So, as you may
already have heard, we did a
thing. While I've been able to tell a few people, I've been
waiting to talk about it publicly for a while.
We've gradually begun to launch Blendix. Blendix aims to be the one site
that you need to visit every day to tell you what's happening in your
world. Right now, it's an aggregator for various kinds of data around
the web. You can pull in the usual suspects (RSS, ATOM), but it's a
bit more than just an RSS aggregator: today, it understands a few more
specific things (last.fm tracks, amazon wishlists, yahoo weather, flickr
photos), and lots more are planned. Although I'm practically bursting
with awesome ideas for its future development, I will try to refrain from
commenting too much on those plans. As I've said before, software is
like frisbee — predictions more specific than "hey, watch this!" can be
dangerous :-). However, since I know it's the first thing you'll all
suggest, I can say that yes, there will be richer integration with social
networks.
In brief, it works like this. You log in, and you create some
people. Some feeds may be automatically discovered based on their
email addresses, and you can add your own. Maybe you subscribe to some
people: if you're looking for one to subscribe to, may I suggest "Glyph Lefkowitz". I hear he's
pretty interesting. Finally, you visit your "dashboard" page, which —
thanks to the magic of Athena — will update
whenever blendix detects that one of the people you maintain or are
subscribed to publishes some new data. You can expect to see more of
that magic as it develops.
A word of warning, though: it
doesn't work with Safari (or IE, but I don't imagine that a lot of you
are using IE). We're working on it, but for the time being, Firefox is
strongly recommended. (Firefox for the mac works fine.) Most of the work involved in supporting
Safari is in Nevow, which is all open source, so if you are familiar
with these sorts of problems, please submit patches!
This is our first live, fully public deployment of a Mantissa server, and I'm
really glad to have it out there. We are, of course, working through
the usual kinks of getting our first batch of users ("beta" isn't a web 2.0
buzzword for nothing), but I'm fairly pleased with it so far.
Blendix itself isn't open source — yet. We've mainly been keeping the
product as a whole behind closed doors as a matter of expediency. We
didn't want to support an API that was heavily in development.
However, one of my goals as we get closer to a bigger launch is to get
enough of the code out there for you folks in the community to write
extensions and improvements for it. There's already enough for some
things (like supporting Safari!), even at the application level. For
example, a big chunk of Blendix is the "Person"
object, which is available in the public Mantissa code, along with UI for
editing, browsing, and viewing.
I'm really glad to have something "out there" to share with you all, and I'd
like to encourage you to share back. Please check out Blendix, and
make liberal use of the information you find under the "Contact" link at the
bottom of every page. Let me know what you think, especially if you're
a programmer and you've got some ideas for hacking on the code. This will be
especially useful as get into the initial phase of pushing the core out to
the community. Also, we really want to make sure the
experience is as bug-free as possible, so let us know about any problems you
have.