Douglas Purdy

I watch the Sunday Morning Talk Shows religiously (yes, that last word was intended).

When David Brinkley was on the air, he was my clear favorite.

Since then I have gained a clear affinity with Tim Russert, so I am very saddened to learn that he has just passed.

His passion for politics was unrivaled in the major broadcast networks.

My thoughts are on his family as the biggest void will be felt not on Sunday morning for us, but everyday for them.

At the risk of being crass, my guess is that David Gregory will be his replacement.

I just finished coding up a very cool feature for FFSync.

Prior to adding the current song to FriendFeed, the tool looks up the track on Rhapsody.

If it is found, the tool will upload a link that will allow a subscriber to listen to the actual song.

This will be in the next drop.

You can see this in action at http://www.friendfeed.com/douglasp.

Download Now

What is it: FFSync “synchronizes” events and information from your Mac to FriendFeed. For example, when you are listening to iTunes, FFSync will update your FriendFeed with an item that lets subscribers know what your current song is.

History: Infobus, FriendFeed Sync, FriendFeed Sync, Part II

Note: This version only supports iTunes “Current Song” sync. I had some issues with the file upload for iPhoto, so I pulled that feature at the last minute.

Future Directions: One of the first things I want to do for the next version is look up songs on http://webservices.rhapsody.com and offer a link from FF to the actual song, so subscribers can listen. I love to get to a place where there could be a referral fee if a subscriber purchased the song.

Permanent Download Page: http://douglaspurdy.com/ffsync/

I have been getting ready for a BillG review over the past two weeks, so I have had zero time to work on my little sync project.

The BillG is tomorrow, the slides and code are in the can and I need something to take my mind off the review.

So I managed to get the little app to a better place (see shots below) and I am going to run a test overnight.

You can watch the results on my FriendFeed feed at http://friendfeed.com/douglasp.

If all goes well, I’ll post a DMG with a binary sometime this week.

This is one of the great truths of the software industry from my perspective:

At a corporate level, history says that leaders in their markets are almost always knocked off their leadership position by their own actions and not by actions of others. If you look at the press coverage it’s all focused on external threats but the biggest threat is internal, and it’s not just true of Google, by the way.

 

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/13/technology/lashinsky_schmidt.fortune/index.htm?section=money_latest

As I posted previously, I think FriendFeed is exactly the sort of “platform” that we need, but we need to find a way to marry this with data on the rich client (the Mac I am using) and the device (the iPhone 3G that I hope to get at the start of June).

To that end, this evening I wrote the below:

Which results in http://friendfeed.com/e/46d84bd8-9583-4ab3-ae29-e3a231562d31

It is a first cut, so there is good deal of work to finish.

Tomorrow, if I have anytime at all, I’ll add support for photos (posting thumbnails of the last import in iPhoto), clean up the UI and start adding even more data sources.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, if you have ever talked to me about my vision for the “web services” world, it will be clear that the fact that I am doing this in Objective-C and with FriendFeed is tragically ironic.

You should check out http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/05/05/Changing-Your-Address.

Tim is explaining in a real-world scenario the exact idea around the “Infobus“.

This is all about liberating your data.

Imagine if Amazon could access a feed (that you provided and gave them access to) containing the names of all your purchased books rather than storing all this information “for you”.

It is your data after all — why not liberate it — think OpenID writ large.

Someone has a good sense of humor and understanding of how our team likes to codename projects.

I just got the below book in the mail (to my Microsoft address) from a book store in England.

I have some ideas on who sent it.

Over dinner tonight, my oldest daughter (by 15 minutes) interrupted my wife and I to said:

“Why are you and mommy always talking about Google. I don’t even know what it is, but you are always talking about it.”

I absolutely love FriendFeed.

This is exactly the sort of platform that we need.

I have been talking about a similar thing internally since before Indigo shipped that I termed an Infobus.

The idea is basically the same as FriendFeed save for it is focused on desktop applications as well as Web properties.

It turns out with our wonderful relay technology, this is actually fairly easy to pull off.

Imagine a platform that federated data across both your web and desktop apps — I want people to see my iPhoto pictures just as much as my Flickr pictures.

I am now using a new domain and new blog engine (Wordpress).

My old content is still available at http://www.douglasp.com/blog.

I have been on dasBlog since around 2003 (save a one period were I rolled by own).

ClemensV convinced me to move off Radio Userland (which I started using in May 2002) just before PDC 2003.

He offered me a free t-shirt (I am easy).

Sorry Clemens — we all need to move on.

[Update:  My old blog is gone now.]