buddycloud

The bags are being packed, iPods charged and presentations prepared.

Tuomas is off to Portland Oregon to work with some of the finest minds in Social Networking at the Federated Social Networking conference. We'll be presenting the XMPP->web federation work we've been developing over the last weeks.

buddycloud is working with companies like StatusNet (who have generously helped cover our travel costs - thanks guys!), Facebook, Twitter, Google, Mozilla, Tumblr and a whole bunch more to build the future of social networking: federated networks. We're excited and it's going to be awesome for buddycloud users who will now be able to connect to their friends on any other social network.

We've been doing our homework already: we have working federation with Identica using the Ostatus suite of protocols. We hope to soon have this working across all social networks.

Evan has posted two great blog entries on what federated social networking is and on the features for companies and the users that inhabit the social networks that they run.

We will post our presentation here once it is ready, and Tuomas will be broadcasting to the #ostatus channel on buddycloud.

This and other public events are always updated to the buddycloud events calendar.

If you want to meet up the best way to contact Tuomas is on +33 63 435 5967.

Finally sent off all the design images for CSS-isation. Now, the weekend can begin. Cutting begins on Monday, then it's time for integration with our XMPP server using PHP and javascript.

Here's a quick copy and paste with some editing from our chatroom about how the channels work on the web.

Simon Tennant

15:48

let's say you click on the blue koski@buddycloud.com in the middle column.

here's my logic of what should happen:

1) middle column changes to view the channelkoski@buddycloud.com

2) right column's first pane changes to show channel details for koski...

right columns's second pane now shows followers of koski...

right columns third pane shows media forkoski@buddycloud.com

Tuomas

15:50

header changes as well, right?

Simon Tennant

15:50

header changes correct

and we rewrite the URL to the address bar url for his channel.

and page title.

and channel details in the header image

*OR* we just show a "sorry that channel is only avaliable to followers"

*or* we show a sorry you need to be logged in to view/follow this channel.

Tuomas

15:52

we can show it before we change the channel

Simon Tennant

15:52

where?

Tuomas

15:52

some short of alert.

i'm not sure if we can even disable links that are not "there" for the user ... can be a bit tricky to do maybe

maybe it's better not to go that way yet.

Simon Tennant

15:53

I don't suggest we do that a) more complex b) alerts are horrible and force the users to do something.

this way I can always hit the back button.

Tuomas

15:54

i don't like to end up getting to deadends

Simon Tennant

15:54

the we show a little padlock next to the users jid

this is what I think is clever with this design (if you don't mind me getting excited for a minute here)

Tuomas

15:56

not at all :)

Simon Tennant

15:56

the RHS colum starts with a box showing channel details

in this case imagine that I click on "produces 14 channels"

that then closes "filmgirl@buddycloud.com channel details" to a little grey box and underneath opens a new box called "channels thatfilmgirl@buddycloud.com produces"

clicking back on the small"filmgirl@buddycloud.com channel details" box expands it up again and I could then click on something else about her.

sort of like a vertical breadcrumb trail.

I think that's quite a neat way to navigate around all the information that we have on our users, places, media, moderators etc.

and we only need the following basic designs or it "details box" same box can be reused for private and topic channels, a media/people/channels broswer box, a placelist box, and a map box.

with just those 4 elements we can access any inormation in a standardised way and reuse templates nicely.

Tuomas

16:01

yes, cool idea

as soon as i finish the other tasks, i can do a working proof of concept of that if you want

Simon Tennant

16:01

blue links always jump you around and open a box below your current one.

pink links do action and report back on the status bar. "You have asked to follow 'big londond cocks', your request has been sent to the moderator"

that would be great Tuomas - it's sort of an infinite explorer

the other "new" bit that we need is the following list on the left hand side

I should explain that a bit:

it does two things depending on whether you are logged in or not -

not logged in: bubbles active channels to the top when they are posted to (not sure how we initially populate a list of say 20 channels)

logged in: same as mobile client - channels with location or posting changes in them bubble up.

so I am quite happy with this design — visually it may not be the best, but I think it lets users explore much mroe of the product while also showing potential users lots of current activity with the LHS bubbling

Tuomas: I'll have a go at sortying out the topic replies in a bit.