Hey beppu

Could you please keep me posted on the status of privacy settings? I’d like to start multiple spaces with my family, but would need the ability to make private some of them.

Thanks!

Thanks for always helping with my projects, no matter how dumb. Remember coromsg.pl? Sorry I get my head up my arse sometimes. I am interested in your larry.pl patches but hate to see you do work I’m too lazy to. Re-did text rendering. Should I still add headers/footers for CSS? Working on Baccarat lately! Not as fun as personal projects but still fun! Anyway, you’re one of the coolest peeps I know. -scott

Also as a side note, a feature request.

When you click color in your note to change color it should have the current color values filled in, so you dont have to enter all three again.

Once again keep up the amazing work.

thanks for moving that!

you all are fantastic :)

• cocinella
• gossip

• back to pidgin (formerly known as gaim)

Hi. i think this is awesome and a good idea. but i have to say, the default style of these notes is killing me! the black bars are not nice. I realize this could be interpreted as personal preference, and i know i have the option to change the colors of my notes, i just wish there was a nicer looking default.

Keep up the good work!

• i want the ability to blast a note into everyone’s inbox, like feature updates or contest things or giveaways.
• i want the ability to see a leaderboard of metanotes users.
  • i want to really see who’s using it the most.
• i want a “recent notes created” fun-feature on the homepage.
  • imagine if it autorefreshed along with the users’ account.

ideally you could even create a controller so i could add (and if necessary remove) heroes ! :)

I think it might be a cool/useful animation to flash the n most recent notes on any given workspace once it’s loaded!

Also, what if (on busy pages), older notes automatically become more translucent as newer notes are posted? Since the z-ordering works, it would make a purposeful visual effect

When attempting to delete some of the default spaces I get this lovely error:

Camping Problem! MetaNotes::Controllers::ProfileEvent.POST NameError “MetaNotes::Models::” is not a valid constant name!:

• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/inflector.rb:254:in `constantize’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/core_ext/string/inflections.rb:148:in `constantize’
• ./metanotes/controllers.rb:218:in `post’
• (eval):27:in `send’
• (eval):27:in `service’
• ./metanotes.rb:45:in `service’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/camping-1.5.180/lib/camping/session.rb:112:in `service’
• (eval):46:in `run’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/camping.rb:53:in `process’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/camping.rb:52:in `synchronize’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/camping.rb:52:in `process’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:159:in `process_client’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:158:in `each’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:158:in `process_client’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:285:in `run’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:285:in `initialize’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:285:in `new’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:285:in `run’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:268:in `initialize’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:268:in `new’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel.rb:268:in `run’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:282:in `run’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:281:in `each’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:281:in `run’
• rv_harness.rb:38:in `cloaker_’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:149:in `call’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:149:in `listener’
• rv_harness.rb:30:in `cloaker_’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:50:in `call’
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.2/lib/mongrel/configurator.rb:50:in `initialize’
• rv_harness.rb:28:in `new’
• rv_harness.rb:28

this is even what we should call it – i like riffing on facebook :).

it sounds easy to implement and logically sound contrasted to a stream of notifications and counter notifications which i think would be the only other alternative

i think black bars is a fine initial default… but i like the way blogger does it, when you first sign up for a blogger account it asks you to select a theme for your blog.

maybe that would be a nice welcome-wizard type thing – choose your default note color (along with gimme openid/gravatar and where are you/when were you born and such)

i just chimed in on this conversation

that conversation should also then be copied to MY inbox!

OptionsDisable Get Free Snap Shots Jive Talks : Enterprise 2.0 in black and whiteAdmit it, Social Software is goofing off at work Jan 24, 2008 by Matt Tucker XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services9 Comments | Post your own |

There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow—that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.

Sounds good, right? So, what’s the hold up? Why aren’t we building out cloud services with XMPP now? And, if people are already providing cloud services without XMPP, what’s the motivation to switch? The rest of this post will shed some light on the current landscape and provide some answers to those questions.

