Sold Out Activist's dashboard

Well, its not ping.fm's problem at all, as if you were to write that same mesage in facebook you'd get the same result. if there was a "says" prefix then you wrote an action as a ping you'd get:

Suchnsuch says "is doing his homework"

Solution: is to have either in the edit section of each network a prefix option

BEST SOLUTION:

a verb detector to prefix 'is' or 'has' and if "not" is 1st word prefix 'is' or 'was'

all other words i guess you could add ' says "' or a predetermined default prefix and a suffix of a quotation mark

EDIT:
Maybe even an advanced verb/sentence detector say you typed "been to the park" been is detected as a past action prefixing "has" present actions will be "is" future actions "will"?

as for when to prefix says... put quotation marks at start and end?

seems most logical to me.

Would love to see ping.fm allowing individual control of the string for each service. Example would be I can control a string to be appended before and after all my facebook pings.

If i was to ping "I am hungry" ... my ping post to facebook would be Wilfred "says : I am hungry".

@TimS That seems like the most logical approach.

I would look at how TwitterSync handles this. They let you control the string yourself.

neat-o. for now, my solution is to remove facebook from ping.fm

I've actually contacted Facebook about perhaps adding a "lock 'is' in status" checkbox as well, and they have it on the "maybe" list. (An actual person responds when I suggest features there! It's something we should be able to take for granted, but it's still pretty awesome.) May I suggest a race between ping.fm and Facebook to add this feature? Winner gets...I don't know, one of those growing gifts or something. ;)

I agree with Scott and Tim. Facebook is really not integrated well with Ping.fm, and it's not Ping.fm's fault, it's Facebook's for putting no seperation from the persons name and their status.

Could we please get an 'auto-is' ? or a 'says' or a colon?

You've said you'll think about it but nothing has ever happened. I know you guys are busy and all, but this doesn't seem THAT complicated to do...

However, twitterific could employ some regular expression to convert `follow soldoutactivist` to http://www.twitter.com/api/friendship... and so on.

And then return an error on an evident, but failed command structure.

I'd like to see more of a journal update vs posting to a shoutbox

Still no solution to this one? I think even a simple checkbox under settings that gave you an "auto-add "is" to sites that use it" option, if that's possible, would be wonderful.

I wrote up a potential solution: http://blog.soldoutactivist.com/horro...

But I'll paste here:

To start, I don't hate the idea of OpenID, I'm just passionate in my reasonings. As with everything else.

It has been noted by various people, various people I will quote as soon as I can find them again, that OpenID is a nifty idea with many logic holes. And I personally get stuck on the DRM issue. For those that don't get what I'm saying, I'll lead you.

OpenID is open source and can be installed on any server anywhere with no restrictions, it's "open" after all. You then can host anyone's account information for any server that supports OpenID. When logging into an OpenID-enabled site, you just redirect them to the proper URL. You log in with one username/password, and bam, you're in.

Until your favorite Satellite OpenID server dies. See as stated numerous times on the OpenID website, all OpenID servers are decentralized. Meaning no connection to any other OpenID server. Meaning that when the user of a particular Satellite OpenID server goes bankrupt, gets busted for pirating the entire collection of Britney Spears, or just decides to throw the dead switch, your account is now gone.

And any account that relied on it is now useless. This is where an OpenID supporter will say, "But you will just use your original login information to log in." And I would reply, "SO WHY DID I USE OPENID IN THE FIRST PLACE IF I HAD TO REMEMBER MY ORIGINAL PASSWORD?!" Seriously though, isn't having to only remember one account information is the whole idea of OpenID? Why yes it is!

Therefore this is PassworDRM. Just like when a music DRM server goes down, you lose your music. If an OpenID server goes down, you lose your OpenID account. Man, you would think a FOSS operation would know better.

What's to do about this conundrum? Well, a central server system! Something that the Satellite OpenID servers are instructed to communicate with and send back encrypted account information so that you would never lose your OpenID account.

How it would work

1. You go to login at X site.
2. You click on OpenID link. You can either specify the URL of your favorite satellite OpenID server.
2a. Or let OpenID.net send you to a random Satellite OpenID server.
3. Log in.
4. The Satellite OpenID server will send a small packet back to the OpenID server, checking the hashes of the accounts to make sure it hasn't changed.
4a. If the account has changed, or was never on the Satellite OpenID server, that information is now sent it to be kept until the garbage collection date is reached.
5. The Satellite OpenID server will then check the user's supplied information about the account against that which it has within its database. The pass/fail is sent back to the server.
6. Done.

That's it. Some developers would point out that this takes longer than normal to process. But yes, that's what happens when you use at least three different servers handled by three different groups. It isn't any better with two servers and two groups, but at least my one password works literally at every Satellite OpenID server that wasn't modified stupidly by its maintainer. Another benefit is that the burden is on the central OpenID server to maintain the account information indefinitely, not the individual satellite servers. Which is AS IT SHOULD BE. The satellites would only keep passwords while they are being used, if someone didn't use a password for three months, it would be deleted from the cache without worry of losing that account forever.

I would have also it so you only changed your password on OpenID.net. Why? So that you could have a hash that would be used by the satellite OpenID server to quickly determine if the account information has changed. Then the satellite would update it's database with the new information.

Why is this a better idea? Because it allows for the entire system to work with one server or a billion servers. As OpenID is made more popular, they will get funding from the big companies, therefore the cost argument of running the central server is moot. (A side note to OpenID, if AOL isn't giving you any money to further development, you've failed yourself) It's better because my account truly will be one account that won't die because my original OpenID host liked to download movies a little too much.

Unfortunately, the only one that's doing it that I can come up with at the moment is internal to my company. However, I've seen it happen on Yahoo before... interestingly enough, it's not happening now... – zarniwoop, on May 26, 2008 00:29

Do you have some sites that I could test where this problem was occurring? – Thomas, on May 25, 2008 19:56