The Idea Ether

indi Beta 3 Profiles

With Beta 3 of indi and indi Channels we introduced the ability for you to create and share profiles. Your profiles are what you push to others on your Direct and Group channels. Your profiles they are never seen by anyone else (i.e. we cannot see them on our servers because they are always encrypted).

In indi, the profiles that you publish can be edited in the Profile Editor utility. If you select one of these profiles and press the Edit button you will see two multi-line edit boxes. The top box contains your profile template, the bottom box contains the CSS style for that template. Flash allows us to use a limited number of css styles and we added a few of our own. The template side allows basic html tags (again limited by Flash to: a, b, br, font, img, i, li, p, span, textformat and u). The template also includes template entries. Those entries are surrounded by square brackets such as [firstName]. There are currently 30 template entries that you can choose from:

[prefix]	The prefix (Mr., Ms., etc.)
[firstName]	First name
[lastName]	Last name or surname
[suffix]	The suffix (Jr., Sr., etc.)
[workEmail]	Work email address
[homeEmail]	Home or personal email address
[mobilePhone]	Mobile telephone number
[indiAddress]	The indi address
[imAddress]	Fully qualified IM address
[workCompany]	Company name
[workJobTitle]	Work job title or role
[workAddressStreet]	Street number of work address
[workAddressStreet2]	Second line of street number of work address
[workAddressCity]	City name of work address
[workAddressState]	State or province of work address
[workAddressZip]	Zip or postal code of work address
[workAddressCountry]	Country name of work address
[workPhone]	Work telephone number
[workFax]	Work facsimile number
[workWebpage]	The web page (URL) for work
[homeAddressStreet]	Street number of home address
[homeAddressStreet2]	Second line of street number of home address
[homeAddressCity]	City name of home address
[homeAddressState]	State or province of home address
[homeAddressZip]	Zip or postal code of home address
[homeAddressCountry]	Country name of home address
[homePhone]	Home telephone number
[homeFax]	Home facsimile number
[homeWebpage]	The web page (URL) for work
[note]	Note about person

Template entries are merged in from your contact record which you can edit in the Address Book or right inside the Profile Editor (Contact Form button in the upper right). Doing this merge allows you to freeform type in whatever you want in a profile, while your contact data is kept in sync with your contact record. We will be adding more capability to this templating engine in the next beta release scheduled for the Spring. Also, we will be adding the ability to automatically extract these template entries from other's profiles to automatically fill in their contact record. So, in addition to all this sharing madness indi will provide a way to keep others up to date with your latest contact information!

indi Beta 3 is out!

We released indi Beta 3 yesterday.

Whew, its been a huge effort to build a distributed sharing solution (using Amazon's S3) enabling real privacy (using encryption) for consumers (yes, your Mom can use it) that runs across OS X and Windows (using Ruby and Flash) and soon Linux (Adobe released the Flash 9 player today).

indi is free to use and has NO ADS.

The new features in this release are many, and I will follow up with some detail on what we have added. The key thing for now is this: indi is the simplest way (drag & drop) to share with people on the Net. If you are tired of SPAM, get indi. Please provide us feedback...we value that most of all.

Now to get those screencasts recorded...

The Web 3.0 parade has begun

There has been this flurry of posts on Web 3.0 now that Web 2.0 (whatever that was) has mainstreamed. Its always amused me to apply version numbers to something that is changing all the time with new services and sites appearing daily, but that's marketing for ya!

What is really interesting to me in all of this "let's jump to Web 3.0" is that people just assume its going to be a simple jump in versions. In reality, semantics and ontologies are not easy...not easy at all. If you want to catch a glimpse of how the W3C defines the semantic web look at the OWL Web Ontology Language Reference.

Relational databases can be hard for folks to get, but descriptive logics...yeah. Using ontologies can be pretty straightforward but I will say that defining them can be a pain in the rear end. Programmers think that its about class heirarchies (like in programming) but its really not. Individuals (objects), via inference, can enter and exit class membership based on the facts you know about them. Classes have union, compliments and disjoint definitions.

Properties are fully namespaced and those properties have...properties. Think of this...you define a namespace#hasChild property which is the inverse of a namespace#hasParent property. Pretty easy to figure that out. Now is namespace#hasHusband the inverse of #namespace#hasWife? Damn...a gray area (in many people's minds).