Polling isn’t working anymore Since the beginning of the Internet, if you wanted to sync services between two servers the most common solution was to have the client ping the host at regular intervals, which his known as polling. Polling is how most of us check our email. We ping our email server every few minutes to see if we got new mail. It’s also how nearly all web services APIs work.

Take, for example, Twitter. High Scalability recently covered the load stats on Twitter reporting that they average 200-300 connections per second with spikes that climb to 800 connections per second. Their MySQL server handles 2,400 requests per second! Recently, the Macworld keynote became the most recent culprit for causing Twitter to cut off its API, which has 10x the load of their website. While Twitter is not a cloud service, nor the largest demand service on the internet (with a paltry 350,000ish users, which pales in comparison to a MySpace or Yahoo!), they do illustrate the kind of frustration a user experiences with polling based services. And, that’s just Twitter! Imagine the impact on overall Internet traffic congestion polling creates worldwide.

Interestingly, the recent Twitter outage lead some influencers, like Dave Winer, to suggest that Twitter move to XMPP which we’ve already begun experimenting with

Some companies are trying to address the polling problem with existing protocols. I think that move is largely motivated by a significant investment in legacy systems that makes moving to another protocol difficult. Salesforce is a perfect example of a company attempting to address the polling problem with creative applications of the old one way protocols.

The latest version of Salesforce will send notifications back to your own webservice to avoid polling. But, that’s a pain to setup for developers. Worse, its very difficult to wire up reverse webservices calls through a corporate firewall.

The hold up XMPP’s largest hurdle is that its not HTTP, and common wisdom states everything new that’s built must be web-based. That means we won’t see a widespread application of XMPP in cloud services until a few more brave pioneers clear the path for the rest of us.

I’ve been heavily involved in the XMPP world as a developer of Smack (client library) and Openfire (server) and have also helped craft the standard as a member of the XMPP Standards Foundation. XMPP was invented for instant messaging and presence, and is the dominant open protocol in that space. Instant messaging? Yep, it turns out that all of the problems that had to be solved for instant messaging make the protocol perfect for cloud computing:

It allows for easy two-way communication, so bye bye polling. It even has rich pub-sub functionality built-in. It’s XML-based and easily extensible, perfect for both new instant messaging features and custom cloud services. It’s efficient and proven to scale to millions of concurrent users on a single service (such as Google’s GTalk). It also has a built-in worldwide federation model.

I’m not the only one to notice that XMPP is a great fit for cloud computing. Tivo is switching to XMPP as a more efficient alternative to their old architecture:

Today each TiVo polls TiVo’s severs roughly every 15 minutes to check for new scheduled recordings, TiVoCast downloads, Unbox downloads, etc. That’s highly inefficient – nearly all of those polling calls are for nothing. There is nothing waiting to be done. And it introduces a lag when you want to start a download – up to 15 minutes. And it doesn’t scale well as TiVo’s user base keeps growing.

So what’s changed? The polling system is gone. TiVo is using XMPP now instead. (...) Yep, TiVo is basically using instant messaging for real- time communication. Now when the TiVo server has a new recording to schedule, it will IM the TiVo to tell it. Or if there is a download to pull, it will IM the TiVo to tell it to do so. This is a much more efficient system and it eliminates latency. It is really a clever idea.

Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.

More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I’m happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that’s powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We’ll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.

Resources for XMPP cloud service developers There are a few places you can turn for help building cloud services around XMPP. Here is a list of a few:

XMPP Standards Foundation—where the standard gets defined Ignite Realtime—Jive Software’s Open Source XMPP projects Jabber Website—lists XMPP servers, libraries and clients Tags: xmpp, planet-jabber, salesforce, soap, cloud_services, rest, twitter, tivo CommentsThis post has 9 comments. We encourage you to please post your own! dawn Jan 24, 2008 at 3:56:35 PM

