microblogging – Joss Winn

OAuth, OpenID, XMPP with WordPress

Joss Winn / March 12, 2009August 30, 2009 / Fun, Standards & Specs, Web

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released an update to Prologue, their theme for group discussion, today. I read about this, minutes after reading about the new OAuth features in WordPress 2.8 and an hour or so after reading about a new Facebook Connect plugin for BuddyPress, the social networking layer for WordPress. All this stimulation proved a bit too much for me, so this post is an attempt to plot what’s happening here and what might be possible in just a few months from now…

So, I have the BuddyPress Facebook Connect plugin working on a my test installation…

Nothing fancy going on there. Basically, new users to the site can register using their Facebook credentials. The plugin doesn’t do anything for existing users on the site. They just login with their local account as usual. For a first release, the plugin is a good proof of concept and with a bit more integration work will make it easy for Facebook users to join BuddyPress sites.

The new Prologue theme, P2, is impressive, too…

It takes advantage of the new threaded comments feature in WordPress 2.7+ , has ‘realtime’ notifications (unless I’ve missed something, the use of the term ‘realtime’ is a stretch – see below) and has some nice keyboard shortcuts…

One thing that’s lacking is a Twitter-like realtime notification that a new post has been made and you should refresh your bowser. Twitter doesn’t use it for the user home page, but they do on their search page and I like it.

Moving on, OAuth functionality for WordPress is still in development but the latest code from the SVN trunks of both the DiSo plugin and WordPress does appear to work…

Be warned that it does not run on a server where PHP runs as a CGI. I tried to run it first on Dreamhost, but it gave an error showing that getallheaders() is an undefined function.

I need to spend more time with the OAuth plugin to see how it will actually work in practice. One of the first use-cases for it is to allow client applications like the iPhone app, to be able to post remotely without sending a password using XML-RPC. If anyone has any ideas and wants to test it with me, please leave a comment. As I understand from the announcement, it’s working but it’s still early days… For more information, see Will Norris’ presentation from last August.

Finally, there’s mnw, a new plugin for WordPress that provides support for the OpenMicroBlogging specification. With this, users from other sites using the specification, such as identi.ca and other Laconica-based services, can subscribe to your blog/omb site and receive updates whenever you publish a new post or page. So this…

…ends up here…

mnw is still a bit rough around the edges but it was only released as V0.1 a month ago, so that’s to be expected. Note that mnw only seems to work on single WP installations (WPMU produces a familiar error message which I think is wp_nonce related) and does not work on WP 2.8 trunk. Also, identi.ca complained of my avatar image being the wrong size. In the example above, I’d removed my avatar from the mnw settings, but I’ve since found that a .png of 96px seems to work OK.

What does it mean for me and you?

So, what does all this mean? In terms of wordpress.com, we might speculate that before too long, they will add the BuddyPress layer to their 4.5m blogs to create a sizeable social network. The P2 theme shows posts in realtime, they’re already offering an XMPP firehose of blog posts and there are plugins that offer XMPP functionality for WordPress, so remote real-time updates aren’t far away and realtime remote publishing already exist using XML-RPC. With the P2 theme, anyone can create a Twitter-like site that any number of registered users can post to and anyone can comment on. Add OpenID authentication and OAuth authorisation and you’ve got a large, mature and open social (micro)blogging service.

For self-hosted WordPress users, it’s even closer to being a reality. I’ve had a site running today that accepts new user registrations via the DiSo OpenID plugin and those users can then post updates to the Prologue themed site and join a threaded group discussion. If I enabled XML-RPC posting, users could post in ‘realtime’ to the group site from their iPhone or other other client app. With OAuth support, this would be possible from desktop and mobile applications as well as other sites such as Flickr, without exchanging protected user data such as a password. Those updates could also be broadcast via XMPP in realtime, which I’ve done on another blog I was testing.

Things are a bit different for WordPressMU/BuddyPress installations. As you’ve seen above, I’ve got a BuddyPress site running that accepts users joining via Facebook connect. Functionality is limited to social networking and it still has some issues that need working on before it’s ready for every-day use (I’ve noted them on the BP forum). WPMU blogs (by which I mean blogs not the overall site) don’t allow new-user registrations so the blog adminstrator needs to sign up new users. Users registered via Facebook don’t have an email address associated with their account, so blog admins can’t add these types of users as the process requires a username and email address of a new or existing user.

However, by activating the right plugins, registered WPMU users (I’m thinking university staff and students) could participate in a group microblog using the P2 theme, LDAP and/or OpenID for login and XML-RPC and XMPP for remote publishing and receiving posts. It won’t be too long before you can send and receive WordPress posts via your GMail or Jabber account (on your iPhone/iPod) in realtime (hopefully with support for tagging), and all of that data is simply WordPress data and has RSS feeds hanging off every tag and wrapped around every post.

