Heri does Ruby on Rails + Web Design

Early June, I went to yulblog, a monthly event gathering Montrealers who blog. I usually don’t come to this kind of event, but since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d drop by.

yulblog takes place at La Quincaillerie, which is a great spot for this kind of event. They’ve got big tables — think tables for 15+ people, plus beer, and a young festive crowd.

I didn’t met many people. For those who know me, I’m not the kind of guy who will speak to everyone every minute; I’d rather have a long conversation with someone, be it a friend or someone new. One of those was with Alexandre Enkerli. He teaches at Concordia University, and is studying social software.

We had a long exchange; he argued that not that many people will use services like Twitter or other social services common tried by early adopters. In Twitter’s case, I argued that it has novelty uses, and I see very well most people use it as a communication medium in the years to come. Alexandre pointed out that Twitter has too many flaws to be massively adopted. I guess though we had the same thoughts; I foresaw that a new distributed, interoperable social software would come up; something that could be used by any so that they could own their own data but still participate and exchange with their contacts/friends. In more practical words, that means a software that could be installed like Wordpress on a user’s server, where he/she would put their activity stream, photos, videos, blog posts, and profile info, and would automatically pull data from their friends, be it from their own servers or a big provider like Facebook.

I have no idea who will come up with this software, but I think that’s the way it should be; and I bet it would be achieved by dec. 2009.

Now, for the technical part, I’m still thinking things over. OAuth seems to be a laudable initiative, although I find the authentication dance between the 2 websites (the server provider and the consumer) completely ridiculous, on an user experience point of view. It’s confusing, way too technical, and screams nerd overload.

Ideally, a website should be able to automatically detect if a user is using a website that has interesting information, open up an overlay form asking if the user wants to use his profile from that website, go to this website, and finally clicks the confirmation box. And that should be all. 1 screen, 2 clicks and no more to authenticate and make the 2 websites “talk”.

I am also currently building a webapp that would even bring down the total of actions required to just 1. This is a special case, because even though the services are on different servers and locales, the ring of websites share the same codebase.