You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

(The last section becomes mostly demo of Ubiquity, which you may have seen elsewhere but is still quite cool). The core aspects of You-Centric browsing include:

1. Portable Identity (in the browser)
2. Social Graph (in the browser)
3. Integration (other stuff from the desktop or computer in the browser)

It’s all about, in Raskin’s words, “Making the web revolve around you,” though cynics might note that the “you” really means “your browser.”

What I love about Mozilla Labs approach, though, is how it leverages open standards and open source. In building identity into the browser, for example, Mozilla did not try to create a new source of lock in for Firefox, but implemented OpenID – meaning users can get Identity in the browser but also retain the ability to bring that identity out of the browser, or to another browser if they so choose.

Similarly, though I don’t know anything about their specific implementation, the notion of bringing the social graph (who my friends are and how I typically contact them, in Raskin’s example) doesn’t require fixing that graph to Firefox. Instead, the browser can parse the XFN/FOAF used by sites like Twitter, and the portable contacts API provided by Plaxo, Gmail, and others. This information can be accessed and used by the browser without the browser becoming the one and only source for that information.

One of my favorite Raskin lines is to describe this as “the browser as my insanely smart butler” – gathering, arranging, and making useful information and services from throughout the web. (My other favorite: “Any magic which is sufficiently dumb becomes indistinguishable from technology”).

What’s all of this got to do with the Assembled Web?

I see it as a browser-focused take on the shift toward consumer control. Increasing the power of the browser in the user<->browser<->site chain of interfaces (the user doesn’t hit the site or web application in an unmediated form but through a browser) is certainly a part of the same shift in the direction of a web in which the consumer decides when, where, and how to interact with the content and services provided by vendors.

(We’re using a Kaltura CDN and player here, so the full screen icon is the four arrows pointing out toward the corners, just to the right of the volume icon).

There’s a custom view in the Alfresco web client property sheet, which embeds FlowPlayer to watch videos in Alfresco spaces, as well as “publish to Kaltura” link which pushes videos from Alfresco into Kaltura for distribution, using the Kaltura API. Once videos are published to Kaltura, the custom view is updated to use the Kaltura version rather than the FlowPlayer.

The project lives here in the Kaltura community: Alfresco – Kaltura Integration

Do you see this integration being useful in your corporate intranet? What other features would you like to see added? Let us know in the comments.

What do you think?

What’s holding retailers back from letting users get reviews from their social graph, not just from random strangers?

What would you like to see in future releases?

Why should shopping online be a solitary activity between a shopper and a site, when shopping in the real world is so eminently social?

This week a Magento extension developed at Optaros was finally released to the Magento community: Facebook Connect Social Shopping. (We’d been calling it Fangento, based on an early “Fans” concept plus Magento, but I like the official name better).

Essentially the extension allows you to leverage Facebook Connect in the context of your Magento-based eCommerce experience. Specifically, users can use their Facebook social graph to ask friends for (and recieve) recommendations about products:

Facebook Connect in a Magento context: Product recommendations from friends

From the overview blurb:

Facebook Connect Social Shopping (FCSS) provides your site visitors the ability to connect with their Facebook friends without leaving your ecommerce store. They can recommend to their friends a purchase that they are making or ask advice to choose between items to purchase. This will increase conversion rates on your site as well as pull in free traffic from Facebook through a direct contact from one of their friends – turning Facebook into a free, word-of-mouth affiliate. If friends are online on Facebook the interaction can be real-time.

I think the most intriguing part is the real-time possibilities – if your friends are actually online in Facebook you can ask them their opinion in real-time – essentially embedding a kind of Facebook chat into the shopping experience.

Can’t wait to see what experiences people (including Optaros teams but also others) build on top of this!

(via BuddyPress Developers Blog)

Also interesting that they’re using the VideoPress framework (discussed here) to deliver the videos from WordCamp.

Related:

• Social Networking on WordPress? Meet BuddyPress

BuddyPress 1.0, the result of that effort, was released on April 30th of this year, and is an option that should be seriously considered anywhere a new content-centered community is being built.

