Social Software Posts

• 03.18.09 Plugging a hole in GameKit (Social Software, Games, Computers)

  The GameKit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is very interesting to a Bonjour / P2P head like yrs truly. It basically provides a very easy-to-use API for ad-hoc group formation and many-to-many messaging on a local network. Great for games, of course, but also for many other types of social apps. (I just saw a report on a dev forum that somebody had whipped up a basic chat app in about 15 minutes.)

  GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth range is just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.

  My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.… MORE

• 02.15.09 What will Web 3.0 be? (Ideas, Social Software, Web, Computers)

  So, Web 2.0’s heyday is over, and somewhere out there, Web 3.0 is slouching toward us waiting to be born. What will it be?

  There’s really no such single thing as “Web x“, of course. And all predictions are really just wishes. That being said, my wish is that Web 3.0 will be about distributed systems. To oversimplify:

  Web 1.0 built up big brand-name websites with their own content—things written by them, or repurposed from the media companies that owned them, or stuff to buy.

  Web 2.0 embraced “user-created content” and interaction between users. The content creation has become less centralized, outsourced to whomever wants to register an account and post stuff, but the sites managing, storing and serving the content are still centralized.

  Web 3.0, I hope, will take the decentralization to the software, and the storage. Monolithic web apps run by huge server farms—Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.—will be at least in part supplanted by apps that users run locally (or at least ‘nearby’) and which share data among each other.… MORE

• 01.13.09 Security hole in Safari RSS (Social Software, Me, Computers)

  Brian Mastenbrook has discovered a really bad security hole in Safari RSS. He hasn’t released details yet, presumably to give Apple time to release a patch, so I don’t know what the bug is. But it’s my fault, since I either wrote the bad code myself, or at least didn’t notice a mistake a co-worker made. And since I’m not at Apple anymore I can’t help fix it.

  Shit. I’m sorry, everyone.… MORE

• 08.09.08 Beautiful snej soup, yum (Social Software, Web, Me)

  I’m fooling around with Soup, a newish micro-blogging service I just discovered. I’ve never signed up for tumblr or its other clones, but I’m kind of smitten with Soup, so I set up my own:

  beautiful snej soup, yum

  I’ve got it aggregating stuff from my del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm accounts, as well as this blog. And I’m directly posting some things I’ve run across today, via its very nice bookmarklet.

  Part of the reason I got sucked in is that Soup has the single best new-user experience I’ve ever seen on the web.… MORE

• 04.26.08 Cloudy Verification (Social Software, Computers)

  The first time you connect to someone, how do you establish that digital identifier you’re communicating with is the human being you think it is? This is surprisingly difficult to do, because it’s prone to what cryptographers call the “man-in-the-middle attack”.

  First, consider the most obvious attack: simple spoofing.

  Let’s suppose there’s an instant-messaging UI, and while working at home you receive a message from someone with an unknown key, whose nickname is “AliceLidell”, which happens to be the name of a co-worker.… MORE

• 04.19.08 Why They’re Doing This (Social Software, Web)

  I don’t want to make a habit of replying on my blog to posts on other blogs, because (a) it’s dorky in an autistic way, and (b) it only encourages the annoying practice of blogs that don’t allow comments.

  But I’ve seen a couple of references now to Dean Allen’s complaint about sites that offer multiple RSS feed formats, none offering comments, and since it directly relates to my past job monkeying with feeds I feel like I should answer.

  There are two reasons why a web page would advertise multiple feeds.… MORE

• 04.17.08 Cloudy Networking (Social Software, Computers)

  Next I need to talk about networking; having an identity and minting certificates isn’t very interesting until you can connect to someone else.

  When one Cloudy peer wants to communicate with another one, it opens a TCP socket to its IP address —

  [Hang on, there are two issues I suddenly glossed over in that last phrase. First, how did this peer find out the others’ IP address? These are just random computers, not servers, so they don’t have their own domain names or even stable addresses.… MORE

• 04.15.08 Cloudy Identity (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

  At the root of Cloudy is the means for creating and establishing identity. A lot of peer-to-peer systems treat the peers mostly as interchangeable anonymous nodes, often deliberately so, but Cloudy is a social system. Your Cloudy identity is simply a public key, currently 2048-bit RSA, generated the first time you launch the program. (The matching private key is stored securely in the Mac OS Keychain.) From then on, that public key uniquely identifies you.… MORE

• 04.13.08 Cloudy As Buzzwords (Social Software, Web, Computers)

  I have many ideas for applications, but most of them seem to rely on similar kinds of infrastructure, in particular a distributed, secure application-level messaging system. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really exist yet, at least not in any form that meets my needs.

  What am I talking about here? More colloquially, it’s a mechanism for letting applications all over the network send messages to each other, without requiring a central server, and without allowing messages to be eavesdropped upon or faked.

  Let’s take it one buzzword at a time…… MORE

• 04.12.08 Unstealthing, Incrementally (Social Software, Me, Computers)

  I got about 14 minutes of fame back in January with a blog post, wherein I grumbled about (among other things) how I disliked Apple’s culture of secrecy, and announced that I’d left Apple to work on my own, unspecified, project. In the intervening three months, I haven’t said anything about what that project is, almost as though it were … secret.

  The irony of this is not lost on me.

  Admittedly, there are things about my … MORE