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Cinch Enables On-Site Recording of Audio for the Stream

Posted on December 22, 2009 by jessestay

Early this morning Rob Blackin posted a Cinch, debuting finally the ability to record audio straight from CinchCast.com’s own website. Until today users could post photos and status updates on the micro-podcasting network, but its core service, audio, could not be recorded from the site itself. Today they fixed that, enabling you to hit record, and save audio from any audio input on your computer. I’m sure there will be many podcasters and audiophiles rejoicing.

BlogTalkRadio’s CinchCast.com, up until recently, has had an iPhone app to record audio, along with an API, and the ability to just call a number on your phone and record audio straight from any phone. The service enables anyone, no matter where they are, to record audio even without an internet connection, and it gets added to their stream of Cinch updates on CinchCast.com. Each stream has its own RSS feed which can be fed into your favorite reader or feed aggregator as well. (I feed mine into FriendFeed)

This move should enable podcasters and those that want to use more professional audio equipment to also post high quality audio shares to the site. For instance, let’s say you’re a musician and you want to share a quick, live, bootleg preview of a song you just released. This enables such capability straight from the desktop and any sound equipment you have. Or perhaps you’re just sitting at work at your computer and just want to record some thoughts.

It will be interesting to see what new types of Cinches get produced from this. Currently, the company is already broadcasting short audio snippets from Bill Cosby, and tech bloggers Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, along with many others are using it to post short interview clips from the conferences they attend and companies they visit. I’m using it as a daily personal journal as well.

Cinch’s focus on audio brings some interesting use-cases for a social media stream that text and video simply just don’t satisfy. I can’t wait to see what comes next for the company. You can follow me on Cinch at http://cinchcast.com/jessestay.

Disclosure: Cinch and BlogTalkRadio are clients of Stay N’ Alive Productions, LLC, my consulting company

http://www.cinchcast.com/cinchplayerext.swf?file=http://www.cinchcast.com%2f/CinchPlaylist.aspx%3FRecordingID%3D14762&playermode=full&autostart=false&bufferlength=5&volume=80&callback=http://www.cinchcast.com/FlashPlayerCallback.aspx&width=300&height=200&volume=80&corner=rounded

Make Your Facebook Page Fly With the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet

Posted on December 22, 2009 by jessestay

Most guys (and girls) who love Facebook like I do probably have a Facebook Page where those wanting to get a scoop of the latest in our professional lives can come learn, chat, and converse with each other. I consider a Facebook Page (some call them “Fan Pages”) the equivalent on Facebook to a Twitter Profile, as it enables a public, anonymous way to express yourself without limit to the number of people that “follow” you. Pages are powerful, and can build strong engagement for you and your brand in ways Twitter or even a regular Facebook Profile can’t. I was surprised that with all the little “chicklets” out there displaying anywhere from the number of readers on your blog to the number of followers you have on Twitter that there wasn’t anything for blog owners to display the number of Fans they have on Facebook. That’s why I created the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet for WordPress blogs.

The premise of the chicklet is simple. It uses Facebook Connect (something I argue is even more powerful than a Facebook Page, but requires someone with at least HTML and Javascript knowledge to implement) to go out and get the number of fans for a Facebook Page you specify, and share the number of those fans right on your blog. In addition, it hyperlinks the chicklet back to your Facebook Page. Displaying this chicklet on your blog can be a great way to encourage readers to click through and become fans on Facebook as well, where more conversations can take place and your blog can spread even further. You can see the Facebook Chicklet for this blog up above this article next to the subscribers and twitter followers chicklets. Go ahead and click on it and become a fan and I’ll send you more updates!

Implementation

To implement the chicklet, you’ll first need to download the FBFoundations plugin (download here) that I wrote and can be downloaded here. This just makes it so that it can access Facebook to get the number of Fans for your Page. It will also add an additional meta tag or two to make sharing your blog a little prettier when it’s shared on Facebook.

Once you’ve downloaded and activated FBFoundations on your blog, just download the FBFoundations Facebook Chicklet plugin, extract it into your WordPress plugins directory, and activate it. You’ll then want to configure it to point to your Facebook Page in your blog’s admin (if not, it will point to mine!). Now, go to either the sidebar widgets section in your administration if your blog is widgets-enabled, or go into your Blog’s theme files, and place the following code anywhere you want the chicklet to show up:

Once that’s in and the plugin is activated, the chicklet should start showing with the number of Fans on your Facebook Page. It’s that simple.

