Fluidinfo

March 31, 2012

Making Tumblr more social using Fluidinfo

Filed under: Howto — Terry Jones @ 6:39 pm

There are about 50 million Tumblr blogs, so there’s a reasonable chance you or some of your friends are use Tumblr. It’s now possible to import Tumblr data into Fluidinfo with just a couple of clicks. If you follow someone on Fluidinfo who’s done that, and you’re a Chrome user, we have some great news for you. Have a look at this:

If you install the Fluidinfo Chrome extension and follow a few people, as shown in the video, you’ll soon be getting little pop-ups telling you when you stumble across things the people you follow have mentioned on Tumblr. Note that you don’t have to be a Tumblr user to do this, you can just follow some people who are.

Fluidinfo is now doing imports of all URLs, #hashtags, and @names that people mention on Twitter and on Tumblr and tying it all together. The chrome browser extension surfaces that information for you as you browse. We have a new Firefox extension that’s about to go into beta, and imports of Delicious and Diigo are in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

March 14, 2012

Browsing the web with the Fluidinfo Chrome extension

Filed under: Howto — Terry Jones @ 12:50 am

Here’s a 4 minute video that shows what it’s like to browse the web with the Fluidinfo Chrome extension:

We’re really excited about where this is heading. The extension allows you to do several tricks not shown in the video, and we have more on the way. In a follow-up post we’ll take you through some of the features.

If you’re a programmer and want to get involved, or the extension gives you ideas for something you’d like to build, grab the source code from Github. We’d love to hear what you think. Comment below, email us at info@fluidinfo.com, or come hang out in the #fluidinfo channel on Freenode.

March 6, 2012

Getting Started With Fluidinfo is now out!

Filed under: Awesomeness,Essence,Events — Terry Jones @ 2:56 pm

Getting Started With Fluidinfo is now available in hardcopy and various eBook formats from O’Reilly. The authors, Nicholas Radcliffe (@njr) and Nicholas Tollervey (@ntoll), know Fluidinfo inside out, as you might hope. They’ve written multiple Fluidinfo client libraries, web applications, command line tools, visualizations, have written many blog posts about Fluidinfo, have imported tons of data into the system, and have both contributed to the design and architecture in many ways. The books is extremely well written. Both of the Nicholases are entertaining and clear writers.

The first chapter has a wonderful introduction and overview of Fluidinfo, and should be understandable by a broad audience. After that, things get more technical with a chapter on using Fish, a Fluidinfo shell, either from your shell command line or via Shell-fish, a web interface. Playing directly with Fluidinfo, adding to objects and running queries, is probably the best way to understand its (very simple!) data model. Then it’s on to programmatic access, using two Python libraries (one low level, one high level) and via Javascript. An example social book reader application is built from the ground up in Javascript. The book concludes with chapters on the REST API, advanced use of Fish, discussion of the special Fluidinfo about tag, and a description of the query language.

We hope you’ll grab a copy and come join us either on the fluidinfo-users or fluidinfo-discuss mailing lists, or on the #fluidinfo IRC channel on Freenode (chat right now with a web based client). We’ll be happy to say hi and to help get you going.

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