Paul Hagon

Over the past couple of months I’ve been building a little application using the API’s from the DigitalNZ project. DigitalNZ is a collaboration between government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups to expose and share their combined digital content. Part of their plan to expose their data is to provide a publically available API for developers to expose their content in ways they may not have thought about.

Typically, a large dataset has a search box as it’s main interface. I wanted to get right away from that approach and create an engaging interface. This uses a map interface to allow the user to freely explore the content.

It currently uses a combination of API’s from Google and Flickr to convert a latitude and longitude from the map to obtain a place name. It then displays a shapefile from Flickr to approximate the area being searched, and returns a list of relevant results from DigitalNZ. Since I started work on this, the data returned from both of these API’s have been released under a Creative Commons license (Yahoo have released their geoplanet data and Flickr have release their shapefile data). I’ll end up incorporating these releases into the application rather than relying on the API’s for the functionality.

Explore the contents of DigitalNZ.

A little while ago, work upgraded our voicemail system. This new system is a nightmare to use.

When you are designing a system you need to give a priority level to all the tasks that are available and create a heirarchy. Not all tasks are equal. For a voicemail system the key task that is being carried out 99% of the time is checking a message that has been received. Other tasks like creating a message (although initially is important, is hardly ever used again) do not have a priority level the same as other interactions.

Have a listen to what is required to receive a message (MP3 file).

It takes nearly 50 seconds before I can receive a message and it buries that option way down in the menu structure. It is also set up that I have to use a different key combination to get to the menu choice I want (for instance, I can’t keep pressing 1 to get to the key function).

Give key tasks higher priority in the navigational layout and make them simple to get to.

This morning an interesting Tweet arrived on a subject that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately:

there seem to be more people using twitter apps than twitter web. What is twitter doing wrong?
@katykat

In April 2008, ReadWriteWeb carried out a study How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients that showed that only 56% of Twitter users used the web interface. My gut feeling tells me that that figure is lower now, given the growth of use of devices like the iPhone. 

This is a perfectly valid question to be asking in the context of a traditional website. But Twitter isn’t a website, it’s more than that, it’s a service like email. You are not restricted to interacting with your email via one particular method. Likewise, by building upon Twitter using their API’s you are not restricted to using their service in the one and only way that you can, you have choice in how you interact with their service. The important thing isn’t the website, it is the service. Twitter.com could basically become a one page website and as long as the API’s were maintained the service would continue as normal for much of the twitter community. The user has a variety of choices in interacting with the service based upon their personal preferences. They can choose the relevant application based upon interface they like and the features they are going to use.

Flickr, despite having a far greater number of API’s available, hasn’t followed the same path as Twitter. Most people still interact with Flickr via the standard web interface. This is mostly due to their terms of use which forbids people replicating the user experience of Flickr:

Use Flickr APIs for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of Flickr.com

Rev Dan Catt who up until recently worked at Flickr said:

I’ve often joked that I could probably get more stuff done working with the Flickr API outside of Flickr than inside.

 So to answer the question, I really don’t think Twitter is doing anything wrong, they are doing everything right.

What can Libraries learn from what Twitter and to a lesser degree Flickr, are doing? Can we start to think about our catalogue (or other core services) not as a website, but as a service. The website version of the catalogue may just be one aspect of the delivery mechanism for the information we wish to distribute. Why can’t we look at providing our services to our users in any way they wish to be able to interact with them?

Why can’t we provide specialised access to our catalogues to specific user groups, so they (or anyone) can create:

• a simplified interface for high school users without all the complex features they don’t use
• allow an historical society to create an application based upon their needs
• an complex view of the catalogue for academics or librarians
• a visual or geographic based search
• a social network based around the catalogue

Institutions like the Brooklyn Museum and collaborative efforts such as DigitalNZ are providing their content to developers to do exactly this sort of thing. It’s very early days still and it will be interesting to see what starts to develop.

Let’s start thinking about interacting with the service, not the website.