Again, be sure to enable the FBFoundations plugin on your blog for this to work. Also, if you want to also enable sharing for each blog post on your blog to Facebook, along with the number of people that have shared the post, be sure to also check out my FBShare plugin for WordPress!

I guess this is kind of my Christmas present to you all. Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy Chanukah this season!

You can download the plugin straight from WordPress right here. Here is the WordPress plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fbfoundations-facebook-chicklet/

Image Courtesy Robb Sutton from http://robbsutton.com/micro-blogging-are-facebook-and-twitter-replacing-personal-blogs/

Kynetx Launches Chrome Extension Support for Their Platform

Posted on December 20, 2009 by jessestay

Editor’s note: Kynetx is something you have to use to fully understand! If nothing in this article makes sense, please skip down to the bottom and at least try out the extensions these guys have built in their app directory and you can see the power of what this platform can do! This is very powerful technology – I really believe this is the future of the web!

Friday afternoon Kynetx launched support in their developer platform to build extensions for the Google Chrome Browser. The company, which provides a standardized, open framework for building web browser extensions (among other supported technologies such as Action Cards), became the first extension-building platform that supports all 3 of the top browsers on the web. The move is unprecedented, as now with Kynetx in comparison to GreaseMonkey, possibly their closest comparison in this instance, you can write code once, and immediately have extensions and plugins that work in Firefox, Chrome, and even IE with the click of a button. Kynetx makes customization of the user experience in the browser a cinch with their platform.

I visited Kynetx on Friday for their weekly Kynetx developers lunch (which they invite the public to, just asking that you let them know in advance), and they were hard at work getting the final quirks worked out of the Chrome extension. Developers like myself are now rejoicing, as Chrome is very quickly, with the backing of Google, proving to be one of the most responsive, most extensive browsers on the internet. It also has an integrated development environment so extensions such as Firebug for Firefox don’t even need to be installed. They all come with the browser, providing a much smoother and faster experience for the developer.

Kynetx is positioning themselves to become the ubiquitous controller for user experience and context on the web. With their technology, users have the potential to fully control what they allow and don’t allow to be displayed on the web. At the same time businesses are each given the opportunity, with the user’s permission, to change the experience for that user on the web.

Kynetx recently launched a tool with the Better Business Bureau enabling, with installation of a simple extension (in any of your favorite browsers now!), display of BBB accredited business seals in Google Local search results. When a business has been approved by the Better Business Bureau a little seal appears next to their name in search results, enabling a more educated experience for users in the browser. All of this is done without any need to form a special relationship with Google to customize those results. Because of the ease of development and broad install base for extensions like the new Chrome extension launched Friday, any business has the potential to customize the experience for the user in a similar manner.

The new Chrome extension works across all versions of Chrome that support extensions. While the official Chrome for Mac does not yet support this yet, the PC version does, as do developer builds of Chromium for Mac. It is rumored that Chrome for Mac will be supporting extensions very soon. The other advantage Chrome brings to the Kynetx environment is the availability of Jails for each extension. With Chrome, developers can enable extensions to not be able to talk with each other or affect each other. This introduces some interesting and secure identity and authentication/authorization implications which I’m sure we’ll be seeing from the Kynetx team in the future.

If you’re a developer with some knowledge of the DOM and Javascript, you should really check out the power of what the Kynetx platform can bring to your company and business. This goes way beyond the browser, and makes context-aware applications a user-controlled standard that goes with that user anywhere. Be sure to check out a little glimpse of what this stuff will enable in my previous article. You can get started developing for this platform immediately on their AppBuilder site.

Just a user? Be sure to check out their App Directory here, download the extensions and try them out in your favorite browser!

Developers, It’s Time to Open Up Twitter’s API

Posted on December 19, 2009 by jessestay

If you’ve read my previous post on this, you’ll notice how I re-worded the title of this article. That’s because I’m delusional to think Twitter is going to open source their API any time soon – I’ve been requesting this for over a year now. I think I’ve come to a new understanding that if we’re to see an open standard built around Twitter’s API, it’s going to be we, the developers, who implement this.

It won’t be Twitter.

