Shelf and the Google Social API
The current trunk version of Shelf uses the Google Social Graph API to figure out who owns the web page you’re looking at. If it can’t find a person in the local address book who owns the URL, Shelf can now ask Google if there are any other pages on the internet that link to that page with a rel=”me” relation, and look for those pages in the local address book. So for instance, if I visit my linkedin profile page, Shelf will display context about me, as linkedin links to http://jerakeen.org/. Likewise, any page that I link to from jerakeen.org will be considered mine as well. This elevates Shelf's context-finding ability to practically magical levels in some cases.
Alas, there are disadvantages. Most superficially, the context-deriving part of Shelf was never designed to make long-running network queries, and so lives in the GUI code. Calling the Google API blocks the GUI thread. This sucks. Fixable, of course, but it makes the current development version somewhat choppy.
More serious is that Shelf now sends the URL of every web page I visit, and the homepages of everyone who’s twitters I read, and the base URLs of every RSS feed I read, to Google. I want to look for context in the email signatures of people that send me mail too, so soon it’ll be sending the homepages of everyone who mails me as well. Some people would consider this creepy. Actually most people would consider it creepy. And I don’t blame them. I don’t really have a solution for this one either, other than a big clearly-labeled option to turn it on.
On the API
For this sort of use the Social Graph API is great. Although all this information is available through just fetching the source of the current page and looking for links myself, there’s no way I’d want Shelf as a local GUI app to be doing that sort of thing. Google aren’t exposing anything I couldn’t have found out myself, but they’re doing it in a simple and fast manner, and using the API is trivially easy. No API keys, dealing with XML, registering my app or anything. I love that they just went with JSON as the format, and hang everything else.
Where's the next release?
On a related note, Shelf development has been a little slow recently. Partially I've been distracted by shipping important features for Dopplr, but mostly it's because I've hit a sort of psychic barrier of progression. Shelf needs a decent caching layer. And a threaded context discovery layer. And a much better event-driven model for display stuff, so it makes a more controlled number of network requests to fetch RSS feeds. Basically, now I've explored the problem, I want to rewrite the whole thing to take advantage of my understanding. And that's boring. So I'm not doing anything. I'll get over it.