University of Washington Emerging Technology

Steven is our speaker for our last Spark Session of the academic year. Feedsync is an Open Spec for Synchronization through Atom and RSS.

His team is connected to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.

Feedsync was called simple file sharing for RSS. Oh, also Microsoft announced a new service recently, called Live Mesh and it has FeedSync baked in deep. (ugh, I hate that term, but it works.)

With feedsync the data is multi-master meaning it can come from and go to anywhere. All endpoints get the same result, eventually. As he points out, if I shut my laptop lid for two weeks it will be out of sync, but when I open up, the machine will sync to RSS feed.

It is protocol independent, lightweight, extensible and preserves conflicting data. which means that it doesn’t just keep the last one, or a merged version, but saves all version. They are hoping there will be creative Commons and Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

What are other ways to sync? iTunes to Ipod, Phone/PDA to PC, rsync and some of the new ways (sugarsync, dropbox, etc) are some examples of point to point syncing.

In the xml, some of the new tags, focus on giving it a unique id. URNs or other methods are ok. There is also sync metadata there too. there is also some history tags to differentiate who did what when and on what device, so that you can tell the update you did on your phone with the one you did on your laptop.

feedSync is not domain specific, meaning it works with email, music, web pages, voice data, etc. For example you can update your calendar from an evite or update the evite from your calendar. FeedSync takes care of the communication between the two services.
Here’s the audio recording for this first part of the talk. (length = 21:26)

He gives a demonstration where he adds a note with some to-do items on one laptop back at his desk via VPN and then goes the to laptop here at the podium, signs in to the service, and the notes app has his notes from the remote machine. When there is a conflict in editing, the notes gives you an alert.

they have examples that work in python, and .net.

For a real life example, he is talking about a project with a NGO in Afghanistan. The group needed to get information from office to office but the infrastructure in the country is minimal and slow. So the keep their data in MS Access files, and sync the data via a server connected by satellites. they figured out a way to send access databases via SMS. Who’d a thunk?
Here’s the audio recording for this second part of the talk. (length = 37:57)

Now he’s talking about Live Mesh, a technology preview announced by Microsoft, with a capacity 10,000 users who signed up for the service in the initial 2 hours that it was available.

Live Mesh is like a central station or desktop in the cloud. you connect all your devices to this desktop in the cloud. One Application is Live Folders, a shared folder across all your machines.
Here’s the audio recording for the last part of the talk. (length = 20:08)
Here are his slides:

Feedsync Presentation (ppt)

FeedSync Presentation (pptx)

I have been tracking several sites that are changing the game in how companies are communicating with their customers. Companies are using these Web 2.0 sites to get ideas and feedback while customers are making their voice heard with companies that they do business with.

I can’t put it any better than Get Satisfaction who offers this type of feedback service as a generic free service for any company to use.

“Get Satisfaction is a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.”

Get Satisfaction
Dell’s IdeaStorm
IdeaScope
Shoulddothis.com
Starbucks
SharepointPedia

Take a look at these various examples. I think the UW can find lots of value with this new model of openness for its community. An obvious example is giving our students a new voice so they can tell the UW what they think as a strong community.

I am attending the Web 2.0 Expo this week. Take a look at the sessions and if there is something you want me to attend - please let me know. I can’t promise I can make everything but I will do my best.

You can hit me back via comments on this post.

Attendees:

Melinda Van Wingen
Ryan Becker
Tony Chang
Ryan Ositis
David Cox
Zach Hale
Andre Tan
William Washington
Jason Civjan
Jason Pittman
Lauren Manes

We mainly talked about various social computing activities happening around campus. Truth be told Tony did much of the talking so we definitely got to do something about that next time

Facebook related:

Scott Macklin will be contacting folks shortly on kicking off the Facebook Courses App based on the Catalyst Survey sent out to find collaborators

UW Marketing has created an official UW Facebook page. Elise Daniel is working on the project and will be talking about her efforts at our next meeting.

UWTV has been thinking Facebook pages as well however they are still in the early stages of brainstorming and planning.