I mentioned earlier that developers are starting to catch onto this idea. It all started almost 2 years ago when Laconi.ca introduced their own Twitter-compatible API into their platform allowing any client library based on the Twitter platform to very simply add Laconi.ca instances to their preferred Twitter client. Unfortunately it took 2 years for that idea to catch on. Finally, we’re seeing some big players in this, and my predictions are coming true. Automattic just released their own Twitter-like API into WordPress.com. Tumblr just released their own Twitter-like API. The problem here is that all these developers are re-inventing the wheel every time they re-produce Twitter’s API, and any time Twitter releases a new feature they are stuck re-configuring and re-coding their server code to stay up with Twitter’s new API features. That’s fine though – this is all a step in the right direction.

The Vision

Imagine now if there were a standard that, at first duplicated what Twitter was producing on their end, but other developers could code off of. Open Source software could be built around this standard, and now any provider would be able to easily install code that integrated well with their own environments very easily. We’d see many more providers than just WordPress and Tumblr and Laconi.ca instances like TodaysMama Connect (of which I am an advisor) integrate this. We’d see big brands and big companies start to implement this.

Soon Twitter will be in the minority amongst services these “Twitter clients” (like TweetDeck, Tweetie, or Seesmic) support. The Twitter clients will no longer feel obligated to cater to just Twitter, and new layers, such as real time and meta APIs could be added to this API standard in a way that benefits the community, not a single company. Twitter would no longer have a choke-hold on this and we would have a new, distributed architecture that any developer can implement.

The Proposal

What I’m proposing is that we work together to build an open source set of libraries and services, perhaps a gateway of some sort, all built on a standard that we set (it will most likely copy Twitter’s API at the start). I’ve built a Google Group, called “OpenTwitter” for now, with the purpose of opening up Twitter’s APIs. The group will have a primary focus of determining how we want to build this software, establishing documentation for such software, and attaching a completely open standard on top of all that we can modify as it makes sense. The goal here is that the public will now control how this data gets distributed, not a single company.

But What About RSS?

The question always comes up, why not just push these clients to support RSS and rssCloud or Pubsub Hubbub? The answer is that we’ve been trying this for too long. It may still happen, but it’s going to take Twitter clients a lot longer to modify their code to support RSS than an open Twitter-compatible standard. Ideally, a Twitter client, which there are many, ought to be able to quickly and easily just change the base domain of where calls are sent, and everything with the providing service should “just work”. RSS complicates this too much. The fact is that Twitter has taken over and we need to accept that as a fact and work with it.

The Invitation

If you can, I’d like to invite you to join our “OpenTwitter” list on Google. Let’s get some conversations going, and get this thing off the ground. My hope is that we can get people like Dave Winer, Matt Mullenweg, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Joseph Smarr, DeWitt Clinton, and Mike Taylor all joining this effort. My goal is that we can even get Twitter involved in this effort – this isn’t meant to snub Twitter by all means. The entire goal here is to build a much more open, distributed web in as simple a manner as possible.

You can join the “OpenTwitter” list here. I’ll be posting a kickoff message there very soon.

Announcing the Winners of the Static FBML Contest

Posted on December 19, 2009 by jessestay

Over on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, Techipedia, I wrote an article about how to customize your FBML Page utilizing the Static FBML app on Facebook, along with a few other techniques. As part of the post we announced a contest. The 2 best Facebook Pages left in the comments to integrate FBML into a tab using the Static FBML app would win. I’m proud to announce the winners. The winners are:

HyperArts Web Design – these guys did some interesting stuff with Javascript to enable loading of the different tabs without an entire refresh of the page. One of the tabs even had a web form on it enabling you to contact them. The overall experience, use of multiple types of HTML elements, and more, provided a full package that I thought deserved to be one of the winners.

Express – this is a very simple one, but very elegantly designed, and they have a very friendly welcome page on their “What’s New” tab. I like their use of HTML, and well-designed layout. I also really like that they used bit.ly links to enable tracking of clicks on the Page. They link to their other outlets such as Twitter and Youtube as well.

I was very impressed with all the designs and the effort put into them. Consistently, there are a few things that everyone, including the winners, could have done better though: I would have loved to see you utilize FBML a bit more. Perhaps you could utilize the tag to implement tabs to look like Facebook’s. Or I would have loved to see and video – I don’t think any of the entrants had that. Maybe you could use to produce a form in a pretty, Facebook-like format. Perhaps a nicely formatted image of the owners using and could personalize it a bit. Be sure to get to know as well so you can add comments to your tabs if you want to facilitate discussion.

