Hi Caty, a mail to share my vision about the User Status feature. The main idea is to have a mechanism for users to broadcast messages concerning their activities. The key use cases for this are: 1) Fast communication between enterprise members which can replace IMs and mails with user status 1.1) Communicate what you are working on 1.2) Quick question answering and feedback gathering 1.3) Interesting material dissemination 2) Focused discussions about a given topic 3) Fast communication with external clients to keep them up-to-date In order to realize these use cases we need something that resembles to Facebook's Wall or, if we look at more enterprise oriented products, to SalesForce chatter (http://www.salesforce.com/chatter) In particular: 1) The feature should be implemented as an internal subsystem that takes advantage of the Wiki underlying model for exposing information 1.1) User status can contain reference to Wiki entities (i.e., page, attachments, comments) and external links. As Jerome said in a previous email, this is key. An autocompletion mechanism could help making this feature more usable. 1.2) I am not sure that we need to provide an upload mechanism to associate an artifact to a user status. Linking an attachment in a Wiki page is sufficient in my opinion. 2) It should be possible to define one or more "neighborhoods", i.e., people that will receive our status updates 2.1) This is something that is more powerful wrt to what we have in Facebook because it would allow us to create different social-graphs that can be targeted when a user status is updated 3) It should be possible to comment on a status update (e.g., quick question answering and feedback gathering use case) 4) The user status are not tweets... I think that the number of character should be limited to a reasonable high threshold (e.g., 2048) 5) User statuses should be visible only to the users belonging to the "neighborhood" targeted by the status 6) User statuses could be displayed using an activity stream in the user's profile page and also on the home activity stream 6.1) The user statuses should also appear in the Workspace home pages. In this case they are configured to display the statuses of the "neighborhood" implicitly defined by all the members of the workspace. Feedback is welcome. Thanks, Fabio On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/24/2010 04:12 PM, Fabio Mancinelli wrote: Obvious, +1. You mean something like: BigBoss says: How do we get through the crisis? Jimmy says: @BigBoss reduce costs! Mike says: @BigBoss sell more! And: Jimmy says: @Timmy where can I get a W80 form? Timmy says: @Jimmy room 404 You mean link sharing? I'm not sure this is the best way to communicate. It might work if it behaves a bit like instant messaging, with updates being refreshed in real time. Also, for it to make sense as a discussion, it should be threaded. So this starts to look like Google Wave, which somehow failed. It might work in an intranet, but still it would diverge too much from a simple status update, and I'm not sure how it can be integrated nicely inside the current Activity UI (nor the implementation, but that's not critical). I'm not sure I get this. Isn't an *intra*net supposed to be internal, inaccessible to external parties? Do you mean closed group messages, visible only in a given space? This is getting too far from the initial ideas. It was supposed to be integrated in the recent activity, as little user messages mixed among wiki activity. Now it looks like the main goal is user communication, with wiki activity on the second place. Going the Chatter way would imply many changes in the ActivityStream implementation, the {{activity}} macro, and the Recent Activity UI. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to go there, I'm only asking if we want to do it as the "User Statuses" sub-feature inside the Activity feature. That's always the case. The full wiki syntax might be available, which includes links to documents/attachment. If we do that, then should the WYSIWYG be displayed as well? +1 for links to existing data only. We could provide a "notify this" checkbox in the edit/upload UI. We could have activities for a space, and activities for a group. This means that in the group UI we could integrate a "say something" widget. Another idea is a panel which allows you to specify where to post the update: global (default), current space, specific space (with suggest), group of users (with suggest), specific user (with suggest). My fear is that the UI will be too complex, which increases the likelihood of users abandoning their update. If something takes too much to accomplish, or there are too many knobs to tinker with, then people will avoid that. Is a simple "reply to this" enough? The current activity stream allows for 2000 characters (which usually is rounded to something more), so this should be OK. This can be done at the UI level, but it's going to be hard to protect it at the API level. We can do it if we change the activitystream plugin to expose more high level methods, like getEventsForCurrentSpace and getEventsForCurrentGroup, while keeping the generic methods protected (as they are now). I don't like this, since it introduces details about the high-level application inside the low-level platform. So, my two main questions: 1. Do we want to make the "User Statuses" this complex? Or do we separate into a simple "User Statuses" and a complex facebook/chatter/wave like application? 