It doesn’t have the community size or custom-development flexibility of Drupal, but it represents a strong step in that direction for the otherwise very blog-centric WordPress. Given that WordPress is arguably the best blogging software in existence (at least that’s what I’d suggest) BuddyPress should be on the shortlist of any team looking to build a social network style community site.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 is the current release, which works with WordPressMU 2.7.1 and BBPress 1.0a6 or later (I think – I tried it with the current trunk from BBPress SVN repo and it worked well). It’s delivered as a series of plugins and themes for WordPressMU and BBPress, which can make installation and configuration a bit difficult, but there’s plenty of community help and a few tutorials already to help move you along.

In addition to the expected blogging functionality (every user can have multiple blogs; individual blogs can be multi-author), BuddyPress also includes:

• Extended profiles – including the ability for developers and site administrators to define additional profile fields
• Private messaging – ability to send and recieve messages within the system
• Friends – bidirectional, request-accept model. (Not a one-way unconfirmed model like Twitter’s follow/following, but a confirmed two-way model like Facebook).
• Groups – including the ability of individual members to create new groups, and mechanisms for surfacing groups when they are created
• The Wire – a commenting / messaging system I think of as something like a Facebook wall. Messages on the wire can be seen by others. User profiles have an associated wire, as do group pages. Custom components could also leverage this feature.
• Activity Streams – a view of all of your activity as well as a view of your friends’ activity within the system. Doesn’t (yet, out of the box) import activity from other sites, though custom components can and will undoubtedly be developed for these kinds of purposes
• Forums – based on BBPress, also an Automattic product. By default in the provided theme, forums are attached to groups – but the architecture provides for forums to be sitewide and/or attached to other objects in the system, including custom components.

These core features (maybe even leaving out private messaging) represent the bulk of the necessary features for an online community, and probably meet the 80% of requirements critical to a communities success. Not all the bells and whistles have been developed yet (microblogging, location awareness, iphone apps, lifestream imports from external services) but this is a solid framework on which you can expect a developer community to grow.

The platform inherits WordPress’s easy to use blog platform and lightweight system requirements (PHP4, MySQL), as well as its license (GPL v2) but adds significant new capabilities.

As with any 1.0 1.0.1 release, there are some caveats for the potential user.

For example, because it relies on WordPressMU and BBPress, but each has to be installed and configured separately, the whole installation process is a bit wonky, and will likely require consulting some online tutorials. Similarly, because the framework ships as a series of plugins to and themes for WordPressMU and BBPress, configuration and customization takes some getting used to. There are two different admin dashboards and multiple folders where plugins and themes might go. Some functionality is controlled via admin screens, but other changes (like determining the buttons across the navigation bar) are controlled by the theme, or by constants defined in wp-config.

BuddyPress Demo Site, showing the default theme (click for fullsize)

Also, unlike the WordPress-based-social-network imagined by the DiSO project, BuddyPress doesn’t support OpenID, Open Social, OAuth, ActivityStreams, Portable Contacts, or any of the other distributed social networking related standards currently being developed. Out of the box, BuddyPress is very much a “walled garden” community, albeit one which the site owner controls and anyone can set up. I suspect this will change as the community around BuddyPress evolves. (Though, to be clear, many WordPressMU compliant plugins will work with BuddyPress, so this will soon be rectified).

Similarly, in the current release the configuration options are sometimes limited. You can add fields to extended profiles, but the provided “prebuilt” fields are only State, Country, and Language, and the mechanism for editing the provided lists is rather clunky:

BuddyPress Editing States Prebuilt Field (Click for Full Size)

Additionally, many of the components are “enabled” or “disabled” – without all the additional control one might expect to have over their functionality:

BuddyPress Component Admin (Click for Full Size)

Finally, the theme and plugin pool is somewhat restricted. WordPressMU plugins should more-or-less work out of the box, as will themes for individual blogs – but sitewide BuddyPress themes will emerge as people get used to the framework. The theme and plugin developer community isn’t starting from scratch, and will quickly ramp up by leveraging their skills form WordPress and BBPress code bases, but it will take time for mature themes to emerge that rival some of the best WordPress themes in look and feel and functionality.