The science studies network (SSNET) is in the midst of creating a Facebook tagging app for researchers to find one another thru a tag cloud of research interests.

Community Platform:

There has been an increase in interest for investigating and using community platforms on campus. Here is a recent eTech blog post on what community platforms are. The folks in SMVTT first introduced the platform on campus and eTech has been actively evaluating various products with the hope to integrate it into our new UW Technology web presence. Folks at Kexp, OIM, SMVTT, Catalyst and UW Technology have shown lots of interest in this space so we will be working together on finding common interests and see where things go from there. If anyone else is interested please let me know.

A technology core for social computing on campus:

We shared thoughts on building out a technology core for social computing on campus that others depts could leverage.

We are not sure if there are strong use cases to support this since many of these services are already out there on the internet but we think some exploratory research could be done here.

Ryan Becker has offered to help look into the UW Social Profile need since its a key component to any social software strategy on campus. Awesome! Thanks Ryan.

Blogging:

Some folks around campus are asking if a central blogging service for the UW would be worthwhile? Based on our SIG discussions we think there is value in a UW hosted blogging service for security, marketing/branding reasons vs using free internet services like blogspot. Folks shared thoughts on preferring the use of a washington.edu url, a common branded blog look and feel, as well as some peace of mind that data is protected and stored at the UW.

SIG Group Updates:

We have opted to do the following to increase the collaboration with our SIG.

1. Start a new email distribution list: https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/socialsoftware

2. Create regular monthly meetings

3. Look into Facebook pages vs groups for our SIG

Tony will be participating on the UW Web Council steering committee on behalf of our Social Software SIG

University of Washington Social Software Special Interest Group
You can find us on Facebook and you can join our email list

So I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5 today. Went fast and easy (too easy.) I also moved our MYSQL to the central hosted service. That was easy too.

But we have a problem with our HTML authentication plugin. The guy who wrote it, Daniel Westermann-Clark, down at University of Florida is aware of the problem, but hasn’t had the time to fix it yet. Drats.

The use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools have become a powerful force on the internet and on campus. The UW has an opportunity to discover this new technology landscape and find ways to leverage, adapt, and integrate it securely with our computing environment.

We need to take the time to research and study this new world as it relates to the UW and then strategize on how to harness its capabilities. An example would be leveraging the Facebook platform for greater reach to current, former, and prospective UW students to better understand our student population. Another example is taking Web 2.0 concepts and integrate them into our IT services and infrastructure, such as exploring a social profile, tagging and/or rating system, to build collective social intelligence into our systems.

eTech and interested participants from around the UW would be investigating Social Networking and Software technologies in order to establish a strategy around this space. There will be several projects below which will be supporting this effort. eTech’s involvement is distributed among consulting, research, meeting facilitation, technology evaluation and integration design work. They include:

Social Software Special Interest Group (SIG), which is now being led by UW Technology eTech and College of Education

• Developing a shared UW community of those who believe that social software has a stake in empowering the future for the UW
• Keeping a pulse of activities and knowledge around campus

UW Technology functional technology website
Developer Connection 2.0 website

• Using the opportunity of these already existing web design efforts to pilot UW use of community features such as blogging, ratings and feedback, news feeds, social bookmarks, quick polls, profiles and forums.
• Evaluating, integrating, and prototyping technology platforms to help support those new features.

Technology Exploration and Discovery

- In partnership with various UW teams including Catalyst and OIM

• OpenID
  • Researching its use to augment current UW authentication identities and system

• Social Profiles
  • Researching the possibility and integration design of a campus profile system for applications

• Social Graphs
  • Creating a better picture of your social and networking community

• Social Enterprise Feedback Management
  • Researching the many platform and tools which allow users to submit and rate feedback in a Web 2.0 way using social voting and idea submission.

Social Software and Networking White Paper & Strategy

• Providing a white paper to open up the dialogue on campus about decisions we will have to make about the utilization of social networking sites and web 2.0 tools on campus.