onXiam

Spam, Time, What Next...

2009-01-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone. Long time, no talk. I won't beat around the bush, here's what's on my mind:

My job is taking up much of my time, and in this economic environment, I want to focus on that as much as I possibly can.
Spam is just...ridiculous. I cannot keep up with it. Every simple trick I try to implement is circumvented in a matter of days and I just don't have the time to implement anything more in-depth, or to clean up the mess that the spammers make all the time.
I haven't had time or ambition to develop anything new for the site in ages, and I'm starting to think that it may have just run its course.

When I started Onxiam, it was to fulfill a need that my mom had -- the need to keep up to date with me on various websites. That need is not so big anymore, and in the days since I launched Onxiam, there have been many others who have done similar things with more time to focus on it. Because of this, I'm thinking that it may be time for me to retire Onxiam.

For now, I've tried once again to clean up the spam, and as a first measure, I've disabled the "add a site" feature. I'm going to kick it around for a while before I decide whether or not to fully retire the site...but for now I'll leave it as-is, with the exception of not being able to add more sites.

-Kevin

Fighting the Ugly Spam Monster

2008-02-14T07:57:00.001-08:00

Greetings everyone.

I know that I've been absent for a while, but truth be told, I have been working on a better version of the site. Work just goes much more slowly these days than it did in the past. I simply have my hands in too many cookie jars at the moment.

However, work is progressing and I'm trying to be more diligent about getting this release finished, because I think that it is quite an improvement over the current site.

Now onto the topic at hand: SPAM

I hate it. You hate it. We all agree.

I've tried to leave Onxiam very "open" -- most notably in allowing people to add sites to the collective pool. However, spammers have been adding far, far too many bogus sites to Onxiam. It's gotten to the point that I simply cannot keep up. One quick look through the site and you'll see what I mean. Who knew that there was such a thriving online community for "SONY Laptop battery 088XX-2135".

I mean really, all of you Laptop Battery people...I just don't know what to say to you. You've just gone way, way too far. I've been struggling with the morality of "policing" Onxiam and deleting sites and deleting accounts. I don't want to spend my time censoring things, but I'm simply left with no other option at this point.

Onxiam was conceived out of a need -- a need to group my online names in one place that would be easy for my friends and family to find. Other people found it useful too, and that's great! But it was always meant to be a list of online communities, not spam keywords.

With that in mind, I am working on taking action to purge all of the sites and user accounts that have been deemed as spam.

This will greatly clear up the noise in the Onxiam database, and will allow me to actually focus some effort on developing features when I get free time instead of spending all of my free time fighting spammers.

Unfortunately, this also means that when I release the new version of the site, the "add a site" feature will be replaced with "request a site". This will allow me to catch spam upfront, before it floods the database and wreaks havoc all over Onxiam.

I'm sorry everyone has had to deal with all of the laptop battery garbage. It will be gone soon.

All the best,
-Kevin

Mention on the BBC site

2007-06-29T14:51:00.001-07:00

I think that a lot of the recent traffic here at Onxiam has to do with an article over on the BBC website. In the article titled The Tech Lab: Bradley Horrowitz, he mentions Onxiam about halfway down under the section titled Digital Lives.

What Bradley is talking about is exactly why I first created Onxiam. And as I've mentioned before on this blog, no Onxiam is not a "secure" solution to this problem, but in the meantime until there is some kind of unique digital identifier, I (and my Mom) needed some way to keep all of these online names straight. And as it turned out, so do many other people.

I just wanted to thank Bradley (elatable) publicly for mentioning Onxiam in the story! I've been getting a lot of traffic ever since, so thank you very much for the shoutout!

-Kevin

Hello to all the new people!

2007-06-29T12:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I last wrote to you. Here's why:

I launched onxiam about a year ago just before my girlfriend moved across the country to be in Chicago with me. In the time since then, we've run a marathon, adopted a puppy that was a hurricane Katrina refugee, and worked on getting settled in together. I've also gained all kinds of responsibilities in my day job, and spent a lot of time working on ideas and concepts there in an effort to do the best that I possibly can for my firm.

