Hi there, and happy holidays. I am currently working on the SigMe System, a new social kind of service, though with a 'Michaela' touch. Anyway - during the development, I also came in contact with Google sponsored 'Open Social', a protocol (API) that allows applications ('Gadgets') to access ones profile data (name, gender, list of friends, activities). It most certainly appears logical, that profile-data should be available for other than 'I like you' and 'You Like me' activities. Think about being able to have a synced database of contacts within you email program - always current, always accurate. Or a plugin-in to your favorite phone-application that always has the correct number for the correct person. Think about shared calendars, business-card listings .. you get the idea.

But OpenSocial has a different scope (yes, I know about RESTful ..) It is mostly meant to be used to allow 'Gadgets' to run within the protected environment of a web-service, a program within a service. People can add own (or other) gadgets to their own account, but those gadgets will only run within an OpenSocial website (e.g. 'facebook') , not as an external application.

There are quite a few gadgets available for people to add to their personal environment @ their favorite Web 2.0 service - however, as soon as it comes to 'gadgets' the Open in OpenSocial ain't open anymore. There are almost no freeware gadgets available, most gadgets are developed by an advertising driven gadget-industry. No wonder, most of those gadgets are mindless time burning games allowing the player to bother friends with 'gifts' so that they too are motivated to play the game and watch the advertising. Viral has a new meaning. I'd rather fight the swine-flu virus.

Now - a few creative people grabbed the gadgets (remember: HTML + Javascript = Sourcecode) and simply removed the advertising or in other ways modified the gadgets. This of course lead the gadget developers to add protection mechanisms. The gadgets now require a correct 'password-key' which will be provided by the environment the gadget is supposed to run on. Since I don't have anyweb.com's key, the 'new' gadgets won't run on my or any other site.

But that is not the only problem with OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a HUGE collection of interacting protocols that add up to a hill of beans - the size of Mount Everest. In order to even toy around with OpenSocial, you need the free 'Apache-Shindig' OpenSocial container. You need 'partuza', a freeware Web 2.0 environment that is able to interface with 'shindig' to see how you would be able to patch your own databases into the OpenSocial environment. You need to understand the difference between 'oauth', consumer-keys and a variety of other security mechanisms. All of that to allow a user to access his or her OWN data?

Well, we don't think so. This is whe we are developing what we call openSigMe. It simply works like this:

You POST the correct key and questions to me, I POST you the requested data. The simplicity of the protocol will provide for very easy integration into external applications so that Squirrelmail, Evolution and Firefox may, in the future, have APIs to access the data stored in your profile (that includes friends, contacts [...]) at Sigme.com or any other openSigMe supporting Web 2.0 service.

KISS is still the word.

Michaela

Spam is a big problem in today's Internet. A lot of companies are turning to professional mail-service companies in order to avoid being spammed to death. That's a good solution – or is it?

That depends.

Here is how those service-companies usually work. They use public DNSBL lists as well as proprietary filters that try to distinguish good from bad (= spam) mails. Whenever the company declares an incoming mail to be 'spam', it will be quarantined . A daily report of all quarantined mail is generated and forwarded to their respective clients. In a perfect world, the clients browse this list and pick which of those 'spam' mails should be re-qualified as 'good' and be made available for them.

All quarantined mail will usually be deleted after 30 days.

Unfortunately, we are not living in a perfect world. I am not browsing my spams, I just delete them every other week or so. That's what most people do. And that's the problem.

What happens, if, for whatever reason, your important mail is flagged as 'bad' by some proprietary filter at some mail-service? It goes on to the 'spam' list and, since nobody reads it, your mail is deleted after 30 days.

This wouldn't be a problem IF the mail-service would notify you about your dumped mail and the reason for dumping. But most don't do that. They silently discard the mail and that's that.

Once again: If I dump my spams, well, that's my decision. Not only am I using generally accepted freeware spam-mail filters, I am NOT a company providing mail-service for third parties.

I can't accept however, that professional service companies are claiming the right to decide whether or not to forward mail based on their filters decisions. They should know that a lot of their customers don't read their spam reports and they shouldn't be allowed to delete mails without sending notifications to the sender.

Now – I understand that they are handling hundreds of thousands of mails each day. Sending rejection reports to each and every spam-mail sender must be a big headache. But mail is their business. They can't just rely on their customers vigilance to read their spam reports and to pick one or two important mails out of possibly hundreds of real spams. They are entrusted with their clients communications and can't decide if an email is important or not.

This is why they need to notify senders if they dump any mail.

Unfortunately they don't do that.

No you know why that big company didn't answer your job application. They never saw it.