Just a thought.

ALT-C 2008: A different approach.

Joss Winn / September 10, 2008April 9, 2009 / Conferences, Open Source, Software, Web

Today, I took a different approach to the conference and relaxed. I usually take the approach of trying to attend as many sessions as possible and absorb and report back on as much as I can. However, I’ve found that this approach quickly leaves me exhausted and somewhat removed from the rest of the conference as it allows little time for reflection.

So, my third day in Leeds was a much more enjoyable and stimulating one as I attended sessions, picking up on one or two things that were being presented and following threads and tangents that I found online and from talking with people. One term that I’ve heard mentioned a few times is ‘lifestream’, that is, an aggregation of online activity into a timeline that can be shared with others. You can see my lifestream by going to this page. You’ll see that following a conversation I had at F-ALT08, I looked again at OpenID and setup my own personal website as an OpenID server, learning a great deal at the same time.

You can also see that I joined identi.ca, an open source microblogging site like Twitter, and found details on setting up Laconica, the software behind identi.ca, on my own server and potentially, the Learning Lab. My experience using Twitter at the conference has really demonstrated the value of microblogging within a defined community as a way of rapidly communicating one-to-many messages and engaging in large asynchronous conversations.

In the morning Digital Divide Slam session, we formed small groups and with two people I’d met previously at the fringe events, created a ‘performance’ that reflected on a form of digital divide. We chose ‘gender’, and produced this (prize winning) video which is now on YouTube.

During the second keynote, I drifted off and began to think about e-portfolios and aggregating our online social activity into a profile/portfolio that is controlled by the individual and is dynamically updated. I’d heard about the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), and spent time considering whether this could be used or adapted for aggregating a portfolio of work and experience. APML is primarily aimed at individuals’ relationship with advertisers and at a later F-ALT session was able to discuss the suitability of APML or an APML-like standard for aggregating a portfolio of work. Consequently, I’m developing an interest in this area and in other online relationships that can be made between people (see this link, too) and the data that we generate through purposeful and serendipitous online activity.

Having listened to quite a lot of discussion about web2.0 applications over the last few days, I’m even more pleased with the decision to use WordPress as a platform for blogging, web publishing and collaboration in the Learning Lab. With WordPress, we’re able to evaluate many of the latest social web technologies and standards through their plugin system. This flexible plugin and theming system has led to the development of an entire social networking platform based on WordPress, called BuddyPress, and because it’s basically WordPress with some specific plugins and clever use of a theme, it can use any of the available WordPress plugins to connect to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other popular web 2 services. I’m looking forward to watching BuddyPress develop.

In the evening, we attended the conference dinner at Headingley Cricket Club. It was a great location, with good food and excellent service and while sitting next to one of my digital slam partners, he showed me JoikuSpot, an application that turns a mobile phone into a wifi router. There on our dinner table, he ran Joiku on a 3G Nokia phone and provided wifi access to his iPod Touch. What a great way to share high speed network access among friends, while meeting at a cafe or park to discuss work or study.

I was impressed. The Learning Landscape had extended to the cricket ground.

OpenSim, OpenID and Open Microblogging

Joss Winn / September 10, 2008April 9, 2009 / Conferences, Open Source, Software, Web

My second day in Leeds for the ALT Conference 2008 and I’m really excited about three open source applications that I’d like us to evaluate when I return to Lincoln.

Yesterday’s OpenSim – A pre Second Life taster workshop demonstrated the potential of having our own OpenSim virtual environment, either as a way to orientate new users to Second Life or actually develop a Virtual World, confined to the university network.

Today’s Hood 2.0, it’s a Web 2 world out there, introduced Laconica to me. This is an open source microblogging service, that would allow us to effectively reproduce a Twitter-like service, but within the confines of the university. I think for us, this has an advantage over Twitter because of the privacy issues surrounding the use of public microblogging services. It does also have the ability to hook into Twitter (and soon, Facebook), if desired.

During the F-ALT08 Edublogger session this evening, I met David, who works on identity systems as Eduserv. We talked about OpenID and how it can easily be set up to serve as an identity provider for one person or an entire organisation. I’ve taken his advice and now run an OpenID server on my personal website (it took less than 30 minutes to install and test). I’ve also been looking at OpenID plugins for WordPress and indeed the Learning Lab blogs could act as OpenID providers for anyone with a blog. I need to speak to ICT Services about the issues surrounding this on an institutional scale, but for me personally, I’m really impressed with how simple the process was to regain more control over my own identity online.

Finally, on a different note, the Keynote this morning was by Hans Rosling of Gapminder. He gave a very similar presentation to the one on TED, which I encourage you to watch for beautiful visualisations of statistical data relating to social, economic and environmental development.