Comments on: A Sketch of OFace on Vimeo

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:43:28 +0000

my pet monkey could interface that ;> man, ‘m excited to see where this is going!

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:08:47 +0000

Austin -
Just last night my friend Thomas was talking about Google Latitude. His complaint was that you have to explicitly add friends you want to share your location with. He wants something simpler – in his words “when I’m on I’m on, when I’m off I’m off.” When he’s on, he wants to share with everyone.

The mechanics of OFace are completely different of course – but it raises the question – will users be comfortable with the overhead of setting it up, and then ’switching.’ At least, comfortable enough for something like this to catch on.

I think it’s a great start – your ubiquity script seems to make switching pretty low friction. Also – I rather liked OFace until I started associating it with the Office Space scene

By: ozten

ozten — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:57:38 +0000

Hi Todd, thanks for the input! Your correct that the way Patty has “faceted” her content will determine which “hats” you have to put on the explore her posts. But you can switch back to any of your facets or a new one at any time.

How would a “bottom up” approach work? With machine learning? A centralized taxonomy? The technical part you describe is exactly how this experiment works… A Ubiquity pageLoad_ command ( equivalent to Grease Monkey ) processes the page and calls back to the oface server and then facets the page, hiding and revealing interesting content.

It’s possible that the current implementation will do more harm than good, but that’s the fun of experimentation

I have (lightly) followed DiSo’s work. I think it’s great and the idea of a Dashboard is rad. OFace is highly compatible with their vision. If it is a successful experiment, I would love to be hosted within a larger open social networking organization, but we need to kick the tires first.

Thanks again for your time and I’ll check out your work too.

BTW the original plans included a hardware device for switching facets through the day like a SimonSays. It would stay illuminated so you knew you had your “Work” hat on or your “LOLCatzLova” etc. I gots no hardware skillz so that will have to wait.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:55:26 +0000

Interesting. I have been working on noise reduction too:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/do_you_want_this_activity_stre.php

My original concept that uses any mobile phone’s D-pad to reduce noise:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronin691/3132754199/

I guess the most immediate thing I noticed, that may be a problem, is that OFace dictates, top down, how the content is filtered. I, as a subscriber to Patty’s activity stream must take the cards I am dealt and be totally dependent on Patty’s taxonomy skills – which she may not posses.

A more practical bottom up approach could be a simple Grease Monkey script that I configure and performs the same meta function without Patty’s input, or knowledge for that matter. Above nerdy Grease Monkey script could be a simple FireFox extension that performs the filtering.

It’s important to note that I am not discounting OFace, just wondering if its misuse may do more damage than good ( like how myspace pages become unusable after someone “decorates” their home page with glitter graphics, RockYou slide shows, etc. ).

Question: Have you had a chance to look at the work being done be DiSo? It is attempting to address similar issues but up a few levels.

http://diso-project.org/

http://www.slideshare.net/factoryjoe/activity-streams-973210

OFace is a good start! I hope what I have written here has not come off as rude, I am just really passionate about activity streams.