Reading Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on plurk and writing my own post on the topic I began to wonder how much work it would really be to add a timeline view using something like the Simile Timeline library.

As a quick proof of concept I saved my twitter homepage to my laptop and added a little javascript. As well as calling in the timeline library from http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/api/timeline-api.js and using the first javascript iso8601 code I found through google, I added:

  jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery('body').prepend('<div id="my-timeline" style="height: 150px; border: 1px solid #aaa"></div>');
    var eventSource = new Timeline.DefaultEventSource();
    evts = [];
 
    jQuery('.hentry_hover').each(function (index, elem) {
      var $elem = jQuery(elem);
      var dateEvent = new Date();
      dateEvent.setISO8601($elem.find('.published')[0].getAttribute('title'));
      var evt = new Timeline.DefaultEventSource.Event(
         dateEvent, //start
         dateEvent, //end
         dateEvent, //latestStart
         dateEvent, //earliestEnd
         true, //instant
         $elem.find('.content a:first').text(), //text
         $elem.find('.entry-content').text() //description
      );
      eventSource.add(evt);
    });
 
    var bandInfos = [
      Timeline.createBandInfo({
        width:          "100%", 
        intervalUnit:   Timeline.DateTime.MINUTE, 
        intervalPixels: 10,
        eventSource: eventSource,
      }),
    ];
    tl = Timeline.create(jQuery("#my-timeline")[0], bandInfos);
  });

and pretty quickly I had a basic timeline view at the top of my twitter page.

Obviously this isn’t a very practical solution, but it’s an indicator of just how easy it would be to build something, whether as a GreaseMonkey script, or a proper client that uses the API and maybe loads tweets using AJAX as someone scrolls through the timeline.

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Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk.

Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and—as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web.

The timeline view that is plurk’s main interface is a nice idea, but it really doesn’t work as a primary way in to your data. Not only is there no fallback when javascript is switched off (neither progressive enhancement or graceful degradation here) but it quickly gets cluttered and when a “thread” gets large it proves very slow. The mobile interface, and per thread interface (as seen for jenny’s collaborative storytelling experiment) are an improvement but they lack the simplicity (elegance?) that twitter offers.

Rather than building a more robust twitter, plurk have experimented with new features, and in itself that’s a good thing. The icons are amusing, the timeline’s a nice visualisation for a small number of messages, and the threaded view works fairly well in very specific contexts. But the essential strengths of twitter—its open API, the way its team adapted the service based on how its users were interacting—aren’t there. And as Lloyd pointed out it requires too much “total attention.” With less focus on flow (and no sign of an open API that would allow clients like twitterific) it can’t become part of the general ambient noise of your day. And as Stowe Boyd observed most of the UI niceties would be pretty easy to layer on top of twitter using its API.

Can anything displace twitter in the near future and claim the space it currently owns?

On one level, we don’t yet need to ask that question as while twitter is a big part of the lives of many of us, the space it occupies is still pretty small and there are no guarantees as to how or even whether it will grow to the scale of facebook et al.

On another, I suspect that the next step from twitter is not a competing service, whatever fancy new features they offer, but is instead a shift from twitter-as-product to a far more distributed architecture that recognises that tools that help us engage with “the flow” of online chatter are a significant part of the infrastructure of how we live on the web, and so need to be built as infrastructure.

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• mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
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  (tags: rubyonrails timezone)
• Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African
  More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine
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Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Refactoring HTML offers a step by step recipe book for migrating such sites to clean, semantic code.

Harold’s is a well known name in the XML world, and that background shows through in how he approaches the book. While a general audience will probably find useful content, the reader needs to be prepared for a series of command-line and Java-based examples. Tools like tidy are featured prominently, as is the use of regular expressions to seek out broken code to fix and, in the music-to-my-ears category, automated testing.

If you’re equipped to do so, following these steps will lead to much cleaner, more manageable sites, but I found myself wondering how many of those comfortable with command line tools and regular expressions are in the market for a book like this.

In general I suspect the key audience for this will be IT departments inside large organisations tasked with refreshing or extending an intranet. For those developers, who maybe don’t spend much of their time working with HTML and like the idea of using scripting tools similar to those in their regular workflow, this book’s worth a look. If you’re already familiar with current trends in web development, then there are probably other ways of picking up on the scattering of techniques that might be new to you.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.

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I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix it?” the event brought together a couple of hundred of us in a hall in Central London for a Saturday for a fascinating journey through a wealth of ideas.

The presentations ranged from discussions of designing sustainable tourism in the Mediterranean to an account of arctic exploration, by way of ideas like Secular Sabbath (exploring the impact of Sabbath on Orthodox Jews’ carbon footprint), AMEE’s aim to measure all energy usage everywhere, attempts to improve government web usage, and transforming bus stops into spaces for play.

Some might have complained that not much time was spent analysing the nature of the problem. The AMEE presentation was probably the closest to what you’d expect at a climate change event—demonstrating some of James Hansen’s recent work on the melting of the arctic ice shelf and the reality of climate change tipping points—but in general there was a refreshing sense that we didn’t need to dwell on such studies because we recognise we’ve gone wrong.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the event was the shared recognition that not only do we need to look for more efficient technology and ways that we can reorganise ourselves to reduce our impact, but that doing so may open up a wealth of possibilities. Whether that’s in recapturing communal, outdoor play (Bruno Taylor noted that 71% of present adults played in public spaces when they were kids, compared to 21% of current-day children), in building new awareness of the spaces around us, or in realising that the constraint of sustainability can drive more creative and more flexible aesthetics. In a sense that tapped into part of what we’re driving at with Generous. The vision of the project is to be more than just “green”, partly because we think there’s a lot of inherent value in some of the other commitments we ask people to make, but also because sustainability can only be achieved if we approach it with a broad vision of how we want society to be.

geeKyoto didn’t present solid answers on what we can do. It offered a few ideas, and reminded me of why it’s an exciting time to be working in this industry in London. There’s a growing sense that the web revolution’s implications spread throughout society and those of us designing and building in its wake have a lot to contribute. With events like Social Innovation Camp, geeKyoto, and a series of others coming up that strive to be more than just talking shops, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

The key question, of course, is how fast we get there. According to Hansen’s numbers we have around ten years before global emissions levels must have peaked, otherwise global climate change will accelerate beyond control. How fast can we turn some of the ideas floating around into significant practical change, and how do we manage the changes so they’re more than just lifestyle changes for the world’s rich?

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