So I spent a little bit of time playing around with Marc’s new PeopleAggregator product (built largely by Gaurav‘s team at Tekriti Software)… some thoughts and questions:
– So what is exactly is this thing? Is it a proof of concept for a social technologies platform from BBM that draws together all these open standards? Or is it / does it aim to be something that mass consumers adopt and use a la Facebook or MySpace?
– Some of the menu navgation wasn’t clear to me… For example, I think “Create content” should definitely be visible at a higher level.
– At least one feature is, um, unfortunately named… “relations” (as in, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”). For example, I added IrinaSlutsky of geek.tv fame (can it be called fame!?) as a relation just so that I can say “I’ve had relations with IrinaSlutsky” 🙂
– I would have loved to try the flickr integration but it wasn’t clear that this is actually working at this point. And even if it is working there needs to be a wizard for this kind of thing — don’t make me think!
– I liked the simplicity of it all and I like the idea of it all being open standards-based. I also like the idea of having everything in one place.
– SXIP is cool, but it’s also something I know, well, nothing about. How do I create an SXIP account? Where else can I use my SXIP account once I’ve created it?
I get the feeling that there’s a lot more here, and that it’s just not so well packaged / explained so I have more digging to do. I’m looking forward to digging deeper (I’m sure Marc’s demo later this week at Gnomedex will help too) and seeing continued development on this product.
At least one feature is, um, unfortunately named… “relations” … that was quite funny …
we haven’t even put in the “what’s this?” instruictions for Sxip, OpenID or Flickr ID systems yet – but hopefully that’ll explain that stuff.
I’ve seen some rpetty slick wizards for configuring systems. YES – web wervices will ‘slide’ in easily – later. For now its not such a crime that one has to go to a ‘general settings’ screen (which has all sorts of access controls in it- BTW) to plug in your un/pw. Under Edit Profile.
Create Content is a verb. Top level Menu items are nouns/places. But Create Content is repated in many locations AND there’s a shortcut menu on the blog column – called “Create Blogpost” – pretty straight forward.
FRiends is too limiting of a word. One can have all sorts of relations.
Won;t have too much time to demo at Gnomedex – but come to our party across the street at our suite on Friday night both before and after the official party.
Hey Marc, You guys have done a great job — there are no crimes here at all. I get and believe in what you guys are doing here with peopleaggregator. I’d sure love for it to be easy to take my data with me between different services and devices. And I know that’s not going to happen without what you are doing with PA.