Disqus - Friends of hacker

Re: gReader: Comment on blogs with Disqus from within Google Reader

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:33:10 -0000

Good example of how well-done integration motivates people to use the products that work well with the other tools they already use. :)

Re: Daniel Ha, Disqus in Seesmic du Jour 119

Joseph Smarr — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:14:15 -0000

Cool interview with Loic Le Meur, which I found out about because Scoble shared it from Google Reader inside Pulse. Since I'm sharing my Disqus comments inside Pulse too, more people will hopefully find this interview because of my commenting. The system works! :)

Re: Sharing the disqussion

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:14:20 -0000

Karl, you're absolutely right! :) Should be easy to add, standby...

Re: Sharing the disqussion

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:42:39 -0000

Geez Daniel, thanks for not pointing this out pre-launch, heh! :P

Re: Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web (Web 2.0 Expo)

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:18:56 -0000

Heh, wow I'm really glad someone still knows and cares about that feature. :) The profile pages got rewritten recently by someone else and that was one of the casualties (since it's kind of a hidden feature I added long ago). What are you using it for, out of curiosity? It shouldn't be hard to add back in, but I hardly hear about FOAF these days, and the page itself is tagged with hCard, which has basically the same info in the FOAF version. Thanks! js

Re: A Few Things For Thursday

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:47:26 -0000

Very cool. The next step for clickpass integration is to include it directly on the "add new comment" UI for non-signed-in users, so they can smoothly add comments with an OpenID, even if they've never used Disqus before. ;)

Re: Gnip launches and Plaxo's pulse is racing

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:02:05 -0000

William-del.ico.us is one of those sites that needed us to "slow down" on crawling them for a while, so we had to turn them off while the service was unreliable. But as of a few weeks ago, we're now back in solid shape with del.icio.us, and today with gnip it will get even better. You can absolutely go hook up your del.icio.us feed now, and it should be a great experience. Thanks! js

Re: Gnip launches and Plaxo's pulse is racing

Joseph Smarr — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:48:07 -0000

Hmm, it seems to be working for me. What is your del.icio.us username, and what error are you seeing? Feel free to contact me at joseph@plaxo.com if you want to figure this out offline. Thanks!

Re: Microbial Metagenomics Meeting in San Francisco

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:38:56 -0000

Sounds like the visit went very well! BTW, something is funky with the fonts/links in this post--in bloglines some of the words aren't showing up (like "San Francisco" in the first paragraph), and the font is different than in the other posts. Hopefully it's a quick fix. ;)

Re: Microbial Metagenomics Meeting in San Francisco

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:43:04 -0000

Couple more quick pieces of feedback while I'm at it (all under the "i love this site, give me more" category!):
- would be nice to link the sidebar headers "Calit2 on flickr", "calit2 on youtube", "calit2 on slideshare" to the calit2 pages on those services (right now you can only click on individual items being displayed, but you can't easily go to the main calit2 page)
- since it looks like you've got people actively posting to flickr/youtube/slideshare, it would be cool to fold those into the main calit2life feed, so people can follow the integrated stream of content being posted (right now, i either don't hear about posted photos, or i have to separately subscribe to that feed). Not sure what your blog software is, but MovableType has the "ActionStreams" plugin that can do this, and there may be something similar for wordpress. You might also be able to use FeedBurner to splice in the feeds, but not sure. Anyway, worth taking a quick look at! :)
- on the "contributors" page, ramesh's photo is broken, and I bet you could find a better Larry Smarr photo ;)

Re: Jim Bottum of Clemson Visits Calit2

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:08:59 -0000

Very cool! Nice to "get the band back together", esp. since you're both out there doing interesting (and potentially overlapping) things! js

Re: Sharing the disqussion

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:50:26 -0000

Sorry, but currently only new comments will get propogated. I could imagine building support for a one-time export of all pre-existing comments, so I'll keep that in mind for whenever we next rev the Disqus integration. Thanks!

Re: Episode 9: "A Big Week for the Open Stack"

Joseph Smarr — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 03:30:14 -0000

It's both--it's just a list of typed URIs, which XRDS calls Services. If there are open API standards like PortableContacts, they can refer to those APIs, but there's no reason they can't also advertise "I use flickr", "I use LinkedIn", "I have an hCard here", etc. The point is it's a generic way to tell a site "here's some more info about the things I use and the places I keep my data".