I’ve recently just come back from 5 weeks holidaying in South America. I left with the intention of going totally internet cold turkey for this period of time. I wasn’t going to actively seek out the hotels computers or an internet cafe to check my emails, update twitter or facebook, or even upload any holiday photos to Flickr. I wanted to spend my time enjoying where I was going & leaving the world behind for a bit.

That really didn’t last long. Unlike Australia, I discovered that everywhere I went was bathed in free wi-fi networks. Most of the hotels I stayed in had free wi-fi, if it wasn’t in the rooms, it was in the lobby & dining areas. Cafes, ice cream stores, bookshops and even many town squares had free wi-fi. This was common throughout big cities like Buenos Aires and Lima, and not quite as common, but still there in smaller towns like Cusco, Puno, Potosi and Sucre (in Peru and Bolivia).  It was these smaller towns that really surprised me. They may not have had paved roads, but they had good internet connections.

Despite being nearly connected the whole time I was away, I purposefully avoided checking things too much. I took an iPod touch with me, which was the perfect traveling companion. When I felt like it I could check email and update twitter and that was about all I did. The news at home was irrelevant, I was in some magnificent countryside and I wanted to experience that, not a computer screen.

While I was away, the world kept ticking along, I was just oblivious to most of it and it really didn’t matter. I didn’t miss anything too urgent and I felt healthier by the end of it.

A few important things did happen while I was away. The Powerhouse Museum nominated my Then & Now mashup for a “Best of web” award at the Museums and the Web conference – thank you. I was also asked by the State Library of New South Wales to present at their reference@the metcalfe seminar for NSW public libraries in May. 

I’m now firmly back into my regular routine of being connected with the world as much as possible. Is it better? It’s different and I now find I can switch off a little easier than I could a couple of months ago.

Yesterday Ma.gnolia had a total failure and everyone’s accounts and the data they had added became inaccessible from both the standard web interface and via the API. In December, Pownce closed down, and in January Google announced it was closing down Google Notebook, Dodgeball and Jaiku. Users are always getting used to seeing the regular appearance of twitters fail whale. With these closures and interuptions to services, can we still rely on storing vital data “in the cloud”?

Stephen Collins has the right idea and has been duplicating his bookmarks in both magnolia and delicious.  That’s something I haven’t been doing so I’ve been affected.  At this point in time I don’t know what I may have lost, probably not much as I tend to not use ma.gnolia much. But it does raise the issue about storing data “in the could”. This is now the second time in a 2 months that I’ve been burned by storing what might be considered vital data outside of my immediate control. I recently had an application for a grant that I was working on in Google Docs. I hadn’t enabled Google gears and the night before it was due my ISP had issues & I had no internet connection. It’s my own fault for not having a backup as there were many points of failure that prevented me from accessing the information I needed.

We all know that we should have a regular back up regeime for our computers – back up everything (music, documents, email etc) on to different media and store it in different locations. I think it’s time that we add in a backup regeime for our online storage as well.

• Gmail, hotmail, Yahoo mail etc - Get your desktop email program to sync with the web application and store a copy of your web based email with your desktop email client.  Here are instructions for forwarding your Gmail or Yahoo mail to another email client.
• WordPress – WordPress can create an XML file of your data that can be used to import into a new instance of WordPress or into another blogging service. Log in to your WordPress blog and go to Tools -> Export.
• Flickr – As I only upload about 10% of my photos to Flickr, I still have all the originals backed up normally. To backup tags, comments and other data that has been entered directly into Flickr, use a program like FlickrEdit to backup your photos and data.
• Twitter – Visit tweetake and select what you would like to backup. It will download a CSV file with your information (although you have to trust them with your username & password).
• delicious – if you are using a Mac, you can type the following into the terminal and it will save an XML file with all your data into your home directory (of course change your username and password to match your account details).

  curl --user accountname:password -o Delicious.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'

These don’t cover all the services out there, and there may be some better ways of doing things, but I hope these little tips help you to keep some of your data safe while you are using “the cloud”.