Reply 1. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

If anyone is interested, you can also Digg this post here: http://digg.com/software/XMPP_a_ka_Jabber_is_the_future_for_cloud_services michaels Jan 24, 2008 at 4:12:49 PM

Reply 2. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services in response to: dawn Ok Matt. You can’t post that and not geek out over the new logo. I’ve corrected that for you.

http://siglerdesign.com/index.php/site/article/xmpp_jabbers_new_logo/ Jungle Jan 24, 2008 at 5:37:30 PM

Reply 3. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Very correct analysis. I’m sad I didn’t read it 3 year ago…

I spend two years building the backend of a complex infrastructure of 200 servers, all very dependent and communicating with each other. We originally used Jabber to communicate with our 10 million clients deployed world-wide, and it was straight forward to use Jabber to communicate between our servers. However, maintaining Jabber connections with 10M clients was a pain, and we decided to replace Jabber with SOAP. My mistake was to also replace inter-server Jabber communications with SOAP. Indeed, SOAP communication proved unreliable, not scalable and inflexible, due to complex firewall setup and SOAP’s inherent one-way communication style.

BTW: Great work on Smack, its a great library. Dave Hoff Jan 24, 2008 at 5:44:41 PM

Reply 4. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services in response to: michaels That new logo certainly does rock. Very important for adoption in this web2 world we live in.

Excellent post Matt. Things are heating up. Marshall Jan 24, 2008 at 5:49:35 PM

Reply 5. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Fascinating stuff and really exciting to see a company serving such major customers going this kind of open route. The speed and scaling possibilities are very interesting. Programmer Jan 24, 2008 at 5:57:24 PM

Reply 6. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Can you explain how this is fundamentally different from RPC’s (besides server->client)? I’m more interested what is happening, application/protocol-wise, on the client. matt Jan 24, 2008 at 6:01:40 PM

Reply 7. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services in response to: Jungle Jungle: thanks for sharing your SOAP horror story. I think that you’re right about XMPP being a good tool for enterprise integration projects in general. Any thoughts about switching back from SOAP, or too late for your project?

Also, seeing how REST has displaced SOAP for simple web services gives me hope. I love the Amazon stat: 85% of developers choose REST over SOAP (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3005). matt Jan 24, 2008 at 6:03:36 PM

Reply 8. Re: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services in response to: Chule Chule: I’m pretty psyched about the logo too! We (XMPP Standards Foundation) spent quite a bit of time working on it so now it’s time to spread the word. I’d love to see it on the front page of dataportability.org, for example.

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Jive Talks is powered by Clearspace out of our development community, Jivespace. We use Openfire and Spark daily to communicate with one another with instant messaging. We proudly support our XMPP open-source community, Ignite Realtime. We use Jive Forums to provide crucial customer support. In other words, we eat our own dog food.

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I just wish there were a way for me to be alerted when I get messages like this, though.

PS: I’m going to cancel my cable modem service in an attempt to not slack so much.

Gosh i can’t wait until this is working.

I’ve had thoughts along these lines myself, but I don’t have the means to implement them at the moment.

The Idea

What if I used a jabber server as the medium through which events are communicated?

Jabber was built for this kind of communication, and we can use ejabberd which is a popular Erlang implementation of a jabber server.

But what about the HTTP end of things?

I’m thinking of using rack as the web server that can handle the numerous long-polling requests coming in. Each request thread will be a client to our internal jabber server, and it’ll block until:

• new events come in.
• the HTTP connection gets dropped.

So is the idea that if I want to respond to your note on my INBOX then I respond in your INBOX? Kinda facebook-write-on-wall style.

If that’s the case, you should add INBOX-TO-INBOX which mashes the two inboxes together :)

....I haven’t implemented space deletion, yet. ;-)

There is so much shit I haven’t implemented, yet.

I’m going to have to go somewhere where no one can communicate w/ me, so that I can focus.

Killing my internet connection helped, but it wasn’t enough. ;-)

This site deserved the award it won! You guys made one of the coolest places on the internet today! Thank you.

