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Posts tagged ‘making stuff’

May 17

Hack day at Singly

Every so often, we have an internal hack day. This can mean different things, but this time around we broke off into teams to build applications on the Singly platform.  We started off the morning with problem/solution pitches from everyone on the team, and then narrowed down to three popular projects. Here’s what we’re building today:

AfterLife (Temas + Beau)

Problem: Too much noise in my feeds across services

Solution: Present feed in a visually appealing way with basic info from each post. I can drag each post up to “heaven” or down to “hell.” I can later see if lots of posts from a specific user went to hell, in which case I may want to remove that person from my social graph.

Foodie Follower (Tyler + Kristján)


Problem: Too many great restaurants. Yelp doesn’t help me see where people whose opinions I trust are eating out.

Solution: Select a set of people in your network whose food preferences you trust, and see the restaurants where they check in, post photos, etc.

Do I know? (Simon, Jer, Sash)


Problem: I receive hundreds of non-spam emails each day. I need a way to know if I know the people who are emailing me.

Solution: A lightweight email app. I click a “Do I Know?” button, and the app checks all my networks, and pops up a red or green light next to each. If I get a red light on each service, I likely don’t know the person.
Check back later for updates on the progress of our apps. And, while you’re here, sign up for our $10,000 App Challenge:

Eventbrite - Singly $10,000 App Challenge

Mar 7

Node.js Meetup

Last night we hosted the wonderful folks of the San Francisco Node.js Meetup in our office for food, beer, discussion and hacking. Check out a few photos from this fantastic night:

 

Feb 6

Singlysunset

The story of Singly: A story about stories

Human beings make sense of the world through stories. We see everything through the lens of a beginning, a middle and an end. Studies have shown that people even have better recall of information if it is presented as a story.

We share stories to get to know each other because they foster our understanding and knowledge. “How did you two meet?” “Where did you live before?” and even “How was your day?” are our invitations to each other.

Without stories, our collective conscience cannot learn, adapt or evolve.

The Internet is–above all else–a storytelling engine, as is demonstrated by the language social media services frame their experiences with. You capture moments with Path, and Facebook displays a literal timeline. Twitter invited early users to tell a story: “What are you doing?” From Wikipedia to Politico to YouTube to any number of other sites, storytelling is ubiquitous on the web.

An interesting story: Our remote team members can pop into the office any time they like on a big screen TV that always remains logged into a Google Hangout.

Using various services, we create pieces of stories: locations, contacts, places, photos, videos, links. These pieces are fragmented across the web – difficult to get to, and impossible to experience coherently.

At the core of Singly is a disruptive, intoxicating idea: people own these fragments and they have a right to reuse, shift, and remake them as they see fit to tell new stories.

As a first step toward empowering the average citizen, we’re releasing an app development platform and marketplace.

The Singly platform drastically extends front-end developers’ abilities. Singly handles building aggregators, maintaining servers, and battling authentication flows so that designers and front-end developers can make beautiful and useful products. Full stack engineers will be able to get to a testable product or prototype in record time, and will be able to solve more interesting problems than wrangling APIs.

Ours is a story about a new kind of digital society, and it begins with developers.

Dec 5

All my checkins (can you tell my girlfriend lives in NYC???)

Making Things Together

I do many things at Singly, but first and foremost, I am a creator. Ranging from full scale product & company creation on down to hacking on the weekends, I bring things to life for a living. This idea is a big part of how I think about personal data – it’s about more than just ownership, access, and control, it’s first and foremost a platform for creation, for Making Stuff.

A platform for creation could mean almost anything, so to get started we thought about what it would feel like to create using personal data with most (if not all) of the many pain points lifted – authentication, aggregation, collation, deduplication, storage, indexing…the list is long and often deflating. I believe incredible things will happen with those obstacles out of the way and we’ve been building like crazy to make that a reality. Our first version makes it super fast and easy to create powerful, yet lightweight HTML+CSS+JS apps that leverage an extensible set of your personal data without the need to run a server or write any backend code to solve the problems on the aforementioned Long List. We are beginning to send out invites and are so excited to see what sort of Stuff you Make. :).

With that, the only thing better than Making Stuff, is Making Stuff with Friends, so last Thursday we reached out to some friends, new and old and all gathered at our space here in the mission to experiment and Make Stuff Together (over beer and pizza, of course). In the course of only about 3 hours some really awesome things were created!

All my checkins (can you tell my girlfriend lives in NYC???)

All my checkins on Excessive Mapper (can you tell my girlfriend lives in NYC???)

  • Max Schultz made DragPhoto, an app to see your photos how you used to as a kid – a stack of polaroids that you can drag around:
Drag Photo shows your photos as a stack of Polaroids

I actually unfollowed two of these accounts after seeing this!

Soon, we will be sending out more invites to developers to get an account and start building things. Sign up at singly.com to get on the list and be sure to put in your GitHub handle if you are a developer. If you are as excited as we are (improbable, but I’m open to the possibility!) and want to get in as soon as possible, there are a few ways to get (extra) early access:

I am so excited for the community we are building around this idea and can’t wait to meet as many of you as possible in the future!

Oct 11

Screen Shot 2012-01-11 at 7.22.19 PM

Building Blocks

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just to realize them.

- Man Ray

Over the past several weeks, Singly has begun to take shape. Since we’ve been heads down working on product development, I’d like to share some of what we’ve accomplished recently.

Continuing to build on the Locker Project code base, we’ve developed the open source platform to the point where we can demonstrate an exciting range of functionality. It’s capable of syncing, archiving and indexing pictures, tweets, links and social connections across six different services, and provides a unified API to access all of the collected data.

As proof of concept, so far we’ve used it to create:

  • A link stream which shows all of the links shared with you through Twitter, Facebook, with embedded previews and full-text search
  • A combined address book with all of the people you’re connected with across Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Foursquare, Flickr and Github, which matches up the same people into a single entry and displays their most recent tweet
  • A couple of photo viewers which let you browse all of the photos you’ve shared on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare
  • A fast global search of all of the above

These basic tools nicely demonstrate the breadth of capabilities available in the platform today. We’ve also built out all of the trimmings, like making it easy to sign up and connect to all of your accounts.

Next, we’re working on opening up the platform for developers to build their own applications. Armed with JavaScript and HTML, you’ll be able to create sophisticated tools, powered by personal data, without the hassle of building a data management backend. If you’re interested, drop us a line with your email address, and we’ll put you on the list for early invitations.

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