Overall I’m happy to see what came out of the contest. My hope is that you can continue this and push your Pages even further. Get to know what you can do with FBML. Learn what’s possible, and show me what you’ve done!

For the winners, either Tamar or I should be contacting you, but you can also shoot me an e-mail at jesse@staynalive.com and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of FBML Essentials.

If you would like help customizing your Facebook Page please don’t hesitate to contact me and arrange a consultation. Congrats to the winners!

Just in Time for the Holidays, FriendFeed Becomes First OAuth Wrap Provider

Posted on December 17, 2009 by jessestay

About a month ago, Facebook’s David Recordon announced that Facebook was hard at work with the Open Standards Communities on a new OAuth protocol called Wrap. The goals of the protocol seem to specifically provide a way to direct a user through the authentication process through a client-only model, removing the need for developers to do heavy server-side code to authenticate the user. Such a model fits well for Facebook, who, through Facebook Connect, has fought to make it as easy as possible to enable developers to authenticate users via simple Javascript and HTML. It seems Facebook is making through with its promises, by launching FriendFeed as the first OAuth Wrap provider to launch with the new protocol.

The launch comes as a test of a discussion that took place at an OAuth Wrap Community meeting at Facebook headquarters last Tuesday, where it was discussed how to enable client-only authorization of users. In response, Bret Taylor and the FriendFeed team (I guess, according to Luke Shepard, that means there’s still a team?) produced a working prototype of the model, enabling it on their own site. Benjamin Golub, who was responsible for FriendFeed’s API before it was acquired by Facebook, confirmed this with the comment, “FriendFeed supports OAuth WRAP now :). Great job Bret, Luke, and David!” on FriendFeed.

It’s still unclear if this API is available to developers yet, or if it was only a proof-of-concept, but it is clear FriendFeed is very likely becoming a playground for the Facebook team to try out new technologies. This is promising in that if this continues, FriendFeed should continue to see cool new technologies applied to it way before, and even if, they even the light of day on Facebook.com.

I’m very excited to see the Facebook team pushing these new open, client-side APIs, but even more excited to see the FriendFeed team still cranking out cool new technologies, making this the second one today for the site. It’s becoming apparent that the FriendFeed team is finally becoming accustomed to Facebook’s internal technologies and architecture, and my hope is that we will soon to see many “beautiful butterflies” come out of what they’ve been working on over the last few months.

Now, if anyone knows how we can try this thing out I’m all ears!

UPDATE: Benjamin Golub has granted my wishes! He says in the comments: “You can try it out yourself! Register an application at http://friendfeed.com/api/register and then follow along with http://github.com/finiteloop/friendfeed-wrap-example/blob/master/friendfeedwrap.py” – hmmm…new SocialToo feature?

Twitter, It’s Time to Open Source Your API

Posted on December 17, 2009 by jessestay

With the recent launch of a “Twitter API” by both Automattic (WordPress.com) and Tumblr, it is evident that developers have a need to implement similar APIs, on similar platforms, reducing the effort to retrieve data from multiple platforms in a single client. With Tweetie, for instance, you can simply change a single URL to “WordPress.com” or “Tumblr.com” or “Identi.ca” and immediately be receiving updates from your friends on those services, and even post back to those services. I argue this approach is very closed though, as for each and every implementation of a “Twitter API” (which ironically has nothing to do with Twitter), the developers need to completely re-invent the wheel and copy what Twitter has done based on documentation of Twitter’s own API to access its data. Readwriteweb even went to the extent of calling this approach “open”. There’s nothing open about it. Each developer implementing their own “Twitter API” (and especially calling it such) is blatantly ripping off Twitter’s API to do so under no license whatsoever and Twitter’s just standing back and watching. I think it’s time Twitter releases their API under an Open Source license to relieve this mess and protect their IP.

Open Sourcing APIs is nothing new. Of course, Google, with OpenSocial, did it and even standardized their own API for “containers” to easily implement the same API across multiple sites. All the code was provided for developers to do this and we quickly saw sites such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, and others all implement the same standard, reducing the code needed to port an app from platform to platform.

Facebook did the same with their platform. A little known fact is that any developer can go to http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php and download the Facebook Open Platform, along with many other very useful open source tools. Immediately they have access to enable FBML, FBJS, and other aspects of the Facebook API to developers on their own sites, standardizing the Facebook platform amongst sites that implement it. Bebo was one of those who took up Facebook on this offer. Others can too.