This brings me to the main issue that people are going to run into when trying to work with ontologies and semantics on the Web and that is gray areas. We have many of them and the current crop of "social" Web sites allow the human to deal with that gray area (using the nuance of human language). In the world of ontologies systems have to do that, and its very, very hard.

All that said, there is real power to ontologies and semantics captured and used by systems. The key to these systems IMHO is that they are constructed on some real ontological and semantically rich foundations (not just a relational data model), and all that crap is completely hidden from humans. Humans build up and leverage stuff on that rich foundation without ever knowing about it. They may feel its there, but don't have to understand it to use it. An environment that allows this for normal folks (on a continual basis) is one of our goals with indi. I really don't like to jump on bandwaggons but it seems the wagons are coming to us. Its nice when that happens, welcome to the parade.

indi Beta 2 Arrives

We have been busy. Digital Independence is getting closer. We have reached Beta 2 of indi and its been released into the wild. We have decided to invite everyone who signed up on the waiting list to get as broad a feedback as possible, so you all will be getting your invitations over the next few days. Remember, each of you can invite others. So lets spread the word (get indi baby!).

We have lots of new things added in this beta. In Beta 1 we had tagging of files in the File Manager, but that was it. Based on many good comments we decided to promote the tagging feature to be something indi-wide. You can now tag any object in indi including contacts, events, files or notes. You can tag items in the store that may interest you (if you view their details). When you are chatting with someone with indi's built-in IM utility you can even tag the conversations themselves. We will be doing some very cool things in the next release of indi with tagging and presence as well as group sharing using tags. Stay tuned for more on that.

Importing and exporting files now use the OS native file open/save dialog boxes which simplifies the process from Beta 1. Additionally, when you open files now from within indi they are unencrypted for your use on the USB drive, but before you exit indi it cleans the files up, importing them back in if they have changed and cleaning off the drive. This ensures if you lose the drive your data will not be compromised. Speaking of encryption, now all your IM traffic is encrypted point-to-point, so your privacy is maintained (even for multi-player games...we would not want your "Hearts" moves snagged by Carnivore ;-)

That brings us to another feature addition, indi database backups. Now when you select the option to sync with a computer, you can additionally select to back up to that computer. When you enable this indi backs up your user database automatically upon exit. If you lose your USB drive just get another one, re-download and install indi (from our site), and start it up from the computer you last backed up to. The indi will ask if you want to restore the database from the backup. Seven copies of your database are maintained to help in case database corruption occurs and you want to skip one.

The store still has lots of items in it which we plan to build, future plug-ins that will make the indi branch out in all kinds of directions. In Beta 2 you can still vote on these items and we ask you do so because those votes help us focus on what to build first. The store is also now active. We have a few plug-ins in the queue that we hope to release very soon which will be able to be "Purchased and Installed". Of course, you will not be charged in the beta but it will help us flush out this feature. We will be adding some new games, and hopefully some nifty new plugins (photos anyone?) that will be available in the store for download.

We added a patching service in Beta 2. If we identify bugs in this beta that can be resolved quickly we will deliver them as a patch. These patches will be encrypted for security reasons, and you will have to confirm to install them, but their download will be automatic. One of the nice things that "Web sites as software" deliver is continuous fixes as problems or features are identified. We want to leverage patches in the same way for the indi installed and executing from your USB drive.

The indi Helper has been rewritten too for both Windows and OS X. The indi Helper is the utility that you can (optionally) install on a host PC which helps autorun an indi-enabled USB drive when you plug it in. This is a handy tool and prevents you from having to browse down into the file system to launch indi. (If you are a Beta 1 user please remove the indi Helper that you already have installed. This one is way better. See our support page for how to uninstall it.)

In Beta 2 we have added sounds. They are custom and we think they are cool, but please let us know what you think. Lastly, the sync speed for iCal, Address Book and Outlook have very much improved with Beta 2. This makes indi a really great mobile personal information device that seamlessly works with what you have now.

Building cross-platform applications is difficult work, but the three main technologies that make indi possible (in addition to our coding efforts) are Berkeley DB, Flash and Ruby. Thank you Sleepycat (aka Oracle), thank you Macromedia (aka Adobe) and thank you Matz and the Rails team too! And thank everyone who has or will use indi. We hope you enjoy the experience, and let's make it better together. For those that are not in the Beta, ask around for an invitation, or peruse the Getting Started Guide from our support page. If you really want in convince us by joining the waiting list.