Hueniverse

New Adventure, Same Quest

Ok, the startup is over – now what? The first thing after deciding to end my startup was to figure out what I wanted to do next. I knew I wanted to stay in the web world, but given my wide range of past experiences I didn’t know what role I really wanted. This was new territory for me as it was the first time in 17 years that I didn’t already know what I wanted to do next (and had it lined up and ready to go). So I asked myself a simple question: what was the most fun part of working on Nouncer? To which I had a quick and easy answer: OAuth.

Working on the OAuth specification, talking about it, promoting it, helping others to understand and implement it, and most importantly being part of the community, were the most exciting tasks this past year. Since I didn’t think anyone will pay me to sit all day having fun writing OAuth, XRDS-Simple, and other related specifications, I was looking for opportunities where I would at least be able to continue working on open standards in a small part capacity. Turns out I was wrong.

It is therefore my great pleasure to announce that I will be joining Yahoo!’s Social Platform team in the newly created role of Open Web Evangelist. Turns out someone does want to pay me to spend my days working on OAuth and other exciting open standards! The Social Platform team is lead by Michael Curtis and focuses on the social directory, social graph activation, the vitality platform, and the universal profile among other things. All this with the perfect timing of the Y!OS announcement (Yahoo! Open Strategy).

The Last AnNounce(r)ment

Two years is a long time, especially when spent building a startup from the ground up. My most exciting professional adventure to date has reached its conclusion last month when I decided to pull the plug on Nouncer, my attempt at building a microblogging web service. The Nouncer story started with an idea and hunt for logo, evolved into a business with some general directions about a financial model, and materialized into a big chunk of code – 150,509 lines to be exact.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part III

There used to be a big difference between API access and regular human-oriented HTML access: the speed in which requests are made. When a request is made via a browser, there is inherit delay from human interaction, browser response, page rendering, and fetching of images. Most of this is gone once a machine makes the call. However, with recent improvement in browser technology and the wide use of AJAX techniques on the client side, even the human-readable pages can make API calls to render pages.

Scalability plays a central role when designing the ways in which data can be requested from a service, be it via an API call or HTML page request. Both types fetch raw data, process it, and then format it into a presentation format such as HTML, XML, JSON, etc. In the case of a server-rendered HTML page, all the different requests are made internally, hidden from the user, and a single page is returned. If the page uses AJAX scripts, the browser makes multiple API calls to fetch individual data sets, but the server still has to fetch the raw data, process it, and format it. It is the size of the batch that makes the difference.

OAuth Discovery Draft 2 Released with Vendors Support

It’s always gratifying to announce new specifications or new drafts of existing efforts. OAuth Discovery has been in development for over five months and has matured a great deal since its initial introduction at the Internet Identity Workshop. I am happy to announce the availability of the OAuth Discovery 1.0 Draft 2 specification which is also the first implementation of the recently announced XRDS-Simple format.

What makes this announcement significant is that the new draft is already implemented and deployed by FireEagle (a Yahoo! Brickhouse service), Ma.gnolia, and Get Satisfaction – three leaders in the OAuth community. On the development tools front, Mediamatic will release initial support for discovery early next week with full support due early May in their OAuth PHP library.