As onxiam grew, it started to get harder and harder to maintain with my ever-more-busy schedule. I continued working on new features but eventually found myself running out of time in my days, so something had to give. For a while it was onxiam. I decided that I would just let it run on its own for a while, and it's been chugging along ok since then.

Recently I've been working on some new features and an enhanced version of the site...call it version 2.0. It's not done, but I've continued to work on it as time has allowed. Now recently I've been noticing an influx of people again, so I've been trying to find more time to work on these enhancements.

To those of you who have written, I've tried to write back when possible, and I will continue to do so as my time allows. Thank you for the suggestions and the encouraging words. And to all of the new people who have joined onxiam, hello and welcome.

-Kevin

Competition

2006-10-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

My friend mattstratton just emailed me a link to findmeon.com.

What can I say? I like the idea (obviously), but the interface leaves a bit to be desired. One of the challenging things that I faced when developing onXiam was that I wanted to keep it simple. This is not always easy to do, but I felt that it was imperative that I make every effort to make this as easy to use as possible.

As I move forward and implement more and more features, the ease of use may get a bit more difficult, but I'll always do my best to keep it clean and simple. As for findmeon, well I have to say that I'm partial to onXiam myself. :)

Back in Business...Almost

2006-10-31T07:21:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone!

The Chicago Marathon is finished and I'm happy to say that I came through relatively unscathed this year (a few injuries sustained during training, but nothing too horrible) and helped a couple friends complete their first 26.2 mile endeavor. A good time was had by all, and now that it is done, I will have some free time to work on onXiam!

But then...wouldn't you know it? I fire up my development PC the other day and BAM! Bad hard drive. So now I have to get that sorted out before I can get moving on the site again. Frustration!!!

But things will be back up and running soon, and then I'll be able to start rolling out some new features and enhancements to the site. I can't wait to dive into things! It's been too long, friends!

-Kevin

The Silence Is Deafening

2006-10-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

What the heck? I know...it's been way too long since I've posted. What can I say? I've just been crazy busy as of late, and I just haven't had time to dedicate to my project. And that my friends is driving me crazy!

What has had me so busy lately? Primarily it has been two things:

1. Marathon Training - On October 22, I'll be running my third consecutive Chicago Marathon. This time my girlfriend and I are both running in honor of Charlotte Rose. For the record, training for a marathon is extremely time consuming! I mean, I'm getting up at 6am, going to work all day, coming home and then I have to run 9 miles after work. By the time I get home from the run, it's dark out and I'm starving. I make dinner, spend an hour with my girlfriend and then it's 10:30 at night and I'm exhausted! This leaves precious little time to code...and when you have such little time, why not take on another challenge...

2. Puppy!!! - Meet M.C. Levee, a hurricane Katrina dog that came to Chicago from Mississippi (hence the M.C. part of her name). My girlfriend and I had been wanting to adopt a dog sometime, and behold one moring I wake up and turn on the TV and there's a news story about PAWS Chicago bringing in animal Katrina survivors from Mississippi that are in need of new homes. The next day we had adopted her and we were scrambling to get our house puppy-ready. We are truly in love with our pup! But as you can guess, she is time consuming also.

In a few short weeks, the marathon will be finished, and our puppy will be adjusted to living with us, so then I should have more time to jump back into developing for onXiam. I have been working a bit here and there, and there is some pretty cool stuff in the pipeline, so please stick with me.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me emails with kind words and comments. I really appreciate it. I'm glad that you are all enjoying onXiam. I can't wait to make it even better.

-Kevin

Make Yourself Known With A Bio

2006-08-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

I just finished implementing another new feature -- bios.

Now when you look at your public page, in addition to your identities you will see a tabstrip above your identity list. Clicking on the Biography tab will take you to the newly created bio page.

What Can I Put In My Bio?
You can use this bio area to tell whatever you'd like about yourself. All I ask is that you keep it clean -- that is, please remember that this is a public page so don't get too raunchy and make me have to play policeman so that my site doesn't get shut down. Sorry that I had to say that, but it's better to be safe...

