Stuart Jarvis

If you’re reading this via Google Buzz then this post was brought to you by WordPress, Identi.ca, Twitter and Google. That’s either impressive or horrifying…

Social Media tools suck

On the one hand, it’s kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it’s a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail. I can use WordPress to blog and that plays quite nicely with Identi.ca – I can syndicate the posts to Identi.ca and likewise list my dents here – things talk to each other. I can also syndicate from Identi.ca to Twitter, but Identi.ca (and therefore I) know nothing about replies at Twitter. From Twitter posts get passed to Google Buzz, but I know nothing about what happens there unless I happen to log in to the GMail web interface. Chances are that there are some people on Twitter wondering why I’ve @replied to them about something they never posted – markey on Twitter != markey on Identi.ca for example.

Identi.ca is made usable and useful by the KDE microblog widget – I simply wouldn’t use it if I had to actually visit the website and log in – that takes longer than the dent. Web interfaces suck. Similarly, I can interact with GMail via KMail (or I could, actually I prefer to have Google forward my mail to another server, a throwback from the days when GMail either didn’t support IMAP or it was a bit funky). GMail’s web interface, while better than other webmails, sucks. Twitter and Buzz, without convenient desktop interfaces that I use already, simply do not get visited by me on even a weekly basis.

In terms of Social Networking, I have Facebook (which I got bullied in to years ago and kinda use, infrequently), LinkedIn (dunno if I’m going to do much with that, another sucky web interface) and Flickr (only for KDE promo). Facebook and Flickr are made more bearable by the excellent digiKam image export tools

Infrastructure for KDE Promo sucks

Similarly, the KDE community wiki sucks – as a collaboration tool (it’s fine for storing info and userbase and techbase are both awesome). I need to discuss things by mail, then open a browser, log in (which requires a round trip to my openid provider if I want the same account on all the wikis). Then I need to remember how to use wiki markup. That’s my excuse for the various things I should have done on the promo wiki and haven’t done. There are things we can do better with the wiki, but the basic problems remain.

Collaborative writing tools suck too. Email is rubbish for actually keeping track of stuff. Google docs is amazing in its way, but it’s another web interface, doesn’t work in Konqueror (or does it nowadays?), is not free and is slow compared to a desktop app. Kobby (and Gobby) also don’t meet our needs – yet…

Really, I want a single “KDE Promo” app that deals with all the above. I’d like a pony too, please You can call it Kommunicator or Kollaborator if you like. The app, not the pony. He’s called Shergar.

There is hope…

Sorry if all that sounds a bit gloomy. There are some good points too The KDE microblog widget rocks. Kopete sorts out my soup of instant messaging accounts, making MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat not suck to the extent that I don’t need to care or even know what network I’m chatting to someone on. Kontact makes my email, calendars and contacts portable thanks to the magic of Kolab PIM data structures.

Ok, the point I’m trying to get to is that all these amazing new social tools we have are limited because they don’t interoperate by open standards, only allow some limited syndication. I want to operate my Identi.ca and Twitter and Buzz accounts as one. I don’t want to have to point Google Buzz at Twitter because they didn’t implement the Identi.ca API yet. I want my Facebook stuff and my Linked in stuff in a single view in Kontact or a Plasma Widget, not in some web browser or web browser widget.

Frank Karlitschek covered some similar ground a bit more coherently in his Camp KDE talk – be sure to check out the other talks too. Together with grappling with the Promo pages on the community wiki and discovering Google Buzz, that’s what has really prompted this post. The new services we’re seeing are exciting and can be useful and Google are helping to remove some of the suck from browser-based apps, but you have to wonder why they fix the browser rather than just using the desktop. ownCloud may have some of the answers, complemented by KDE software (reimplementable by anyone else by using open standards too). Perhaps we can even succeed in, as it were, “freeing the web from the browser”. Only time will tell.

Tags: Camp KDE, community, Free Culture, promotion, rant, suckage, web technology

Lots of KDE goodness for everyone

As if the new look KDE website wasn’t enough Software Compilation 4.4 is out too.

There are plenty of goodies in this new release (see the feature guide for a more complete run down). However, one of the most exciting new features is the Plasma Netbook workspace. Almost makes me want to get a netbook, but I suspect I’ll give it a run out on my old but little laptop anyway.

In the KDE Platform there are all kinds of exciting changes that have a direct impact on the workspaces. You can now share Plasma widgets remotely, handy if you’d like to share info between your machines (a simple universal todo list perhaps?) and there’s more social web integration thanks to the new GetNewStuff interfaces built on OpenDesktop.org‘s open collaboration services that also allows you to find other KDE software users and search online help.

There’s plenty more polish everywhere and entire new apps – one of the most interesting for me is probably Cantor which promises to make some powerful but unfriendly science applications a bit more user friendly. Anyway, I won’t ramble on too much more about new features here – just check the guide for that or have a look at the SC 4.4 screenshots on Flickr.

Heroes of SC 4.4

So, enough of what we’ve done. When you read through the feature guide you’ll see the names of a whole load of people who helped make this release (and there are hundreds more who made contributions, big or small). But there are also some people you won’t read about in there at all.

There is the web team who have worked miracles in getting the new website up and running. Even when I saw Eugene‘s mockups at the Promo Sprint I never really believed it would be ready for 4.4 – perhaps 4.5 – but the web team proved me wrong. (Yes, we know there are some rough edges and broken links at the moment).

Then there is the promotion team who have put together the release announcement (kudos to Sebas and Jos I believe). Even more impressive there is the comprehensive feature guide which saw over 2700 revisions by 26 contributors (Jos was all over that, Luca, Justin, Aron Asor, Sebas, Vivek Prakash, Ricky Laishram and Carl Symons all made significant contributions too – there may well be many others who aren’t in the author list).

Ah well, too many people to list – translators, developers…

Spread the word and have fun

There may be release party near you so be sure to check. Otherwise Lydia has been coordinating the social web effort: spread the word on the usual suspects: identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, your blog and the like – tag “kde44″ where possible.

You can see what everyone else is saying at buzz.kde.org (props to
Franz Keferböck for his work on that).

Enjoy the software that makes up Software Compilation 4.4

Tags: community, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Netbook, releases, web technology, wow factor

I really need to start believing the the power of free communities. I remember hearing about Wikipedia shortly after it started (the English version was at the few thousand articles mark) and thinking that it was a nice idea but would never really take off and compete with traditional encyclopaedias. Yeah, so I was wrong on that one, but at the time I knew nothing of the things (KDE for example) that communities of volunteers can build.

But a few years later, when I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I really shouldn’t have fallen in to the same trap again. But I did, I never thought it would become comprehensive enough to be usable. Now it’s my site of choice when I want a map, not only because the other alternatives either cool, but non-free, belong to the competition or are just plain horrible to use but because in many cases the OSM map data is actually superior (with better marking of local footpaths etc) and – of course – you know you can use it freely.

A really nice illustration of the coolness of OSM, showing edits from 2008, can be found at Vimeo or possibly viewed below if you’re viewing this somewhere that allows embedding. Either will unfortunately require you to have some kind of Flashy stuff installed.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

(This animation was produced by ITO World. It is licensed CC-BY-SA. The music is ‘Open Electro’ by Vincent Girès and is also CC-BY-SA).

Tags: Free Culture, web technology