Alcides Fonseca

Yahoo has lanched Fire Eagle, a way of providing your location to several services. Good news to Python Hackers, Steve Marshall has published his bindings to the Fire Eagle API. Also in the Python world, Simon Willison has done a really cool mashup envolving FireEagle and Wikipedia (along with some Google Stuff) sticking it all inside a Django Project. And he also explains how he made it.

Among the best of the web I found a link to Richard Crowley’s blog. I found there three cool hacks, specially the last two. The first is PownceFS and implementation of your Pownce friends archives as a filesystem. Systems like this and like DropBox, that connect the desktop and the web are stuff that I believe in. Oh, and take a look at TarPipe when it comes out (or earlier at Take Off!).

The other two are some UserScripts to improve you Google Reader experience. I use it as the my major source of information (email being only for private stuff and twitter… you can’t really call it information, can you?) but I archive stuff in my delicious account, so now I have what I’ve been looking for in a while: being able to bookmark posts directly to Delicious inside Google Reader.

The last one, is another script to see that original link for that post but inside GoogleReader, which I find very handy to comment a post, or see some youtube video GReader insists on not parsing.

Yeah, there’s missing only Microsoft for having all the buzzwords in this post’s title. But I won’t be discussing that polemical bid.

Yahoo has launched their 0penID support and I hope the beta there means it’s going to be improved!

I’m doing some OpenID-related stuff and I’m wondering if I should recommend Yahoo as a OpenID provider. First of all, you need to activate OpenID in you account (just like with Blogger). So allowing the users just to enter their URLs and login would be perfect, but I guess they are just doing this for some stats or so. But for regular users having to active something may make them think twice (could be good or not).

One thing that a multi-website entity like yahoo did was to allow users to choose their OpenID url. So I can pick between me.yahoo.com/alcides and my flickr URL. That’s very sweet from Yahoo since they are admitting having flickr in your URL is cooler than the crazy Yahoo. But I find a problem here. Isn’t the “id” in OpenID for identity? http://flickr.com/photos/alcidesfonseca doesn’t have anything to do with my identity, it’s just a place to display my photos. But http://flickr.com/people/alcidesfonseca does! It has all my personal information, even my hCard! So, Mr Yahoo/Flickr Folks, why do we use the photos page instead of our profile page? I know you have a rel=“me” link to the profile page, but it’s just not the same thing!

First, Yahoo (and Flickr) will be OpenID 2.0 providers starting 30th this month. Google announced that Blogger is now working a provider but only if you allow it. I really don’t know why they are asking people to check that damn checkboxes, maybe because of their enourmous database. There is not a list of trusts you can manage, for now you just can add one. At least they are already consuming openID. I wished I would not need a yahoo account to have my own space at Flickr. But that’s not for this moment yet.

Microsoft is getting late here. Wouldn’t they like to have the url id.live.com/alcidesfonseca spread all over the internet?

I’ve already talked about one TED presentation. Well, today I’m talking about another conference network of the same kind. Pop!Tech shares the same purpose as TED: to spread extraordinary ideas through remarkable people that have the power to change the world.

I am following the Pop!Casts provided by Yahoo and I am delighted with the presentations I heard. I suggest you take a look and hear a couple of them.

Before putting my hands in the ejaki project, the previous version of the website was pretty old-fashion but used Google Maps API. Wow I though, but then I saw it was only used to get thumbnails for each ejaki (Point of Interest). Well, in my opinion, the map should be the center of the website, just like it is on the mobile app, since Geography is the background of our shared information.

First I had to evaluate the existing APIs: Google Maps was indeed good, proved by the fact it is the most used, and includes features like GeoCoder, remote GML overlays, traffic and driving directions. This should be useful features to add in the future for our application.

Yahoo Maps AJAX (Flash was not an option) was pretty good, with almost all the features as Google’s but with integration with Y! Pipes and GeoRSS. This extras were not relevant since we intend to use only our database (in which other information can be added).

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth shown to be a really nice platform. Microsoft is known by being left behind in the web2.0 age, but this one is from far the most powerful engine. Since 3d visualization, “Birds eye”, powerful information finder, and all the features from both Yahoo’s and Google’s APIs. But there as a downside that matters. Since this is a scientific research project, we don’t like to use proprietary formats, and Microsoft is known for that. We wouldn’t like the possibility of in the future their API would only work on IE.

Open Layers is a free and opensource library, a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As an opensource alternative it would be nice to use and foment it, but it’s too poor for now. No Satellite view, no geocoding and nothing that would make it more useful for our users. Maybe in the future in another project…

As so, we sticked to Google Maps since it had the basics and some extras that might be useful in the future. Later working with it, I found out it was really nice, but one function was missing: To set the zoom depending on the geocoding answer, and so here you have it for free ;)