developers on the Google App Engine team, has released an application which allows you to use your Google Account as an OpenID.

Once you’ve logged in to your Google account, you just use:

http://openid-provider.appspot.com/yourgoogleusername

On any site which relies on OpenID for validation.

So now Yahoo!, AOL, and Google have (direct or indirect) mechanisms for providing OpenID (and Microsoft has committed to doing so in the future).

Combined with all the free, purpose-built OpenID providers (like ClaimID, MyID, MyOpenID, MyVidoop, and Clickpass) and it looks like 2008 could be the tipping point (assuming one hasn’t already occured in 2007).

(See OpenID Status Check for a recent, and more exhaustive list).

(To subscribe to any of these in Miro, you can just use the “Add Channel” command in the Channel Menu and put in the RSS url below. Be sure to look at whether you want to download ALL the videos in that feed or just NEW videos added.

TED Talks

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Monterey California which “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

They now make a huge variety of talks from the conference (current and past) available for syndication in video format. (They also encourage users to share talks – including embedding videos as well as enabling download to desktop without any nasty DRM).

The only real challenge with TED Talks (as the videos are called) is where you want to subscribe to them:

• The “official” feed at the TED site: http://www.ted.com/talks/rss
• The Feedburner TEDTalks_video channel: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TEDTalks_video
• The Feedburner Ideas Worth Spreading feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ideasworthspreading

Any way that you get them, these are fascinating commute sized snippets of high energy brain food, all directed at challenging preconceived notions of all kinds. Many are deliberately provocative.

Recent favorites include Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law and Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU

As you might expect, given their reputation for attracting and retaining top quality, imaginative engineering talent and for supporting diverse approaches to innovation, lots and lots of good speakers come to Google.

Two series in particular I’m fond of are the Google Tech Talks and Google engEDU. Neither of these has a feed of it’s own per se, they are just search results on Google Video for the appropriate tags, served as an RSS feed:

• Google Tech Talks: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+%22Google+Tech+Talks%22″>
  +duration=long&so=1&num=30&output=rss
• Google engEDU: http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=Google+engEDU&so=0&num=20&output=rss

Again there are a TON of interesting videos – don’t set yourself any expectation of watching them all, but cherry pick from the stream passing by.

Pop! Tech Popcasts

This one stretches the definitiion of favorite since it is brand new, but the initial set of videos is compelling. Pop!Tech is a conference on “The Impact of Technology on People.”

This year they also created Pop!Casts, which are also creative commons licensed, and availble in audio or video formats.

• Popcasts Audio Feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_audio_rss.xml
• Popcasts Video feed: http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/rss/popcasts_video_rss.xml

Initial videos on their list include Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, and Jason Moran – and intriguing mix.

With all this great content available, there’s no excuse for not having an active, ongoing, “continuing education” program of your own. So take the time to feed your brain and your imagination.

Just for fun bonus: Ask a Ninja!: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja

And my recent favorite, Ninja Poetry:

(People I’m reading on this include my colleague Sebastian Wohlrapp, Marc Andreessen, Josh Catone, and Jeremiah Owyang – of course there are a gazillion others as well).

Did I miss something somewhere in the API documentation or the Campfire Video? (It has been a busy few weeks, and I would be happy to be wrong).

As I see it, in short: Open Social is not Social Network Portability. It’s social network widget portability.

Open Social enables widgets written to its OpenSocial API to be deployed (without rewriting) to multiple containers, but it doesn’t link my profiles on various networking sites, or allow me to carry my relationships with other people across network boundaries.

So if I make a “photos of my dogs” widget, and deploy it on Orkut and Hi5, I can share photos with my friends on both of those networks, but the two are completely separate. I’d have to log in to Orkut and share some photos there, then go log in to Hi5 and share some photos there.

My friends who are only on Orkut won’t see photos I share to Hi5, and vice versa. If I add someone as my friend on Orkut, they don’t “automatically” become my friend on Hi5.

In fact, as I read it, nobody but me even really knows that these two profiles (one on Orkut, one on Hi5) are the same person.

This mostly helps developers of widgets to run inside social networks. Instead of having to write an application for Orkut, and another for Hi5, and another for X, developers can create one application adhering to the Open Social API, and it can be used on all those networks.

This also helps small social networks, who don’t have a large enough user base to convince widget developers to create widgets for their platforms – the long tail of social networking platforms, if you will.

If anything, this will enable small, silo-style, disconnected social networks to continue to proliferate.

Can anyone point me to any example demonstrating how Open Social is more than described above?

I know the Container API / SDK – which will tell networks what they need to do to become containers – has not yet been released, and perhaps more will be clear when it is. But for now, this seems like a good thing (I do think an open API for widgets is a good thing) but certainly not a great thing.

[Update]
See Tantek’s comment below and his post on Open Social and Portability, as well as this O’Reilly Radar post from yesterday, which I just came across: “It’s the data, stupid.”
[/Update]

[Update2]
There is this text in the description of Hosting OpenSocial Apps:

To host OpenSocial apps, your website must support the SPI side of the OpenSocial APIs. Usually your SPI will connect to your own social network, so that an OpenSocial app added to your website automatically uses your site’s data. However, it is possible to use data from another social network as well, should you prefer. Soon, we will provide a development kit with documentation and code to better support OpenSocial websites, along with a sample sandbox which implements the OpenSocial SPI using in-memory storage.

(I added the bold). I guess we’ll have to wait to see just how data from “another” social network might be used, or even how data from many social networks might be used.
[/Update2]

The situation is really that the libraries are beginning to recognize the tradeoff Google offers in scanning:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

So Google doesn’t charge for scanning the books, which is a huge benefit to libraries (who are not exactly known as the land where money runs free), but in exchange imposes restrictions on what libraries can do with the resulting digital assets.

The Open Content Alliance (founded by Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive fame), on the other hand, charges a fee for digitizing (though that can be supported by grants) but makes the content available to all. (See the principles outlined in their call for participation).

On a serendipitously related note, there’s a Webinar / Live event at the Berkman Center today with Aaron Swartz, who is the tech lead for the Open Library project.

Berkman events are webcast, have an associated IRC channel, can be attended in Second Life, and are archived at Media Berkman, in case (like me) you can’t get to Harvard Square today.