You guys definitely deserved the award keep up the good work I love it.

Idea: allow notes to live in multiple spaces. Then, in addition to an INBOX make an OUTBOX where notes you add to other people’s INBOX are automatically duplicated/linked. Or make it a setting (on by default perhaps) that when you add a note to someone elses INBOX it is duplicate/linked in your INBOX.

The inbox2inbox idea would be a metanote-metapage which holds all of the notes in my inbox that you wrote and all the notes in your inbox that I wrote. When I add a note to the inbox2inbox metanote-metapage it goes into your inbox, and when you add a note it goes into my inbox.

Well maybe you could just drop something in that says “This Feature Isn’t Implemented Yet” or something. Better yet, just remove the Delete button.

On an unrelated note, I just installed Firefox3beta4 which claims to have faster js… and based on the performance of this quite js-heavy site I’d say that it’s quite a bit faster!

I’m not really sure who to tell, but the link in the heroes menu for maleachs just takes you back to the homepage instead of his metaspace.

Currently, if you want to leave someone a message, you have to go visit one of their spaces (like /$user/Inbox) and leave them a note there.

It’s really inefficient, and we realize this.

However, we’re (or at least I’m) not sure how we ought to deal w/ this problem.

you should be able to move, resize, and delete notes left by OTHERS in YOUR spaces.

you should NOT be able to move, resize, or delete notes left by OTHERS in ANYONE ELSE’S SPACE unless you are SHARED in that space.

i guess sharing pages officially is later, so i am just randomly writing here :)

OpenID

I will look into it.

Content Push

I’m hoping that if I provide an API, someone else will add content pushing for me. ;-)

Sonicsrini’s Inbox

I collected the ideas presented in my 2 notes over to the left and added a few more.

Content Push

Ability to push note content into specific sections or content areas of other social sites. ie. My Profile Space “Music” note content being pushed into Facebook/Myspace Music content area. Other thoughts are to push notes to twitter/pownce.

Implement OpenID

Take a look at Clickpass

First off, love the site. I see myself using it quite a bit in the future.

Please give us an API of some sort. Another thought is to become an Open Social container and allow widgets/apps in notes.

• ideologically, a person without projects is an idiot.
• on a usage basis, people with projects will use the HELL out of metanotes.
  • they’ll come back constantly, especially if we notify them about significant changes.

• they’d have to define the project.
  • they could do this by creating a space.
• they’d have to share the space with their desired teammates.
  • those teammates would have to register for metanotes if they are just invited by email.
  • these teammates would therefore have to WANT to be part of this project, so they should have to confirm that they want this space shared with them.
    • the proposer of the project should get notification of this confirmation or denial.
  • after the teammate says yes, the metaspace should appear in each teammates’ metaspace as a shared space.
• different note colors is key here.
• the space log is key here.
  • it should auto-update with IMPORTANT changes.
    • username created a note called subject.
    • deletion events, note-editing-events, change-subject-line events.
• the space log should glow when someone other than you has entered something into it.
• you should be able to email from within metanotes, ideally from the space log (broadcast)

Is it currently, or will it ever be possible to embed js into notes? Embeded a tangler forum on the homepage, it seems to work sometimes.

Keep up the great work, metanotes rules!

I’m so glad you changed the order back. Everything was getting very confusing. I love this site. Hoorah!

when you lock one of your notes, you should be allowed to enter some custom text that will pop up as a javascript alert when people click that note.

The new note style is better, and MN seems to run quicker than it did! Are you considering adding note comments? Just dropping a line to say hello :)

things get cluttered over time.

it can be an iteration of the “notes” menu. maybe a panel ? but it should notify you when you enter of new notes – in effect being like a “river” view of a page, with the full note body excerpted.

this will also make a great alternative tagging interface.

we can call it

history

or just

the space log

very excited to see the community progressing as well ! ! ! :)

one of my many projects is to get my FOWA notes, which were relatively extensive, including photos, and put them up on the page you created about FOWA….