Mauveweb (Mauvespace)

Mauvespace 0.1.0

Daniel Pope — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:01:53 GMT

Yesterday evening I finally managed to release Mauvespace. You can read more, download or signup on mauvespace.com.

Version 0.1.0 is a kind of halfway house to a full social network. It's got a blog, user details, photos and a templating language, but it can't syndicate any of the information that it exports.

I'm eyeing up Magpie as the parser behind blog syndication, and RAP can already parse RDF/XML so that's a pretty good start. The main issues are in finding profiles to syndicate, importing them into the database and making sure that it's all updated properly.

I keep thinking of new mashups that the Mauvespace model allows. In fact it's a bit rich to even call them mashups. Mashups are usually defined as third-party scripts that combine and relate data from various large online databases to display interesting or useful things. With Mauvespace everything is a kind of mashup. Its data is (well, will be) drawn from a distributed semantic web and the templating language makes no distinction between local data and syndicated data.

My next task is to do some publicising. I'm also going to do a couple of more varied themes for 0.1, I think, before I start doing anything involved for 0.2.

Mauvespace vs Facebook

Daniel Pope — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 01:49:44 GMT

I find Facebook very annoying. I can't seem to make it do anything useful. It seems to get certain, key things stunningly wrong, assumptions which are disingenuous in my case and make it seem broken. I can't find any friends on it and I'm getting bombarded by junk which isn't applicable to me. I can't find options to do many of the things which I'm sure are possible.

However, I'm impressed with what Facebook is supposed to do. It's far and away the closest of the social networking sites to what Mauvespace aims to do. That in itself is interesting. I didn't invent very many of the concepts regarding what Mauvespace can do: many of the suggestions about the combined expressibility of RDF vocabularies come from the web. However, it occurs to me that a fair number of those might have been inspired by Facebook or others, and Mauvespace merely inherits those suggestions (albeit mostly unimplemented as yet).

Specifically, things like annotating not only pictures as depicting a person, but regions of pictures, are things that I've read specifically about in comments describing RDF ontologies. I'm surprised Facebook isn't semantic.

Still, several key factors differentiate Mauvespace as a social network even if it could do everything Facebook can (and the eventual plan is certainly to implement some of those things):

It's open source.
It's entirely themable.
It's semantic.
It's distributed and interoperable (as a result of being semantic).

Not all of these will matter to all people. Many people I've spoken to simply say "I'm interested, but only because I tried x and didn't like it." But regardless of what matters to other people, these things are exactly the most important things to me personally:

I can make it work the way I want it to (as can anyone else).
I can make it look as pretty as I like without resort to hackery (as can anyone else).
I can use whatever data users make available in any way I see fit.
No for-profit organisation controls my data, forces me to use their system to talk to my friends, forces my friends to use their system to talk to me, requires me to pay them money or requires me to view their ads.

I don't think any proprietary social networking site could ever meet these requirements. That is why Mauvespace exists. Or very soon will.

Plan for 2007

Daniel Pope — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 12:59:07 GMT

New Year is a good time to look forward to the things we hope to achieve over the next year. So I thought I'd define now my main (technological) priorities for the year ahead so that I can get some sense of focus.

Get up to speed on RDF and get using it in applications. I am not a total stranger to RDF but I've not used it at all so far. The main focus of my effort for now is a new project called Mauvespace. Mauvespace is an open-source web application that is a cross between a semantic CMS for personal homepages and a full social networking service. I don't want to hype it too much now though until there is something to show. But I hope very soon to roll up all of my homepage stuff from Mauveweb into Mauvespace, then throw it open to other people to use it for the same thing, either on my server or on their own. This frees up the mauveweb.co.uk domain, which could become a place for web projects. Sorry about all the 'Mauve's. I guess I'm not very imaginative with names. Although, it works as a brand, I suppose.
Deploy some applications using Zope. My Python web applications are becoming increasingly Zope-like. The latest one I've been working on for a client is a self-contained web server, but that's partly because I wanted very careful handling of file uploads. I needed to remove file size and memory limits imposed by PHP, and I implement concurrent querying of the status of uploads, which allows me to provide AJAX progress bars. There are lots of parallels with Zope: that it's Python; that it's a web server; that any persistence is object-based (although in this application it's in-memory persistence; non-volatile data is retrieved from other network services mandated by the brief). Anyway, in 2007 I hope to transfer from ad-hoc Zope-like systems to Zope proper with all the advantages that brings. It's just a shame there have always been reasons not to so far. Unfortunately Mauvespace is PHP by necessity. PHP is the only language that enjoys widespread hosting support and I consider that vital.
Hack Inkscape. Inkscape is of course hugely important to my work and as a result I've become quite involved with making sure it meets my needs, mainly through bug reporting, feature requesting, and so on. I would like to stretch my C++ legs and improve things, if I find time. Incidentally Inkscape 0.45 has been bug hunted and is moving to feature freeze very soon. The headline news is the Gaussian blur feature but there are a plethora of other improvements too.
Continue the high standard of technical commentary on this blog :) Actually, I wish I could get it more organised and make it more accessible to people who aren't knowledgable web developers. But if it would be less personally useful to me if that was the case. So the status quo may have to suffice.