Your input needed: Mobile Web Server feeds
A comment I have heard often is that the content from a Mobile Web Server should be available also via various feeds, to be imported into other services. For Blog entries and Gallery items we have already added these via RSS (see Forum Nokia Wiki for more information). These work for me in Jaiku for example, have you tried the feeds in other services?
One interesting addition would be to add Presence information such as calendar status and location as an embeddable feed. This way you could share your whereabouts automatically from the phone, without having to update or sync anything.
What do you think, is that worth pursuing? Do you have any other comments (technical or not) about the current feeds we have? Also which of the social services would you like to see getting “MWS enabled”?
Thanks for your comments in advance!
-Jukka
There are a few thoughts about feeds that I have, hopefully this won’t be too long-winded:
RSS Feeds
Feeds should be available for things like status, gallery, blog; and one should be able to subscribe to all of them either from their respective web app, or a generic RSS subscription screen. Kinda like that same idea we were saying with security a post or so ago where on one page a person can add the RSS of whatever we are serving to their RSS reader/reader service of choice. Here, something like an AddThis.com kinda functionality if you will.
Feeds as a Mashup
For the Gallery and Presence apps, those pages should not just serve RSS, but also be able to mash RSS feeds from various services that are relevant to the respective pages.
For example, from the Gallery page, I should be able to add the RSS feed from Share on Ovi, and elect to show that Gallery with the last 10 images. Or with the presence app, be able to pull in presence info from Plazes and Jaiku, and have that appear on the Presence page as an “Other Presence” kind of section.
If you will, making the MWS a bit of a mashup platform with some parts of it, but then able to aggregrate other web services so that a person really does contain a manageable aspect of their online presence via the MWS.
I have tried to create a WidSet Widget with the feeds, MWS populate. The Widset servie (www.widset.com) says, tht he can’t find an entry. I use the Widget-creator on the Widset site. I have create many Widgets this way (see the oublic profile of hindermath), but the MWS feed should be not compatible
On the other hand, have links on the Feed Site for other blog services, such as Blogger, MSN Live, Facebook and other more.
Another idea is, to make the blog application compatible with Windows Live Writer (a blog softwrae from Microsoft, that could write in many blogs). This would be a nove feature. The Live Writer has a section for unknown blog service that calls Atom Publishing Protocol.
I think it would be nice if there were entries like this:
Share my location:
( ) Once
(o) For 30 minutes
( ) For 12 hours
And a feature:
Send my location to:
To: [Jukka, SMS]
There could be a setting, with who the location URL should be shared with, but I think what’s above is good enough for most common scenarios. Sharing could inherit the rights from other services.
Sending the current location map as a static MMS would be nice too, but that doesn’t have much to do with web services. It serves the same goal, though.
(Are Regular People ™ more comfortable with reading an MMS than browsing to an URL that has been sent to them as an SMS? Neither is hard with our current handsets, but MMS requires less clicks. Of course, nothing stops you from sending a static image and the URL to the dynamic image.)
If you really want to bake a feed out of this, maybe you could have a feature to mark the current position and RSS those. That could make a nice widget for sharing trip data with geotagged images and blogs.
I’m not sure, which part of that should live in the phone and what should be in the “cloud”. MWS is good for controlling privacy. It’s easy to pull unwanted feed entries offline, if you regret what you shared with the Internet last night.
Sorry if some of that was off-topic…
ARJWright : in fact, I see things the opposite way : MWS holds the data, and publishes feeds, through webpages, RSS, or a REST API. Then, services such as Ovi connect to MWS and display your gallery inside their service. Then you can get all the services the website offers, using the latest content from your phone.
I am actually working on the integration of MWS albums into my Facebook app, so this posts comes exactly at the right moment (sorry if I am not sticking to the RSS part).
First of all, the fact that system albums cannot be shared can be discussed : if a user knows what he is doing, and wants some specific users to access them, he should be able to. Then, these albums should be accessible through RSS : presently, the private album has no feed, and the memory specific ones have a feed, but that brings up a 500 error. Also, copying a picture to an album should be much more simpler/quicker, like, for example, directly on the phone. Even better, could it be possible to have the same albums in the Gallery app and in MWS ?
As to presence information, it is already available through REST, but adding the feed might interest some people.
I think the exposing the location information as a feed would make lots of sense. GeoRSS is a simple format, especially for point data. It would make it a lot easier to integrate the phone with other applications.
Rob
@Arthur: You said clearer what I was trying to say. I agree with you that services should act that way. It would amke sharing of content determinent to what I want to share, rather than what the service determines I can share then what I want to share.
Thanks for your comments!
Our current proposition is to make the first iteration like this: we re-use existing RSS feeds (Blog, Gallery) and REST APIs (Presence) and proxy/aggregate that via mymobilesite.net. In the portal it would be able to configure which information this new “newsfeed” will have, and there will be one URL to put into Twitter, Jaiku etc. How does that sound?
GeoRss is the simplest format of point data. You already explain it all about Mobile web server feed and I agree with you it will make allot easier to connect the phone with other applications.
Outsourcing Solution in BPO
frank riched
Jukka : this sounds… great ! A proxy would allow quick and constant access to user’s content.
I agree, that proxy does sound great.
About the proxy idea, to clarify: we would not be storing the content on the gateway but just to generate a RSS newsfeed on the gateway that can be embedded to other places such as Jaiku etc.
As you may know our gateway already functions as a cache: whenever the (public) content is accessed it will remain on the gateway for some time, so that requests to same content don’t need to be sent via device data channel.