As for what you can technically do in this area, the answer is pretty much anything. You can type regular text (even UTF-8 unicode for our chinese members!), you can bold, underline, link to webpages, link to and display images...the HTML editor that I found and implemented is pretty robust. It does make use of Javascript, so trust me that life will be much easier if you have Javascript enabled for this page.

A Response To Requests
I fielded a few questions in the past about being able to have more than one website listed in your profile. If you look now, I've actually removed the "website" field (the profile page used to have name, location, website...) and I've moved that text into everyone's bio area as a starting point. Now that this bio text area is available, you can tell everyone about all the other websites that you own by putting that information in here.

How Do I Get Started?
In order to edit your bio, you have to be logged in. When you log in, you are still taken to your identity maintenance page, and you'll notice that I have changed things around a little bit again. Now in the right-hand sidebar you will see some links to take you to various pages. From here you can click on Profile and you'll be taken to a familiar looking profile page. It made logical sense to include the bio editing capability on this page, so that is exactly what I have done.

To edit your bio, just click inside the editor area and start typing.

Remember, your bio and all other profile information is completely optional! However, if you provide information there, it will be displayed. There is no "private" profile setting. So if you want to share this info with others, then go ahead and fill it out. But if you do not want to share any personal information or bio information, then just leave these areas blank.

Enjoy!

Feature Update

2006-08-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I added a couple new features to onXiam. They are two "gadgets" that appear in the right-hand sidebar, one on your public user page and the other on the site directory page.

Similar People
On your public user page, you should notice a gadget called "Similar People" in the right-hand sidebar. Take a look at my page for an example.

I'm starting to have enough data into the system that I can attempt the creation of interesting queries to see what the data can reveal. This is the first one that I've made. The way it works is this:

I check to see on which sites you have an identity -- excluding any you have set to private.
I compare this to everyone else's site lists to see if there are any "perfect matches" and then display to you the top ten "most similar" people to you along with a count of how many sites you share.

My hope is that this may get you to explore these other people's profiles and find that while you may share 10 of the same sites, perhaps they are active on a site that you had not heard of, and as a result of this you may find something really interesting that you want to join.

Most Popular
This one is exactly what it sounds like. I've simply written a query to count which sites have the most identities associated with them, and I'm displaying the top ten results here along with the person count.

I think that in the future, I'm going to be able to make some more interesting connections between the data, so consider this just the first pass. Is there anything in particular that you would like to see? Use your imagination and think about how this data could be tied together and presented in interesting ways. If you come up with anything, please leave me a comment!

Until next time...

New CSS

2006-08-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reworking the CSS layout for onXiam. I've incorporated a more traditional style two-column layout which will greatly help me in the future in regards to screen real-estate for upcoming features.

While I was restructuring the layout, I also worked on unifying the look and feel of the pages a bit more. Usually when I do something like this I miss a spot or two, so I'll be keeping my eyes open for this and any "stragglers" will be fixed soon.

One thing to make a note of is that as part of this update, I have also changed the People and Sites pages to now behave as directories. You'll also notice that in the sidebar, I now have the lates people and latest sites displayed in their new home. As such, the link in the primary navigation to the "latest" page was just not needed any more, so it has been retired.

Take a look around and feel free to leave comments about the layout. Hopefully the "why" will become more apparant once I get some of the new features built and released. But for now, just know that this new layout is just step one in a multi-step plan.

Oh yeah, I ran out of time and I didn't finish a new look for the homepage, but that is coming too. I need to bust out a graphics program...

Growing Pains

2006-08-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I've been a bit quiet lately. Well, that is pretty much due to both my day job and my evening / weekend activities. But last night I found myselft staying up way past my bedtime working on the site.

Over the next day or two, you may notice some visual changes to the pages. I'm reworking the general layout of the site via CSS in order to prepare for some of the upcoming enhancements that I'm currently working on. So if you notices some strange appearances from time to time, rest assured that all will be well soon enough.

The positive comments and acceptance of the site has really motivated me to keep pushing forward to make it even better. I only wish there were more hours in the day that I could work on it! I'm anxious to get some new features rolled out, so this CSS rework as well as some behind-the-scenes things that I've been doing are just necessary parts of moving forward at this time.

