B. Mann Consulting

BrendonC dropped by to leave a comment mentioning that Drupal in Python -- aka Drupy -- is a real project.

Here's the latest update (as of 6/17/2008):

Currently, Drupy can successfully run Drupal Bootstrap Phase 8. This means there is one more Drupal Bootstrap phase to be completed before alpha completion. For more details, check the Drupy diagnostic page, which is updated regularily.

Find the code on Gitorius, news and bugtracking on Sourceforge, and say 'hi' on freenode at #drupy.

One of the outcomes from my trip to Victoria last week is some thinking about the social graph.

More specifically, you may recall that I've been using Flock. As it turns out, I recently upgraded my laptop to Leopard, and made Flock my main browser. This has given me increased exposure to their "people bar" -- a side bar that supports a variety of big community websites, like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so on.

As I've been using this feature, and seeing the way that Flock "detects" features of different websites, I started thinking about how every community website could enable this functionality. Right now, the Flock team has to pre-integrate with the specific website's API to enable this functionality. But, just as they "detect" the presence of site-specific search engines, there is no reason that one couldn't expose a link header that indicates the presence of a social graph.

I know what you're thinking: "But Boris, how many people use Flock? Isn't this just browser specific functionality?" Well, no. First of all, Google has a Social Graph API that is already being crawled -- looking at FOAF and XFN.

Secondly, I got to thinking about all these site-specific applications -- like Twhirl that was bought by Seesmic. So, if we had some basic standards about this stuff, it would be simplistic to have one app that let us monitor / notify / update any of these systems. Yes, there will ALWAYS be websites that have more complex APIs with more features -- that are only accessible by implmenting *their* API to talk to them.

But for thousands of other community websites, built in Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, or what have you -- you suddenly have the same rich access to applications as the big guys. How many websites would encourage their users to install Flock or Twhirl if it supported *their* website?

Oh, and I'm completely skipping the linked data / RDF / Semantic Web factor of having community websites expose some part of their social graph, or at least make it available for querying by people that have the right credentials.

OK, so how does this look to the end user? I'll use Flock as an example, since I've got agreement in principle from them that they'll work with me on this, including help in defining some of the formats.

1. User surfs to community website where they already have an account (for simplicity's sake, we'll pretend a session is still open)
2. Flock detects a website that has a social graph available because of a header link that looks something like this:
   <link rel="socialgraph" href="/user/4426/socialgraph.rdf" type="application/rdf+xml" />
   (Note the user ID in there, because the user already has a current session open)
3. Flock does it's fun in browser slide down that says something like "This website supports a people bar. Would you like to add it?"
4. If the user clicks on "yes", then Flock initiates an OAuth request to be allowed to a) fetch the current user's social graph file and b) take actions on behalf of the user such as setting their status or sending a message/poking/whatever another user on the site
5. The user acknowledges the OAuth request and clicks some allow buttons
6. Voila! A fantastic site specific "people bar" right in your Flock browser

So, that was a VERY Flock specific flow, but as I mentioned with Twhirl up above, absolutely no reason that you couldn't do the same thing with those type of people notifier on your desktop apps / widgets / etc. -- just start by typing in the URL of the website, the app would go and discover the social graph link and/or initiate an OAuth request to authenticate, and all of a sudden you're directly monitoring the different community websites you're a part of directly. Bonus points to websites that expose the social graph as an XMPP Pub Sub endpoint so these apps don't need to poll constantly.

Now, I know the first thing we're going to have to do is fight a religious war over the format of the socialgraph file. I'm going to suggest some minimal FOAF format, since I'm a born again RDF fan.I don't want to go spraying email addresses all over the place, so perhaps either local unique user GUIDs or OpenID could be used as identifiers for each person. We actually don't need full "person" information -- a username, avatar, status message, and date stamp for last activity sorting should be the minimal set. Even status message could be option for smaller, less complex sites so almost anyone could support this out of the box: just show everyone on the site (yes, that's right...ignore any sort of "friend" connection) sorted by last active -- which could be a post / comment, or (again, simple support by many sites...) just date stamp of last login.

I'd like to think that the choice of OAuth as credentials for acessing this info isn't controversial at all. Feel free to layer OpenID in here somehow, but for the action-at-a-distance on which cool functionality can be built, this kind of a token system looks to be ideal.

What next? Well, surprise, surprise, I'm going to take a crack at getting this implemented in Drupal. Raincity Studios is already working on the OAuth module, which would be one of the main pre-requisites. Once the format of the social graph file is defined (calling Joshua, Arto, and maybe RalphM...), building the next piece shouldn't be too hard.

Ideally, something like the Gnomepal Drupal distribution would ship with this out of the box (for the really ambitious, Drupal 7 core!). And other systems like Marc Canter's People Aggregator could easily expose this social graph info as well.

I'm excited at the continuing growth of every website as a dynamic web application, and also of the exposure of data and APIs by this web of sites. This feels like the right path we're travelling on to get everything a little bit more interconnected.

Chris Pirillo is picking up the torch first raised by Marc Canter over 4 years ago: open community platforms available for everyone, powered by Drupal.

Chris is a long time friend and colleague, and it's great to see him stepping up and saying that he wants to make an out-of-the-box install profile for social communities -- blogging, SEO, multimedia, content licensing. And the thing is, the pieces ARE there. It just needs some effort to put it all together and integrated, and that first run experience integrated into an install profile.

Here's a short quote with some thoughts from Chris on what he wants -- a Community Participation Platform. I think this meshes with Acquia's meme on social publishing:

I don’t want a social network, I want a socially *RELEVANT* network (both on-site and beyond). I don’t want a community platform, I want a participation platform where members are rewarded and ranked appropriately. I don’t want a place where people can just blog, because I’m going well beyond the blog. It’s not just about hosting videos, audio files, or any piece of random media - it’s the discovery mechanisms between them that make them more relevant.