Ultimately, BuddyPress truly is a 1.0 product, in the sense that it can be used out of the box but will certainly mature and become more capable as people start developing additional components, and the user interface undoubtedly will evolve.

That said, I still believe this platform will jump directly to the shortlist for anyone looking to build a content-centric community on open source.

What does BuddyPress compete with? Drupal and Joomla!, certainly. Ning as well, though many folks who set up networks on Ning won’t have the technical chops to create a custom BuddyPress theme, and for now the configuration is a bit too hands on for that. (Perhaps Automatic will offer a hosted, simplified version of BuddyPress down the road, as it does with WordPress.com?). Movable Type Pro and Enterprise, as well – given their recent push into the social networking space. (The open source version of Movable Type, however, does not include these community features.)

To a lesser extent BuddyPress could be competitive with offerings from companies like Awareness, Jive, Telligent, Blogtronix and the like.

You can check out a live demo of BuddyPress, download it and try it out yourself (remember you’ll need to download WordPressMU and BBPress, which you should get from SVN, as well), or check out some of these sites built on BuddyPress:

• Volkswagon TDI Tank Wars
• GigaOm Pro
• Wanna Network?
• Flokka
• We Heart This
• Kodingen
• Petomundo

If you do try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.

Consistent with our service oriented content management (SOCM) philosophy the integration enables separation of repository services from presentation services, enabling you to build content-centric applications in the python-based Django framework while still benefiting from the workflow and document management capabilities of Alfresco.

Django-Alfresco integration

As Jeff mentions in the screencast, the integration project itself should be released shortly as an open source project.

The upgrade adds support for HD as well as other formats, using automated transcoding (see the announcement for more info):

With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.

Videos can be streamed and embedded . . . on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.

I’m very happy – as all content creators and consumers should be – to see support for Miro as well as iTunes, along with the classic ease-of-use you’d expect from the hosted services at WordPress.com.

Taking it one step further, though, Automattic has released as open source the entire framework they’re using to manage uploaded videos, transcode them to additional formats, and serve them to consuming sites. This isn’t your average consumer-grade WordPress plugin, though, as they warn in the description:

This plugin is different from other plugins because it can not be used “out-of-the-box”. It is intended for self-hosted large scale WordPress MU sites that want to develop their own customized video solutions. In addition to Web servers for WordPress MU , it requires at least one file server and one dedicated video transcoder. Considerable amount of PHP coding and system administration skills are required to install, customize and deploy this plugin.

As more and more significant, large-scale enterprise customers discover the flexibility, power, and ease of use WordPress offers, this style of plugin shows great promise – we look forward to helping some Optaros clients use this to add video to WordPress based platforms.

Here’s a quick high level diagram of how the framework works, from the plugin page on wordpress.org:

WordPress Video Solution Framework

My favorite part may be step 1 of the install instructions. After a bunch of file copying the directions say:

Carefully study the source code, understand your system environment, and modify places marked “CUSTOMIZE”.

Adding this video platform to the P2 microblogging theme and Buddy Press, which also recently went 1.0 and is intended for building social networks on a WordPressMU code base, WordPress is making substantial progress toward being more than just a blogging application- it’s becoming a full-blown media and community platform.

Using the CMIS and CMIS Alfresco modules Optaros recently contributed (based on joint development effort between Optaros, Acquia, and Alfresco), he demonstrates:

• HTML content created in Alfresco being “pushed” to Drupal and converted to a standard Drupal node, where it can be affected by any of the existing Drupal modules like 5-star rating or comments.
• Content created in Drupal being “pushed” back to Alfresco, where it could trigger a workflow, archiving, or any other Alfresco action
• The ability to browse and query, from within the Drupal interface, CMIS repositories, including standard keyword search as well as CMIS queries.

Although this demo is specific to Alfresco and Drupal, the CMIS module itself is designed to facilitate integration of other repositories as they become CMIS compliant.

(You should also check out Jeff’s post on CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management for a sense of how we see this particular set of modules fitting into a larger strategic approach).