Google Profiles just launched a new feature that's too dorky and obscure to warrant an official "Google blog" blog post, so the product manager on it said, "Brad, you're dorky... you should post it. You do Social Graph API stuff. The right people would read your blog, right?" (roughly)

So sure, I'll blawg it here.

Google Profiles now have XFN rel="me" attributes on links. Again. (It had them briefly for awhile but it was done grossly so they were removed...)

Why is this important? rel="me" links are the glue of your social identity online. They tie together all your sites & accounts, letting other sites know where to find you. (Of course, if you don't want to be found, or have different personas: don't make links between them!). But if you're reading this post you already know all this, so I'll shut up.

How does it work in Google Profiles now? While I don't work directly on Profiles, I sit near them and like to voice opinions on things. So here's the new design, which you can blame me for parts of if you hate it:

• assume users don't care about rel="me" and it's super dorky.
• do the best possible right thing by default, but let dorks override it.
• assume users will use products in ways you didn't imagine (aka "wrong")
• assume users will add Profiles links to their favorite websites, bands, friends, etc., not just "their" pages on the web.
• hide the rel="me" choice by default when adding a link
• show the rel="me" choice if they go back and press "edit" on it
• track two new bits per-link:
  1. does the user care about rel="me"? (i.e. are they dorky?)
  2. if so, does the user want this link to be rel="me"?
• when rendering the Profiles page HTML, consider those two bits:
  • if the dork bit is on, use the value of the second bit (whether they chose rel="me" on this link)
  • if the bit is off, just guess. But guess somewhat conservatively. We can adjust these heuristics over time (a lot of which are based on sgnodemapper), as most the links will be in do-not-care mode.

So, my dorky friends, you can now fix the rel="me" state on your links by going to the editor and pressing "Edit" on the links and checking their state. Be sure to hit "Save" at the bottom.

Enjoy.

(And keep in mind that the real utility of all this comes later. Consider yourself a dorky earlier adopter.)

There's a bit of accuracy in this ValleyWag story, in that I'm leaving SixApart. But the reasons ValleyWag cites for me leaving aren't so accurate.

Yes, I'm bored, but that boredom isn't SixApart's fault. I've been doing this whole LiveJournal thing for about 9 years now. Even though I haven't been working on LiveJournal itself for perhaps a year or more now, people still think I am, and it's probably time to distance myself from it and move on... I just need a change. LiveJournal's in good hands -- I'm not worried about it. I haven't touched the code or the servers in ages, so I know it's fine.

I've really enjoyed working with everybody at SixApart, especially on public projects like MogileFS, Perlbal, OpenID, djabberd, Gearman, TheSchwartz, etc. But all that stuff basically just works now^[1], solving the problems they were meant to solve, and I find myself out of new things to work on.

Since I've always been just kinda been a floater engineer at SixApart, never really part of (or head of) a group, I just feel a bit detached now without something obviously broken consuming all of my time & attention. There are plenty of other groups at SixApart having fun working on other problems, so I could join one of those groups, but I think this is just a good point in my life to change directions a bit.

My apologies that there's not more drama to this whole story. :)

[1] Yes, things can always be better. But relatively good, compared to the past.

[	Tags	|	livejournal, work	]
[	Current Mood	|	sad	]

czircon

LiveJournal is really going to shit lately. The "sponsored communities" are bad enough; now we have to put up with ads on the front page as well? And not just banner ads, but ads with Flash and fake forms to fill out because they think it's more likely to trick you into clicking on it? Ugh. Unfortunately I'm pretty much stuck here.

  1  AU
  2  . New South Wales
  3  . . Sydney
  4  . Victoria
  5  . . Melbourne
  6  DE
  7  PH
  8  RU
  9  . Moscow
 10  . Saint Petersburg
 11  UA
 12  . Kiev
 13  UK
 14  . England
 15  . . London
 16  . Northern Ireland
 17  . Scotland
 18  . Wales
 19  US
 20  . CA
 21  . . Bay Area
 22  . . . North Bay
 23  . . . . Marin
 24  . . . . . Sausalito
 25  . . . . . Tiburon
 26  . . . . Napa
 27  . . . . Solano
 28  . . . . Sonoma
 29  . . . San Francisco
 30  . OR
 31  . . Portland Metro Area
 32  . . . Beaverton
 33  . . . Portland
 34  . WA
 35  . . Seattle

Side story: my car recently recommended I drive like 3 times as far because its stupid navigation can only find the nearest junkfood restaurants as-the-crow-flies and the location 9 miles north (along my direction of travel) was farther than the 8 miles as-the-crow-flies which actually was 5.5 miles north, 5.5 miles east (out of the way), eat, 5.5 west (back to free way). So 11 miles wasted. Yay quadtree!

(don't worry, the humans won and belayed the computer's order)