It’s discovery - no matter the community, no matter the type of content. Imagine coming to a site and not just reading about what other people are interested in, but what interests they SHARE with you! Imagine coming to a site and seeing how someone ranks in answers pertaining to your own questions! Oh, I’m confident you may have seen these features elsewhere - but what about for your own site, what about for your own community, what about for your own ideas?

And Chris isn't just shooting his mouth off: he's already been working on this for some time, with Adam Kalsey just recently releasing Activity Stream (a Friend Feed clone), is going to be at the Drupal co-working in Seattle, and is hosting a Drupal hackfest all this weekend (March 29 - 30th). I won't be able to attend the whole thing, but I hope to drop in on Sunday (want to drive down to Seattle with me? leave a comment...).

My interest? Well, easy to use install profiles – whether brands of their own or "merely" great bundles of expertise put together to serve specific needs has been a long time interest and push of mine: it's the way we can make Drupal accessible and optimized for every web vertical and user community.

In a more commercial vein, I hope that Raincity Studios can be one of the first hosting providers to offer Chris' Community Participation Platform at the click of a button.

I'm looking forward to the next exciting piece in this adventure, Chris. You've made an awesome statement of purpose, and like all open source, I'm behind you 100% of the way.

My cab should be here in minutes, so this is going to be a quick and dirty post. I'm just getting over a cold and trying to be in top shape for Drupalcon Boston 2008 so apologies for the last minute posting.

I'm running a session in the site building track on Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules - a gap - fit process. This could as easily have fit into the business track, and really it will bridge both. I'm looking forward to making this, in part, an interactive session, a way to raise some interesting questions, and ideally to share best practices. Expect everything from project management, scoping, to Boris' gold star module development. Oh, and I'm going to yell at people for not expanding their business models.

The good folks at Palantir asked me to help sit on a panel to discuss getting your team up to speed in Drupal. I don't have a good outline of that yet, but I have lots of ideas around that concept. Anything new? Perhaps not, but working with the larger team at Raincity Studios has been a joy, especially in the mentoring department.

Lastly, I'm moderating a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web...but really, I'll just be a remote mouthpiece for Arto Bendiken the architect and programmer behind this latest wave for Drupal.

I'm using a couple of different tools to broadcast messages out about happenings at this event. A forum post on the Drupalcon site talked about one way to use Pownce / Twitter. I also like Twemes, something built locally in Vancouver to track stuff on Twitter using hashtags. Simply use the hashtag #drupalcon and all your twitters will end up on this page: http://twemes.com/drupalcon -- there's also an RSS feed on that page. For Jaiku, I figure we can re-use the #drupal channel, since it's not that high volume in any case. Posts here on this blog will be using the Drupalcon Boston 2008 tag (again, there's a feed on that page). Any Utterz* I will tag with that as well.

I've posted also on the Raincity blog and over on here. See you soon!

Hi, you may remember me from such roles as the first Drupal Association Board of Directors. This is a bit of a recap of my year's involvement with the Association, along with an explanation of my current feeling about it, and that I won't be applying for a Board position this next year. Oh, and if you're a current or prospective Permanent Member, you should probably read this.

Ethan Kaplan is doing an awesome session at Gnomedex. Here are some awesome quotes:

Pop is a machine

Monetizing beyond the physical 5 inch

And of course, go off and check out the Drupal-powered Headautomatica that Ethan put together. It's using the hall of fame module to have people vote on aggregated items from everywhere.

Photo by noded on Flickr 

I'm sitting at the opening remarks of Gnomedex in Seattle.

Just wrapped two fantastic days at DrupalCamp Seattle. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed my time hanging with Drupaleers from all over. I was amazed at how far people traveled: we had participants from Calgary, Minnesota, San Francisco, and probably more places that I'm not aware of. This Drupal thing might just take off!

Actually, I think that's the amazing thing: people are picking up Drupal for all sorts of projects. As much hype as Ruby on Rails gets, it is so enjoyable to meet people that are learning the Drupal interface and doing very cool things without being programmers or developers. 

And of course, Chris Pirillo just let us know that TechMeme was hacked.

So, I just turned on the notify module here on my site. I noticed that *I* just got a massive email sent to me from the site with lots of posts in it. Err..I may have spammed everyone with an account on this site.

If you *don't* want to get email every week with any of my new posts, you can login, and go to the my account link, then hit the "my notify settings" link.

So, if you got a big long email from this site...sorry for the spam!

It's been a busy couple of weeks. My last post was from San Francisco, and I haven't even finished posting my notes from the Internet Identity Workshop that I was attending down there.

I'm sitting in the airport waiting to board a flight to Toronto. I'll be there until next Wednesday, attending not one, not two, but three separate conference/events.

They are, in order:

• Drupal Camp Toronto
• Bar Camp Toronto
• Mesh Conference

For some reason, I waited until the last minute to buy a ticket to Mesh. It turns out that Troy will be joining me there, I'll be hanging out in the unconference room (check the wiki for updates around that) and looking to connect with some eastern folks that left nice comments on my first post saying I was coming -- like John Philip Green. See you in a bit, I still need to update my 43 People list. 

And this will be a very Drupal-y time, I think. This post in IT Business.ca says "Everything's coming up Drupal". I probably need to debunk that in more detail -- the summary is that only low budget companies are choosing open source. 

If I get to vote, I pick pingback. Here's the Hixie whitepaper that says why. Time to work on the pingback module for Drupal.