Mosuki blog

If your website offers iCalendar (ICS) downloads of calendars or events, adding an “export to Mosuki” button onto calendars or events on your website is super easy. Start with this URL:

http://mosuki.com/feed-add?ics=

and add on the URL encoded URL to the the iCalendar file containing the calendar or events for the current page. For example, if the iCalendar file was at

http://www.mysite.com/calendar?id=12345

then you would create this URL:

http://mosuki.com/feed-add?ics=http%3A//www.mysite.com/calendar%3Fid%3D12345

Then just add a link to this url onto the page on your site. See, wasn’t that easy?

The most obvious new feature this month are our new feeds. You can now get public feeds for:

• Discussions on public events, public places, and public photos
• The list of published events
• All events at a public place
• All events published by a particular user

If your feed reader supports password-protected feeds (as most do), you can get private feeds of:

• Your calendar (experimental)
• Your messages & invites
• Discussions on any private or group event, place or photo
• All events at a private or group place
• Each of the event list views

The calendar feed is experimental because we aren’t sure how well feed readers will display items in the future. To subscribe to a feed, just look for and click on the feed icon: . If you have problems, let us know. (Oh, and for the geeky, our feeds are in RSS 2.0 format, but if anybody wants ATOM or RSS 1.0 feeds, let us know.)

You may also notice that the site seems a bit faster, and doesn’t default to SSL (https) anymore. This is because we implemented secure logins without having to default you to SSL first. (Again, for the geeky, non-SSL pages log you in over a SSL JavaScript connection.)

We have improved the security in the “I forgot my password” process, so that we don’t ever have to send passwords in email. The places list is slightly improved. And there is now a site tour, where you can learn about all the cool features that Mosuki has to offer.

As always, this new release contains a number of bug fixes and minor improvements. And, as always, contact us if you have any problems. And stay tuned! This release lays the groundwork for some exciting new features which shoulds be out in the next few weeks.

Mosuki has just released PottyMouth under the BSD License. PottyMouth transforms completely unstructured and untrusted text to valid, nice-looking, safe HTML. We wrote it for Mosuki in January 2007. We’re excited to be able to give a little back to the free/open source software community, since software from that community has made Mosuki possible.

The Web Standards Project has an good explanation of what we think is the single biggest problem with hCalendar — overloading the HTML title attribute.

Their article doesn’t mention one other problem with overloading title attributes — the appearance of (seemingly) gibberish tooltips when a user mouses over a date or time. Given the rapidity with which bugs in our tooltips are reported to us, we think that this is (an underappreciated aspect of) an underappreciated problem with hCalendar.

We join with The Web Standards Project in encouraging microformats to address this problem in hCalendar. In the meantime, if you want to interoperate with Mosuki, we encourage you to use our iCalendar support to import and export events from us.

We posted eight months ago about Google calendar’s lack of respect for private data. Chris Pirillo has a found a clever demonstration of this: just search for “user password” in public events, and you’ll come up with a huge list of usernames and passwords of all sorts.

We’re not holding our breath for Google to fix this problem, or even notice that it exists. But it illustrates a subtle point about privacy and security. Think about how hard it would be for Google to fix this problem now. They have tens of thousands of calendars, and events in Google Calendar that may or may not be private. So even if they added privacy controls now, it would be up to the user to change the privacy settings on all of their past events. And Google calendar users would be confused when other people’s events that they used to be able to see suddenly disappeared.

Privacy and security isn’t easy to do right, and it’s even harder to tack on after the fact. We have been designing and worrying about privacy and security from the beginning, and we don’t have these kinds of problems.

Just checked this out, it’s easy:

1. Log in to SonicLiving
2. Click ’share+subscribe’ at the top
3. Click on one of the “Moz./IE” links
4. Copy the URL (will look similar to http://sonicliving.com/user/9999/cal.ics)
5. Log in to Mosuki
6. Click on add feed on the bottom right of the calendar page
7. Paste the URL from step 4 into the URL box
8. Set it to update however often you want and click “Create feed and import”

Voila!

The all-public, all the time nature of the newly popular microblogging site Twitter just bit one of its users. Here’s what happened. Steve Rubel, a senior executive of major marketing company Edelman posted that one of the company’s clients, PC Magazine, “goes in the trash,” despite his “free sub[scription].” Whoops.

Now, PC Magazine is probably just not his preferred sunday afternoon reading, and nobody really can blame him for chucking it rather than letting it clutter up his house for no reason. And he probably just expected his comment to blend in with all the other mundane details of his everyday life that his six hundred friends and nine hundred followers may or may not read on his Twitter page. Sounds harmless enough, right?

Instead, his comment grew legs, and walked around the internet right to PC Magazine’s Editor in Chief, who, sanely and reasonably, decided not to boycott and blacklist Edelman. Rubel apologized, and didn’t get sacked. Hooray. Everybody’s behaving like adults.

There’s a deeper message here: private information exists. One of the major aspects of the Web 2.0 craze is freely available public data. Every site offers public, user submitted information for perusal. Mashups combine this information in new and creative ways. It’s a grand, exciting experiment, and it’s already producing some thrilling results.

But in the midst of this craze, people seem to be forgetting that not everything is public. Private data does exist. Myspace and Friendster learned this quickly, and added ways for users to hide their profiles from prying eyes. Flicker lets you make private and group photos. LiveJournal added private posting years ago. And you can bet your Twitter stock options that somebody at Twitter is working on a way to make a Twitter post private right now.

It’s nowhere clearer than in the event space that private information exists. Imagine if anyone could see all the events on your calendar. What if your mom looked at your calendar and saw “Take girlfriend to abortion clinic?” What if your boss saw “Fetish Night” on your calendar? What if your friend Bob saw “Suprise birthday party for Bob” in his “Upcoming events” on Mosuki? Bad news.

The companies that make it past the Web 2.0 hype and become the Yahoo!s and Googles, and AOLs and Flickrs and YouTubes of tomorrow will have to understand that private data exists, as well as offering public data. And the ones that don’t get it, and don’t get it right, won’t last.

We hope you like Mosuki’s new design. We do. Lots. Send us comments, complaints or any feedback here. Many thanks to Sandy, who provided us with this much-needed facelift.

There are some other changes too. You’ll notice that we now have delicious and reddit buttons on published events, as well as the old digg buttons. (Please let us know if the reddit buttons work for you — none of us genius hackers can figure out how to create an account on reddit.)

We’ve moved to a new URL scheme for greater privacy (that’s what the ~s in the URL bar are), but don’t worry, old links will still work for a few months.

Emails now support unicode fully and look a bit different. And we fixed a particularly subtle sorting bug on the event list and the sidebar on your calendar.

Enjoy!