What we need now is a standardized platform for sharing micro-content. Some have proposed RSS do this, which is fine with me, but since developers already have apps built on Twitter which this would go with it makes sense to also enable a standardized platform for developers to code on for these types of apps. Such an open-sourced code-base would enable developers to not have to change their code to enable access to similar sites beyond just Twitter. Twitter right now is a closed platform, plain and simple. With the exception of OAuth, they are based on a proprietary API, do not support open content protocols, and even their real-time stream is proprietary.

A good step for Twitter would be to open source this API. Enable sites such as WordPress, Tumblr, Status.net, and others to easily integrate it into their own platformse without the need to re-invent the wheel. Put it under an open license, and then your IP remains protected. Until that point developers are going to continue ripping off Twitter’s API, and Twitter’s IP slowly starts to go down the drain. I’d love to see Twitter take a lead in this process – it took Facebook just about 6 months to open source their API. Why haven’t we seen this yet from Twitter?

Or are they the next Compuserve?

FriendFeed Launches Status Update Sync to Auto-update Facebook

Posted on December 17, 2009 by jessestay

Despite all the “FriendFeed is dead” arguments the naysayers have been pushing, a new, pretty significant update was pushed by the FriendFeed team today into production. The update belongs to FriendFeed’s App on Facebook, and now imports every update users post on status update services they import into FriendFeed as status updates on Facebook. This means if you are importing your Twitter feed onto FriendFeed, and have installed the FriendFeed app on Facebook, all your Twitter updates will now automatically import as status updates onto Facebook. Not only that, but it supports Google Chat status updates, Plurk updates, Identi.ca updates, and potentially any status update service supported by FriendFeed.

This move goes head-to-head with services like Twitter’s own Facebook app, which, as one of the very first Facebook Platform apps, automatically posts Twitter updates to users’ profiles. The idea also, to me, suggests that the FriendFeed team will be releasing more updates around this in the future. For instance, it now makes sense that FriendFeed begins to enable preferences around which services auto-populate into Facebook, and perhaps even a “post to Facebook” checkbox next to the already-existing “post to Twitter” checkbox when you post an update on the service. FriendFeed also, very soon, needs to integrate Facebook Connect so that their Facebook integration (which is bound to happen) is much tighter and works better with the Facebook environment. This is based on a Facebook app, which in my best guesses the FriendFeed team should be integrating into their existing FriendFeed app on Facebook – it’s inevitable at this point. When this happens it makes sense to add even more updates to their Facebook integration, further growing the service.

The skeptics have all been pushing that FriendFeed won’t grow because the FriendFeed team is no longer working on the product. I think this pretty much debunks that theory, even suggesting more updates are to come. As I said before, FriendFeed’s just fine – it won’t be going away any time soon, and I think this proves my point even further.

Potential FriendFeed Hole Allows Users to Embed Web Bugs

Posted on December 15, 2009 by jessestay

I have discovered a feature (or perhaps vulnerability?) of FriendFeed that, intended or not, could enable marketers to track every single view of their RSS posts to FriendFeed. The feature revolves around the ability to embed images, via a subset of RSS called MediaRSS, into your RSS feed. If your RSS is MediaRSS formatted, FriendFeed automatically reads the images in the feed and displays the first one as the main image in the post to your feed on FriendFeed.com. Here’s the problem though (or maybe it’s a feature?) – FriendFeed stores the original URL to the image as the main image URL. They don’t re-format it at all or store it on their servers. This means you can dynamically produce anything you want on FriendFeed.com, set cookies, store IP information, etc. without the user ever knowing about it.

I discovered this hole due to an annoyance I had with my TweetMeme button always showing up as the image in my posts to FriendFeed. I noticed that the number of retweets was dynamically updating, right on FriendFeed. Sure enough, looking at the source of the image, the image was being generated from TweetMeme’s servers, not FriendFeed’s.

Such Web Bugs are common throughout the web, especially in advertising and other marketing-based mediums, so the threat isn’t huge. However, this may be something the FriendFeed team may want to look at if they don’t want marketers to be getting information about their users off the FriendFeed.com site itself. If anything, I’d like to see them just ignore 3rd-party image URLs altogether and maybe my pesky TweetMeme icon will stop showing up as the image on my posts to FriendFeed. Is this a feature or a “bug”?

Googling, here’s some more information I found about “Web Bugs”: http://www.leave-me-alone.com/webbugs_growing.asp