NoseRub

I talked about NoseRub 0.6 a few days ago and was very excited about it. Today, I made the first huge steps toward that release. The main thing we want to achieve with that is, that you can add any URL as a contact!

I repeat this, because it's so important: you will be able to add any URL as a contact!

What does this mean? This will mean, you can add davidrecordon.com as your contact and see what he is doing in your network's social stream. You also automatically get updates about new services he is adding to his site. You will also be able to add users from FriendFeed.com to your contacts and thus get informed about what is going on on their sites.

We do this by parsing Microformats information from these sites. Namely hCard and XFN. For even better results, we use the Socialgraph API from Google to examine the XFN.

On the screenshot in this post, you can see how this looks like. You see Davids photo there, as this is made available through hCard on his website. The broken image left to him is from brianoberkirch.com. That is, because we currently don't copy the images to our own server (but we will do! we are no traffic stealers!) and only David has the same naming convention for the small image, as NoseRub has :-)

You can also see David's updates in the social stream, as the updates from Jörg Kantel are. I just added his account from FriendFeed.com as my contact. We have to think about what to do with the feed from FriendFeed here, as we already accessed the single accounts. But this are just some minor issues that can be solved.

But what really important is, that this is a real distributed social network! And your contacts do not even need to know what NoseRub is. Just add them as your contacts and be able to follow their activities from that moment on. And if you want to, you just install NoseRub on your own server and no one but you has full control over your social network.

We want to release NoseRub 0.6 later this month. Although a lot of work is already done, we need to polish some things and also may add one or two surprises :-)