Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 16:40 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:

Hi there,

> I agree with Frade, for example among my university friends facebook is
> quite important, it's how you interact with a lot of people you don't
> see daily and some times the way to find out about meetings, parties,
> etc. Why can't we provide an easy way for people to integrate all this
> info to the local apps?
> A small example that I believe is doable right now:
>  - you login to GNOME for the first time
>  - you are asked for personal info
>  - you are asked also for your facebook id (example)
>  - the fb id gets processed into an empathy account and a f-spot export
> configuration (or whatever wants to consume it)
>  - the panel/clock show fb events you are attending, evolution reminds
> you of them also

Starting the first of March lasting until August will Adrien Bustany
(abustany on IRC) be working for me on a schoolwork internship.

Because his GSoc was about developing miners for web sources, I asked
him whether he'd be interested in finalizing this work.

He made me this plan. Each task is roughly a two week sprint:

* Adapting miner-web to get it merged it in Tracker's master

* Writeback for web miners: Twitter/Identi.ca, Flickr, PicasaWeb,
  Facebook (Facebook last because of licensing issues).

* UI integration for both the desktop and the mobile versions (using
  Harmattan's Qt).

* Automatic metadata improvement using web sources.

* UI integration to control the automatic metadata fetcher(s), both
  desktop and mobile, or only mobile to save some time. Discussion about
  privacy issues. Bandwidth control (when is it ok to pull data, when
  isn't it, etc).

* Integration with Harmattan core services: address book, GPS, pictures,
  videos. This will require more SDK information.

* A bugzilla miner and a issues ontology (to be planned in a sprint)


You can find an example of such a web miner here:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/tracker/tree/src/tracker-miner-facebook/facebook.vala?h=miner-web

Here you can find some of the code Adrien developed during his GSoc
(needs refactoring to Tracker's miner libraries):

git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-twitter
git://git.mymadcat.com/vapi
git://git.mymadcat.com/ontologies
git://git.mymadcat.com/libtrackerbridge
git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-manager
git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-facebook
git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-twitter
git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-gdata 
git://git.mymadcat.com/bridge-flickr

I must add that, although many of the GNOME people are probably Facebook
fanboys, Facebook's license doesn't allow you to just start using and
copying the data. Even if the data is about yourself, it's owned by
Facebook. I think the licenses allow you to maximally cache things for
several hours. Not forever.

I think those "cloud" licenses will be quite a challenge in the years to
come, by the way.

> I'm sure my univ mates would appreciate a desktop that eases their FB
> experience. Notice how we would improve that without buzz-y words and
> without smoking crack.

How about inviting your university mates to join Adrien on this effort?

Given that I will be asking Adrien to focus mostly on what is publicly
released about Maemo's Harmattan, your university mates and yourself can
focus on providing similar UI integration with the GNOME desktop!



Cheers,


Philip

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be