Put A Face To That Name!

2006-08-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

Ahh summer...the time when I spend my days working, my evenings training for a marathon and my weekends out of town attending weddings. But I am back in town and I was able to spend a little bit of quality time with the source-code, and I am happy to announce a new feature for onXiam.

You've chosen your name, you've tied your identities together, now you can now upload a photo to your onXiam profile! For an example, you can check out my profile. Ideally this would have been ready when I first turned the site on, but it was a time-crunch and it just slipped down the priority list. But now it is ready to go, so get to uploading, people!

FYI, in order to simplify my life in the future, I decided to use a pre-determined size for all user photos. That size is 150x150 pixels. Big enough to see, but small enough to fit in columns should I create a new CSS for the site. If you want your user photo to be absolutely perfect, you could crop it beforehand to be the desired 150x150 dimensions. However, cropping beforehand is not absolutely necessary. Here's how it works:

The image you want to upload:

Is smaller than 150x150

The image will be displayed at its native size in the middle of a 150x150 area

Is portrait and taller than 150

The image will be automatically resized to a height of 150px, preserving aspect ratio

Is landscape and wider than 150

The image will be automatically resized to a width of 150px, preserving aspect ratio

Is bigger than 150x150

The image will be automatically resized to fit the 150x150 area, preserving aspect ratio

I hope this works ok for everyone. I'm anxious to see everyone's faces!

More to come...

New Badge: The 80x15

2006-08-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have websites and blogs and enjoy the clean look of 80x15 pixel badges, I created an 80x15 onXiam badge just for you!

Feel free to copy this image, make it a link that goes to your onXiam profile and put it up on your sites! It really seems that a good number of people that have been joining onXiam are doing so through discovering about it via blog posts, sidebar badges and people including links to their onXiam profiles in their message board signatures (check out the signature for lightsup55).

This badge is also available on the onXiam Promote page. For those interested (or those who want different colors), I created this badge using this cool service.

Unknown Tales

2006-08-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to take a moment to thank TheWorldofDan for his help yesterday in testing the new "add a site" functionlity. TheWorldofDan (or Daniel Hollands) contacted me in regards to a new site that he was launching and asked if I could include it on onXiam. I said "Sure, but maybe you help me out by testing out the "add it yourself" functionality. Daniel obliged and we shared a nice email correspondence afterwards.

Daniel's new site that he added is called UnknownTales. It is a site where users generate "interactive fiction" -- I likened it to a "choose your own adventure" type game, except that the users actually author the adventure. It is a really neat idea, and I wish him luck.

One really interesting piece is if you look at the user profile page on UnknownTales (here is Daniel's), you'll notice that he has a place for you to link to your onXiam profile. I want to thank Daniel for including that!

One onXiam user, Baba, has already emailed me saying that he found UnknownTales through onXiam and he loved that there was a place for him to put his onXiam username in his profile. So there you go, Daniel! People like you site, and they like having the ability to add their onXiam username to their profile! Everybody wins! YAAAY!!!

So if you haven't yet, you should go take a look at UnknownTales. It really is a neat idea, and it will be interesting to watch the talents of writers everywhere help it to grow. If you like it, go Digg it! And don't forget to subscribe to the Latest Sites feed to keep an eye on new online communities that are added to onXiam. You too can discover fun new websites and communities to join!

New Features: Sites and Site Details

2006-08-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

Last night I launched the much-overdue add a site functionality. In addition to this, I also created a couple other pages. These have actually been up for a few days now, but this is the first chance that I've had to write about them.

In the top navigation, you will now see two new links: Sites and People

Sites
Previously if you wanted to know what sites were available on onXiam, you had to do some searching. Literally. If you went to the search page, you could see all available sites listed in the site dropdown box. But that wasn't the most intuitive place to learn about what sites are available on onXiam. Something else was needed.