2. What are the possible targets of a message? 2.1 Only neighborhoods == XWiki Groups and users - group:XWiki.XWikiAllGroup - group:XWiki.R&DGroup - user:XWiki.johndoe 2.2 Only Wiki, space or page 2.3 Entity references which can target different things, like: - somewiki - somewiki:somespace - somewiki:somespace.somepage - somewiki:XWiki.somegroup#XWiki.XWikiGroup - somewiki:XWiki.someuser#XWiki.XWikiUsers -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:42 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <sergiu(a)xwiki.com> wrote: Yes, this was a pretty trivial use case :) Yes... Or something like Fabio: I need to prepare a technical presentation about XWiki, could you tell me where I can find material about the architecture? Sergiu: You can look here: http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/Architecture or here ... Yes. I see your point and actually I agree. When I thought about focused discussions I was thinking about a topic that doesn't need a wiki page but still needs feedback. But in this case we might be in the use case of "quick information gathering" Yes, but imagine that a project manager wants to communicate his statuses to the client he is working with. Yes, finally this boils down to be able to target a specific group of users, what I called "neighbourhood", which in this case they are client that somehow have access to a restricted part of the system (provided that this is feasible and that can be handled at the platform level) As Gregory said, we don't have to copy chatter. However I have always thought that user statuses implied a certain degree of communication, unless we are talking of a very simple usage where users, for example, only updates statuses with messages like "Today the weather is good!" If we think about the "Interesting material dissemination" use case, I see an interaction of this kind Fabio: I've find a very interesting paper about Semantic technologies. Check it out: http:... +-> Sergiu: You might also be interested in this: ... +-> Vincent: Nice. Let's create a page and collect these links: Drafts.InterestingSemanticTechnologies Well, this was more an indirect reply to Caty's remark where she was asking if "it is it worth it to make our own status casting or can we use directly the Twitter API?" I don't think that the full WYSIWYG should be available, that would be a little heavyweight from my point of view. I would say that a text area providing a completion mechanism for linking entities would be enough. Yes, nice idea When I talk about neighborhoods I mean something that can also be defined by the connections users establlish and that are orthogonal to groups or workspaces. If we take the twitter model, this neighborhood is defined by the "users following me". What are you saying is actually what will happen in a context of a workspace where every status sent in the "Say something" widget of the Workspace is shown to all the members of the workspace (which, btw, is a (sub)wiki) The neighborhood I was talking about here was more a personal social network defined at the user level. Yep. Just a little remark, when you talk about "group of users" this can be by default the "users following me". And it could also be the default if not overridden. The point here is if we want to implement the "following/follower" mechanism or if we just say that every status update is broadcasted to all the users. The "following/follower" is a feature that allows the user to define his/her own social network that is orthogonal to existing groups and workspaces. Quick question: When you say that the target of the post is a page, wdym exactly? I understand quite well the other items, but what happens whey I send a status update to a page? Definitely. I agree. Well, unless I am missing something, this is the idea. I see replies appear à la Facebook though. Ok. I think that this needed only if we want to go to the "following/followers" way or if we want to target wiki-groups. If we think to workspaces, for example, they will be stand-alone (sub)wikis so every message sent in the context of a workspace will be broadcasted globally (i.e., to all the users of the workspace). On the other hand, why not creating a new component/API that exposes this kind of information and that can be used by the activity stream instead of putting it directly in the activity stream plugin? I think that the we should definitely start with the "simple" version that can be a version where everything is broadcasted globally and where the user can be helped with an auto-completion mechanism when posting references to pages. I think also that the user status reply is a very important feature that should be taken into account. I was thinking more about neighbourhoods (global wiki, groups, users, or "followers") Thanks, Fabio