P@ Log

This is my 6th blog since 2002: in the past 6 years I’ve been blogging with a very irregular posting pattern, my main interest being initially in the technical aspect of blogging platforms. I’ve changed platform in average every year (details in the About page), but did not spend much effort marketing my blogs: a few posts to share links with folks interested in the same technical topics, and posting slides or code samples occasionally. A few years ago I stopped blogging about new links and started using my delicious feed for sharing these, and these days I use my FriendFeed page for sharing.

This year I decided to blog a bit more, essentially about the OpenSocial API, but maybe about other topics as well, technical or personal.
The first step was to clean up the mess of various blogs spread out at many urls: creating redirects from old blogs to this one, and claiming my blog on Technorati through this post.
Patrick Chanezon’s Technorati Profile

Then adding rel=”me” attribute to many links, to make it easier for the social graph spider to index my online presence. I guess I also need to do that on my old blogs.

One issue I have is with styling the FriendFeed widget in the sidebar. It appears as very tall, with a lot of whitespace: next step is to do a bit of css work on this blog to make it easier to read.

Let’s see what I can do in the next few weeks.

Today Kevin Marks (Google), Chris Schalk (Google), Lou Moore (Hi5) and myself presented OpenSocial at the Graphing Social Patterns West 2008 conference.

GSP is a great conference to talk about OpenSocial: all the attendees are involved in some sort of social networking software, and are very receptive to OpenSocial. Congrats to Dave McClure and the O’Reilly team for organizing it.

It was a great opportunity to have the 3 OpenSocial developer advocates from Google on stage at the same time, usually we all travel to different conferences. I made an introduction about OpenSocial, Chris described the API, showed code and did a demo of PixWall on Orkut, Kevin talked about Shindig and Caja, and demoed Shindig working in the Eclipse debugger.

And Lou Moore from Hi5 showed all the cool extensions to OpenSocial that Hi5 has made: for example he demoed PixWall taking advantage of the Photo API that Hi5 makes available, that allows an application developer to let the user pick a picture from one of their Hi5 Photo albums. Thanks Lou.

Here are our slides as a Google Presentation.

You can also find it on Slideshare.

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Clive Boulton from the Silicon Valley Web Builders posted a cool video that gives you an idea of the exciting atmosphere at the OpenSocial Hackathons they have been organizing at Google recently.

Here are the slides (PDF Version) for the talk I gave tonight at the Facebook Developer Meetup at Google.
Google Presentation version below.

Here’s an interview I did last week with WebMaster Radio about what OpenSocial is.

	Webmaster Radio
Open Social Google API Evangelist Patrick Chanezon describes the new OpenSocial platform, and tells us how its used to develop cross platform social applications on popular social networks Show: Social Networking Conference Channel: Conferences

Last week I gave a keynote about OpenSocial at the Miami 2008 Social Networking Conference.

Here are the slides for my presentation in PDF format.

The main argument of my talk was: after OpenSocial launched in november we ran fast on the Gartner Technology Hype Cycle, from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Trough of Disillusionment, but after 3 months of hard work with all container partners we approach the end of the Slope of Enlightenment, towards the Plateau of Productivity where all social sites can start to become OpenSocial containers, and all application developers should start creating an OpenSocial version of their application.

The launch of MySpace Developer Platform on tuesday marks the start of the Plateau: developers, it’s time to get started coding!

A post in french since this event will be in french: demain dans le cadre des Google Developer Days Paris, je presenterai Introduction aux APIs Google
Le 31 Mai de 14h30 a 15:30
Au au Bastille Design Center
74 Boulevard Richard Lenoir, Paris

Une visualisation plus amusante sur une carte.

I just posted the slides for the 6 Google APIs for Don Isidro Parodi Presentation I gave 2 days ago in Buenos Aires.

You can find all the links for demos I showed in my delicious ba2007 tag.

Here are the slides from yesterday’s talk at San Francisco State University.
Thanks to Arno Puder for inviting me, it was great discussing with faculties and students. I met with Dragutin Petkovic, Chair of the CS Department at SFSU, who used to be one of Sergey Brin‘s teachers: maybe my future boss was in the room, at least I hope many future colleagues:-)

We had an interesting discussion with Arek Goetz, from the Math department, who’s moving from Latex to Google Docs to create a collaborative environment for his students to work on projects (it seems they’re using the whole shebang of Google Apps: Talk, Mail,…) , and asked good questions about how to include Mathematical formulas in Google Docs. The issue for now is that while Google Spreadsheet has an API, Docs doesn’t, so apart from creating Greasemonkey hacks I don’t see an easy way to extract macros from a docs automatically and replace them with images.
For students who attended yesterday, I posted a list of my favorite programming books: I’d suggest reading a few of these before your interviews at Google.

Thanks for inviting me yesterday, I’d be delighted to come back.

It’s a bit of a short notice, if you’re in the area, today at 5:30 pm I’ll talk about Google APIs at San Francisco State University in their Computer Science Graduate Seminar series. It’s a public talk so feel free to come discuss.