Laughing Meme » casual privacy

Internet News: Flickr Taking Privacy Just Casually Enough

Kellan — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:04:57 +0000

Susan Kuchinskas has a nice write up of my talk on Friday that manages to hit most of my quotable moments (and leaves out the few that really shouldn’t make it to print). Slides coming soon.

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3743196/Flickr+Taking+Privacy+Just+Casually+Enough.htm

code.flickr: Web 2.0 Expo, you’re in our town now

Kellan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:32:23 +0000

I’ve just posted to the new Flickr Developer blog a list of all the various Flickr folks speaking at next weeks Web 2.0 Expo. Also, if you haven’t seen it, take a spin around the rest of code.flickr, a new site for the Flickr development community that launched this week, and has been brewing as side project since time immemorial.

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/04/18/web-20-expo-youre-in-our-town-now/

Daring Fireball: Flickr Guest Pass

Kellan — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:20 +0000

John just spotted one of my favorite features I’ve added to Flickr.

Here is another tip, the “Send to a Friend” links at the bottom of every page will generate a Guest Pass behind the scene if needed.

And if you’re interested in this kind of thing, Flickr’s Guest Pass is the seed of my expanded “Casual Privacy” talk at Web 2.0 Expo SF this April.

FOO: Crowdvine, iCalico, Pathable, a Study in Collusion

Kellan — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:10:36 +0000

I didn’t make it to FOO this year, but I did send software in my stead, and its nice to hear that folks liked it.

We slaved iCalico to Crowdvine to add a social networking layer, a network that was walked, mapped, and color coded by the Pathable folks.

Tony has a nice report back on it, as does Shelly from Pathable (6 weeks aka a couple of late nights). And Scott Berkun (who owes me a copy of “Art of Project Management”!) said super nice things.

Collusion Patterns

So how do you do that — stitch together 3 different sites to provide a unified experience? Visions of APIs, Internet scale SSO, and messaging layers spring to mind. Or more likely hash and slash patches, jury rigged shunts, juggled install directories.

We did the dumb easy thing, and I’m surprised more people don’t do it.

Crowdvine.com sets a cookie collusion. This cookie contains the data we needed to display the logged in view of iCalico. (you’re nickname and optional your URL). In addition it contained a md5 hash of the concatted data, plus sekret known only to Tony and myself.
If we find the cookie collusion, we load the described user from the database, or create it on the fly behind the scenes.
There is no step 3.

Amazingly useful, trivially simple, ultimately flexible. Niche sites are great, but you need techniques for stitching them together before they can realize their potential as pieces of an ecosystem. I don’t necessarily expect to see this kind of integration become more common, but I think it would be great if it did. (and in the name of transparency disposable apps are huge enablers, disposable sites/apps is another pattern I’m puzzled we don’t see more of — its as if we more inclined to converse bits then landfill)

update: Whoops, it was pointed out there was a step 3, or rather a step 1.5: use CNAMEs to point to individual components on sub-domains.