Blogging Roller

Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn because it mentions the ROME RSS/Atom feed parser. I'm really sorry I missed it at JavaOne. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. Here's an example:

Looks like we made it to the final round of the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad competition and so Project SocialSite will be one of the five projects that will "present their ideas in front of an audience of creators, evangelists and adopters of cutting edge technologies who will provide feedback in real-time and decide the winner." Thanks to all who voted for SocialSite.

And in other news, Arun Gupta has put together a very nice ten minute screencast that shows Project SocialSite in action.

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up

Jamey Wood and I presented our Introduction to Project SocialSite yesterday. We had a much larger crowd than I expected, given the number of concurrent talks -- I'm guessing there were close to 300 people in the room. I hope to be able to post a link to the slides at some point in the near future because right now we've got almost no information on Project SocialSite on the web. Now that we've got permission to talk about the project, I'm going to try to change that.

I spent most of the day in the Sun booth answering questions about SocialSite and demonstrating our widgets and web services in Roller and MediaWiki and talking through some key slides in our deck. At this point, we only have a handful of our widgets implemented and they're pretty bare bones, but folks seemed to "get it" and liked the idea of adding social networking features to existing web applications.

If you're at JavaOne, then please stop by the Sun both and say hi. Look for us under the banner Social Networking for Glassfish. And if you want the full scoop then check out our Birds of a Feather (BOF) session:

Jamey and I will be ready with slides and demos and answers to (almost) all of your questions and you'll have plenty of time to make it to the After Dark shindig.

• cgwalters - A software tsunami
  "OpenJDK is finally changing that. Now, you can write a library using Java, it can be sensibly integrated with Free operating systems"
• Countdown for IBM Project Zero | Reg Developer
  "bringing the feedback typical of an open source project without any of the obligations to give the resulting technology back to the community."
• Soviet-era JCP needs change, concedes top commissar | Reg Developer
  Patrick Curran has reached a firm conclusion on his organization: "We have to change," he said. "No more smoke-filled rooms."
• Glynn Foster: Why Our Governance Doesn’t Work
  "There’s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesn’t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute."


• Skype Journal: Skype and the Social Network Stack
  "We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing"
• An Open Letter to American Express ~ Chris Pirillo
  "You know, for all the buzz that FaceBook gets… I get far more value out of Twitter."
• buddypress - Google Code
  "suite of plugins that will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform"


• App Platform Strategies Blog: Looking for SOA success stories
  "SOA is not working in most organizations"
• OLPC News: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days
  "the end of a dream".
• Atlassian Dev Blog - Maven in our development process. Part 4.
  "Maven users need training."

Evans Data Corp. is doing a survey on Web 2.0 development and they've included some interesting questions on social networking:

• How is your organization using Social Networking?
• What is keeping your organization from using Social Networking now?
• Why are you planning to use Social Networking technology?
• Which of these Social Networking APIs are you most interested in developing with?
• What are your plans for OpenSocial?
• What are your plans for developing Facebook applications?

• More on MySpace’s Open Development Platform - GigaOM
  "made up of three APIs — primarily Open Social and extensions we’ve added"
• ZDNet.com: Progress report on the OpenSocial Web
  Summary of latest OpenSocial news and hackathons from Dan Farber
• Facebook to Punish Stupid Applications, Reward Good Ones - ReadWriteWeb
  "Metered messaging based on user engagement could save the Facebook Platform from a growing sense of app fatigue"
• Roumen's Weblog: Android plug-in for NetBeans
  "the screenshots look promising"
• Rob Williams' Blog: finally ditched LifeRay
  "we have finally ditched Liferay in favor of JBoss Portal. So far so good. It is much more stable. The code base is not a rat's nest of untested Struts goop."
• Indoor WiFi Signal Booster by Meraki
  "Meraki Mini is a small, easy-to-use wireless mesh repeater."

Kenai was announced yesterday at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS 2008):

It was mentioned in Software VP Rich Green's presentation.
I think that's just about all I can say on the topic.

And by the way, the audio and slides for all of the SAS 2008 presentations are online now. Ian Murdock's presentation is especially good, as Redmonk's James Governor tweeted yesterday "Ian Murdoch (the ian of debian) is doing a phenomenal job of explaining what Linux, and distributions are. A great education for analysts."

I missed this one in my social networking API link-fest yesterday: Google announced version 0.7 of the OpenSocial API, some of the data APIs are outlined in the spec and they're still using AtomPub protocol (just like GData).

I had heard there was some push-back against AtomPub, but I really don't know what is going on because there is no transparency at all in the specification development process. So, who knows, but I really don't think they have time to invent an all new protocol. In fact, they'd better wrap things up tout de suite because Google's planning to go live with OpenSocial on Orkut during the last week of February.

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.

This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.