The Brian Shaler Blog

I thought I would share this video I made after an interesting lunch encounter:

It would be great to accompany this video with a screencast of the post-production, which is definitely at least 50% of the work for a photo like this. Unfortunately, that would be additional time for a project that took over 4 months to wrap up as-is. Yesterday, I finally edited and posted footage from November of Adam Nollmeyer of Acme Photography and myself taking photos from a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles.

The resulting photo:

Special thanks to Andrew Hyde, Brent Spore, Daniel Burka, Gary Vaynerchuk, Willo O’Brien, Jim Long, Justine Ezarik, Joshua Strebel, Ward Andrews, Marcus Nelson, Rob Sandie, Matt Mullenweg, and Thor Müller for not holding back!

You are cordially invited to watch and participate in a LIVE web demo of XID at http://ustream.tv/channel/brianshaler, starting at (about) 1:00pm MST/Arizona Saturday 2/2/2008.

Update: For time conversion and the current MST time, check out timeanddate.com

What is XID?

The XID project is intended to provide a free, open, and decentralized method of sharing your online presence with your friends.

The most important thing about social networks is being connected with your friends. By storing and filtering your friends’ XID information, you will easily be able to see which of your friends already have accounts on any given social network. No email address book importing. No searching for each of your friends’ names. You don’t need to rely on the web site’s friend-finding mechanisms if you have XID.

What will be Demo’d?
XID is a platform, and when the platform is launched, so will a set of complementary applications. The applications involved are not yet complete. I will be showing and explaining what has been completed so far. Currently, there is an optional web application that is intended to allow new users to quickly and easily set up an XID card without looking at any code. There is also a Firefox extension that allows users to import and manage their friends’ XID cards.

Web Application
The web application consists of these key features:

• Registration/Login: Create a card and come back to edit it
• 3-step process of creating an XID card: Save basic personal information (Name, Location, etc), contact information, and profile URLs (all optional)
• Profile URLs: People who use the same screen name on multiple sites can add them to their XID card with one click
• Public URL for XID card: Give this URL to their friends

Those features have been at least partially implemented and they can be previewed right now. There will be more features in the near future.

Firefox Extension
The Firefox sidebar extension consists of these key features:

• Add: Paste a friend’s URL and the extension will retrieve the friend’s XID card and add it to a local/client-side database
• Friends List: Display all friends and show how many social networks they are on
• Networks List: Display all networks friends are on, in order of popularity
• Friend Detail View: Display all social networks a specific friend is on and provide links to the user’s profiles
• Network Detail View: Display all friends on a given social network
• Recent Activity: Shows if friends have added or removed any social networks

Again, those are features that are at least partially implemented and there will be more to come.

NOT Just a Tour
There is no scheduled end time for this Live web demo. After an initial tour is complete, I will discuss current and future features with anyone in the UStream chat room (UStream account NOT required to participate!). I will also work on writing code to implement features while discussing them. Live.

At the expense of a little productivity, I will attempt to multi-task.

As the dot-com bubble had just begun to burst, one could hear a faint whisper that the next bubble forming.

A booming industry experiencing rapid growth usually appears to be on the verge of a major collapse. With an industry that is constantly growing at a wild pace, bubble talk follows you where ever you go.

A few years later, Myspace sells for half a billion dollars. After that, YouTube sells for $1.65 billion. Each new astronomical valuation breathes life and vitality into the bubble talkers.

Talking about bubble talk can get pretty boring. Luckily, we now have bubble videos!

This reminds me of “The Internet Stars Are Viral”

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