The road to 1.1

Jun 06, 2011 0 Comments , , , , , , , and

So after some discussions with Chris we’ve managed to come up with a roadmap for the next version of Causal, aka Talkie Toaster.

The following features take priority and will be included in v1.1 no matter what else gets dropped to actually ship:
  • Personal data storage – a configurable install-time setting that allows you as a user to store/backup your social media data as Causal collects it.
  • Dropbox integration.
  • Improved user interface – mainly backports of the much nicer Javascript and UI elements on gargoyle.me.
Throughout Causal’s development our main focus has been on doing things “the right way” regards scraping all this social data together, on creating a nice user interface with an extremely low barrier to entry, and on not storing user data.
As you can see, this focus has changed a little bit, with the launch of projects such as Locker and ThinkUp, personal social data backup/mashup seems to be the in thing, and we feel being one of the first players in this space Causal definitely has something to contribute.
So with a small refactor we’re going to make a configurable option (one set when installing Causal itself) that allows you keep your data in Causal in perpetuity and to provide an extremely easy method to export this data out of Causal (most likely in a human-friendly format such as JSON).
We’ve already begun work on 1.1, so watch this space for more news, and remember we publish all our code, test data, website, etc. openly on Github.

Gargoyle Me

Apr 11, 2011 0 Comments , , and

After many months work we’re pleased to announce the launch of Gargoyle Me, a free to use hosted version of Causal.

Not only is it a hosted version, it’s quite nicely “spiffed up” with a nifty new design and improved history interface.
Please feel free to use it, check out the description (including our basic privacy policy “if you tell us not to share it, we won’t“), and give us feedback!
We’re hoping to provide more services through Gargoyle than we can off the bat from Causal, but rest assured Causal will remain open source and all fixes and changes to it will be rolled back.

This project

Jan 20, 2011 , , , and

Hi I’m Chris.

Wes and I started this project based on the idea that it would be cool to have all your updates in one place and went from there. Also it was our way to play with cool technology.

First a bit about what Causal is and what it does.

What it is

Once setup with various permissions and usernames (see below), Causal generates a list of your posts to these services in one place. In short it shows you what you have been up to for the past week.

This can be a bit navel gazing so we added statistics about your usage of the services. What where you most shared web sites on Google Reader or your most retweeted person on Twitter for example.

You can also share a combined feed of all the services currently supported. Each service can be included independently into this feed depending on if you want it shared. This feed is made available in .json.

How it Works

Causal is Python Django project available under the Apache 2.0 license currently hosted at github. We have decided to make the code freely available for two reasons. Firstly we would like the users to drive where we take the code and what services we add. Secondly we want to completely transparent about how the code works.

Privacy is very important to us and we want Causal to reflect this. The only way to prevent any issues in this regard was to let everyone see how it works. In a nutshell we send you the user to the third parties site if we require access that isn’t publicly available, for example Twitter and FourSquare. Both these services require authentication for the data we need to fetch. We store the OAuth token locally on Causal’s server. Posts to these sites is then fetched using the token and cached for around an hour locally for speed of access for repeated visits. We provide a method for you to delete from the stored token from Causal and so block access. You can also revoke access for that token from the third party service. We would recommend you do this anyway as house keeping for the third party.

Some of the services we use such as last.fm don’t require authorisation for the data we use. In these cases we just need a username to access these publicly available feeds.

Roadmap

We have created a hosted version of the service at gargoyle.me. This will have the latest version of the code.

We have included a few services that we thought were essential but would love to add more, along with new features. This is where you come in.

Please use it and give us feedback at @projectcausal or email us at “team AT projectcausal.com”. We want the project to be driven by users and not by what we think people will want. Think of it as crowd sourced development. You can provide ideas, code or just fork the project and do your own thing with it.

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