Good friend - and fellow Mozillian - Chris Blizzard has just released a long-time "hack in the evenings" project of his: Whoisi. I think the best "one line" description that I've heard for it, thus far is "a wiki-like Friendfeed." It's quite fun - sort of an identity service combined with a wiki combined with a feed reader. All without requiring any form of signing up or logging in. It'll be fun to see how it all comes out in the wash, but for now it's certainly grabbing the attention of some notable people.
Chris has posted a ton of details concerning how the application works. I've had the opportunity to follow his development for a while now and heard about all the interesting issues that he's tackled - related to Python, databases, scaling, and jQuery. I love seeing "for fun" applications finally come to light - and this one is a keeper.
Christopher Blizzard (June 26, 2008 at 10:29 pm)
Wow, thanks for the awesome little write-up, John! It's not as cool as processing.js or jquery, but I've put some time into it and I like to use it.
Jakub Steiner (June 27, 2008 at 2:37 am)
I went from 'pretty cool' to 'A-mazing. How come nobody else thought of that?' The non-existant barrier to entry, along with the initial 'how does it know all this?' makes it quite unique.
Richard D. Worth (June 27, 2008 at 5:11 am)
I'm totally sold, and was from the moment I heard what it was. Chris has tackled quite nicely the problem all these other sites have: they're all about accounts. You creating an account, and then getting everyone you know to create an account. All so you can duplicate a bunch of information you and others already have in other places. Beautiful!
zack (June 27, 2008 at 8:21 am)
Hm. Needs a feed for each user's page that combines all items in a lifestream format. Without that, I'm not sure I really see the value over subscribing to an individual's separate service feeds. But with that, then I can just subscribe to a person's whoisi page, and get updates from everything they are up to. Want help implementing? :)