Read Write Web — Monthly Open Thread — (February 2013)

Summary

Realtime communications were in play this month, with some impressive demos of firefox and chrome talking to each other, using the W3C WebRTC protocol.  For those wishing to try it out, some of this functionality has been abstracted in a developer friendly API, called PeerJS.  On the social front, Google have also announced a sign-in process for their social application platform, Google+.

The Linked Data cloud, got that much bigger, as statistics from the OECD, Swiss Federal Statistics Office and UN Food and Agriculture Organization joined the LOD cloud.  Kudos to Sarven Capadisli for making this happen, you can read the write up here.

Lots going on in the RWW, the highlight of which was probably the release of the Drupal WebID integration by Stéphane Corlosquet.  Account recovery and pairing were also fleshed out on the mailing list, this month, with some more demos.

Communications and Outreach

Over at the Web Application Store CG, three sets of manifests are in the process of being compared: W3C Widgets, the Chrome app store and Mozilla marketplace.  There has been talk of standardization which would be invaluable in delivering read write apps to the web.

Mozilla have announced a system of payments for their marketplace, and for firefox OS.  In the W3C Payments CG, there has been some discussion with Kumar McMillan, of Mozilla, on issues such as security and linked data integration. Their receipt protocol looks promising, and could perhaps be used in conjunction with the linked data apps to provide payments.

Community Group

This month in the community group there have been some great demos.  The first demonstrates conditional access to DropBox, SkyDrive, GoogleDrive, Box.net and Amazon S3.  Another shows multi protocol login to MediaWiki.

We have discussed two long standing problems and found some solutions.  One is account recovery and the other is pairing of devices.  Andrei has explained how both of these can be solved, with a full implementation in my-profile.

Applications

As previously mentioned, Stéphane Corlosquet, has announced his Drupal integration of WebID.  While Drupal 7 already has semantic elements, this can potentially help bring user centric linked data to a large portion of the Web.  There is a working demo here.

For those living on the bleeding edge, it’s now possible to experience realtime updates over turtle using tabulator, data.fm and curl.  Currently in production, the “updates via” branch of data.fm provides support for (secure) websockets.  This is best tested in the Chrome browser, navigate to, say, http://chat.data.fm/dig#test.  Then try to modify this file either by hand, from the UI or using curl ( curl -H “Content-Type: text/turtle” -X PUT -T dig http://chat.data.fm/ where ./dig is the turtle file) and watch the text update in realtime!

Last but not least…

For those following the FreedomBox project it has reached the first milestone of the software stack with version 0.1 being released.  FreedomBox aims to be a free software distributed system that allows you to keep all your logs and social data in the safety of your on home.  Congrats on reaching version 0.1, looking forward to future releases!