#Ideas

TL;DR – this is why (and how) I created the electronic version of EFF’s Dice.

I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and believe in their just cause. I support it as much as I can and try to educate as many people as I can about their rights, privileges online and how to correctly behave in this new found jungle.

Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back.

When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. If the message is not clear you can lose a lot of attention.

Yaniv let the cat out of the bag about some of our ideas for making other parts of the search and its relevant data open, free and accessible to all of us.

I’d thought I’ll add some background and my thoughts on the subject.

First, the idea was iterated a couple of times when we were in that place where you have a solution(s) and you are seeking a problem(s) to solve.

Dave Winer says:

“[…] we could make Twitter the open identity system we’ve been looking for. Make your Twitter ID the one that you use to log on to other service […]”

I say let Twitter support OpenID with all of the good Relaying Party Best Practices including (but not limited to):

• Ability to associate an existing account with an OpenID
• Ability to switch to another OpenID (sort of a password recovery for OpenID)
• Ability to create a new account directly with an external (non Twitter) OpenID (be a standard relaying party)

If they want to, they can also be an OpenID provider (which should be good for them, of course ;-) ).

I really like Amazon. I really like Amazon’s recommendations and ever since I inputed most of my books into Amazon I get really good recommendations.

There is one thing that bothers me, though.

I recently made a big order from Amazon and included two books which I was long overdue in owning and reading them. The books were “Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” both by Douglas Adams.

After reading Grant Robertson’s post – “Taming your own river of news” I’ve decided to use Yahoo Pipes to create my online life feed (it sounds better than “Eran’s river of news”, don’t you think?)

You can check it out here.

Basically I aggregate the feeds from this blog, my Advanced .NET debugging blog, my Yedda questions, my Yedda answers, my del.icio.us links and my Flickr photostream.

These feeds are most of the content I’m generating or contributing to (at least the ones with a feed in it). If I’ll remember some other feeds that I’m contributing to and forgot to add, I’ll update the pipe.

I think Yahoo Pipes is really cool. The main attraction is its slick user interface and ease of use.

I just created a pipe of all of the Recent Questions of Yedda translated using Babelfish to French and it took less than 5 minutes.

I do have a couple of ideas that I think will make Yahoo Pipes into something very interesting:

• Accept Regular HTML pages
• Have a built-in Microformats parser
• Support for a more complex piping scripting (perhaps in the form of a JavaScript script)
• Support for state saving (or at least a limited way such as the ability to compare the previous version of the page/feed you are piping)

**Accept Regular HTML pages