[foaf-dev] Rapportive

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 8 November 2010 13:32, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
> via Daniel O'Connor, cc:'d., an interesting Gmail-addon app:
> http://rapportive.com/   ... this (amongst presumably other things) is
> pulling in data from Google's Social Graph API (and hence from XFN and
> FOAF). When you view a mail message in Gmail (including Gmail Apps for
> Domains), it shows a sidebar with photos and info about the sender.

Cool Mod, even plays nicely with the 'Better Gmail' Mod

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6076/

I wonder if you can merge features, or maybe google should just put it
in a lab...

>
> IMHO when people look for 'linked data killer apps', they often look
> in the wrong places. We don't need some ground shaking wonder site,
> ... just for our stuff to be unubtrusively useful. Users shouldn't
> know it's there.
>
> A couple years ago I gave a talk touching on the idea of an 'invisible
> Semantic Web'. ---
> http://www.slideshare.net/danbri/when-presentation-849447
>
> "An invisible Semantic Web... Somewhat better search results. Slightly
> smarter spam filters. A calendar full of useful information. Long-term
> archival tools. Auto-maintained cross-references. Relevant people
> grouped in addressbook. "

Nice slides.  Great to see how far we've come in 2 years, from quoting
search monkey, to now google and facebook being 'on board' with the
sem web (in no small part thanks to you), seems now part of the
paradigm.

My favourite UX is when a user says, 'thats cool' and 'how did that
happen?', in that order.

Most non sem web folks generally have a mythical understanding of what
the sem web can and cant do.  They basically think every sem web app
has access in realtime to the sum of the linked data cloud and can
query it at speed, provided that you know the 'complicated' syntax and
rules.

The actual practicalities are that most apps are at very early stages,
sort of proof of concept stage, much related to the cases you mention.
 Potential I still feel is high tho.

>
> And this is just the kind of thing I had in mind. I fear this isn't
> revolutionary enough for some folk, but hey, we can have a revolution
> later too.

I personally feel sem web has revolutionized my way of doing things
(PIM, tasks, games, time tracking, alarms etc.).  It's currently
chaos, but I use a data wiki for most things, every day linking more
and more of my data together.  Eventually my hope is that the whole
web will become (socially) linked in this way.  Once we all run
personal web servers, it may happen much faster then people think.

>
> The Rapportive app reminds me a bit of the old Gnome Dashboard work,
> see Edd's http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-desktop/
> and more recently the experiment I made at wiring up SGAPI via Mozilla
> Ubiquity (http://danbri.org/words/2008/08/28/369). I think Thunderbird
> itself is growing some similar facilities lately too. Anyway, I'll try
> using it for a while and see how it works in practice...
>
> Anything that helps people cope with giant email inboxes by putting
> faces to names, and conversations in context, has to be worth
> investigating.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
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