Re: Tying it All Together: Implementing the Open Web (Web 2.0 Expo New York)

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:48:07 -0000

I think you misunderstood what's happening here--you *do* get to keep your own address book and keep it private, and you can then opt-in on a per-site basis to share access to your private address book, so services can do interesting things with your data, but you keep full control and ownership over your data. That hasn't really been possible before, but that's exactly how things will work once the social web is truly open.

Re: Portable Contacts is now Plaxo's primary API

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:18:34 -0000

Portable Contacts will empower sites and tools like FriendConnect to let you link in your existing contacts from any compliant address book or social network.so it's another key "building block" like OpenID and OAuth, both of which Friend Connect also uses under the hood.

We recently did a quick video on this subject, which you may find informative: http://www.thesocialweb.tv/...

Re: Tying it All Together: Implementing the Open Web (Web 2.0 Expo New York)

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:03:29 -0000

Hmm, I think most sites run on their own servers is because it's easier for the site developers to update the code and keep it running smoothly. While in theory you're right that web sites could behave more like desktop apps (where you download the code and run it on your own computer, with a local copy of your data), and this *is* happening to some extent with AJAX/offline apps (e.g. if gmail used gears, you'd basically have all the javascript and data locally cached), site developers still need to be able to push code updates, run scalable web servers and databases, etc. so it's hard not to do that in a centralized way. It's also nice for users to be able to log in from any computer and get the same app and data immediately. So I don't think this is something specific to web 2.0, but part of a larger move to doing more computing in the cloud, which has some trade-offs, but a lot of benefits.

Re: About Me

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:05:59 -0000

Gino-check out http://www.plaxo.com/api/op..., which is a step-by-step guide on how to build OpenID support into your site, including how to structure the database. Essentially you just need a many-to-one openid->userid mapping table.

Re: Powell endorses Obama (Scripting News)

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:43:04 -0000

Wow, that's a thoughtful and powerful endorsement. Thanks for sharing it!

Re: Powell endorses Obama (Scripting News)

Joseph Smarr — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:33:12 -0000

...and apparently Lessig agrees: http://lessig.org/blog/2008...

Re: Happy Halloween!

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:43:39 -0000

You've never heard of the Silicon Valley ethic "work hard, play hard"? :)

Re: Episode 13: "Dare to be Open?"

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:44:07 -0000

The main reason is it's a lot of work to write custom one-off auth and import code for each of these services, and so we're holding out for them to support OAuth and Portable Contacts. That way, we could stop taking passwords for all of them, and only have to write the code once. I'm hoping that day will soon be upon us. :)

Re: A New Open Stack: Greater than the Sum of its Parts (Internet Identity Workshop 2008b)

Joseph Smarr — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:44:07 -0000

Ok I put the slideshare embed in this post. Thanks for the gentle nudge, both of you. :) Though let me note that a) flash is also a proprietary standard, b) slideshare messed up my fonts and builds, and c) I had to wrangle a bit with Wordpress to get it to embed it without messing it up (and the default embed code still put too much link text/etc around it). I agree that raw PPT is not the most web-friendly, but I think the state of the art could still be improved! :) And of course, the real issue is I keep moving to lighter and lighter slide decks, and talking more and more against the light slides, so just uploading slides without audio is communicating less and less of the real message of my talks. :)

Re: Yahoo Ups the Ante for OpenID with Profile Portability

Joseph Smarr — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:23:11 -0000

George-that's awesome! Is it live? When I sign into Plaxo using http://openid.aol.com/josep... we send the sreg params but I don't see any sreg UI on AOL's side. Do we have to get whitelisted or something? I'd love to see it in action! :) Also, way cool to see Mapquest become an OpenID RP! Though it seems to break on delegated OpenIDs (e.g. http://josephsmarr.com) or directed OpenIDs (e.g. "yahoo.com"). But hopefully those are quick fixes. ;) So great to see all this rapid mainstream roll-out of these open standards!

Re: Episode 19: "Happy Birthday, OpenSocial!"

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:54:03 -0000

Actually you can sign up for a disqus account using an OpenID, so technically we do support it, but the UI is definitely sup-optimal. We've asked disqus to make OpenID-based commenting more prominent, but not sure where it currently sits in their roadmap. Thanks for the feedback! js

Re: Clickpass » Blog Archive » Clickpass is being acquired

Joseph Smarr — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:19:26 -0000

Congrats Peter, it's great to see your hard work has paid off, and also great to know you'll be sticking around a while longer in SF! ;) js