I decided to create a site directory of sorts. This is a simple alphabetical list of all sites that are available on onXiam. Each of these site names is also a hyperlink. Clicking on a sitename takes you to a detail page about that particular site. Here you will see a headcount of how many of that sites' users are active on onXiam as well as both their onXiam username and their username on that given site. Whew! That was a mouthful!

People
I toyed around with the idea of making the people page a directory of sorts too, but for now I've decided against it. Instead I'm displaying the most recent people to join onXiam as well as a link to the search page where you can search for specific users.

All of this is just serving to "round out" some parts of the site that I wanted to have live when it launched, but due to time constraints I just wasn't able to have it all ready. But with this done, and with the "add a site" functionality launched, now I'm going to try to get to work on some more interesting and fun things for the site!

You Can Add Sites

2006-08-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

Last night I put up some new code that will allow onXiam users to add sites to onXiam. Once you submit the necessary site information, the new site will be available for all onXiam users to add to their profile.

This was probably the feature most requested since I launched onXiam. I had always planned on making it available, but the problem was that the process of adding a site is somewhat complex, and I have been struggling with how to make it easy enough that anybody can do it without confusion or error.

Well, I tried and I tried. I coded it one way and then another. I asked my friend for his opinion and tried that way. Then I tried a few other approaches. All of them had shortcomings. You see, the problem is not so much adding a site -- that part is very simple. The problem is creating links to user profile pages on these user-submitted sites. Why is that difficult? Basically it is because URL schemas are different from one website to another. Some websites feature the username in the URL (such as http://www.onxiam.com/people/kevinkmp/), while others do not have usernames in the URL but instead have some other kind of identifier (such as http://upcoming.org/user/22400/). That makes creating these "site templates" quite difficult to put completely in the hands of any user.

You see, in order for onXiam to link directly to people's profile pages on various sites, I have to abstract these profile page URLs. For instance, I have to take the URL, figure out what is the username in it, then replace that with a placeholder of sorts. Now whenever an onXiam user says "On [this-website] I Am [username]", I then merge their username in place of the placeholder in the URL, thus creating a direct link to their profile page on that site.

Now try to imagine how I've been building the "Add a Site" page. It necessitated text such as:

Do users on this site have their own profile page? If so, what is the URL of one of these?
What username appears in that URL?
If no username appears in that URL, then what other identifying code does appear in there (hint: look for something like http://www.website.com/1234 -or- http://www.website.com/page.html?u=1234)

As you can see, this has the potential to be quite confusing, and when I had a few people test it, that was made all the more obvious. So finally I took a step back and re-evaluated what I was trying to accomplish with the "Add a Site" feature. When it came right down to it, the main thing that I was trying to accomplish was to make new sites available to onXiam users by getting them to appear in the dropdown box on the "add an identity" page. The ability to link directly to profile pages is a fringe benefit, not a core requirement.

With this in mind, I thought about how long this had been taking me to build vs how long it would take me to review new sites as they come in and handle providing the direct profile links myself. I decided that since I had already spent two weeks trying to get this feature built, it probably wasn't worth it. Simplify! I would simply provide users with the ability to add a new site. By default, when users add an identity on one of these new sites, it will link to the homepage of the website. As new sites are added, I will be monitoring them and when possible I will tweak them to link directly to user profile pages. I don't think it will be too difficult for me to stay on top of this, and quite honestly, I think it will be easier in the long run.

So there you have it. If you are an active member on CommunitySomethingOrOther.com and you want to add it to onXiam, now you can do so by providing two little pieces of information: Site name and Site URL. So for example:

Site name: Onxiam
Site URL: http://www.onxiam.com

That's all there is to it. Upon submitting the site information, it will then be immediately available to all onXiam users. I hope this is the beginning of tapping into the knowledge of the users in order to make onXiam grow even more.

Chinese Coverage

2006-08-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I noticed that quite a few of the people joining onXiam were stating that their location was somewhere in China. This happened frequently enough that I decided to do a little digging.

As far as I can tell, I think that this post was the beginning of it. Unfortunately for me, I can't read it. I tried running it through an online translator, but the resulting text was not all that understandable. Well, I'm thinking that this post made some interesting points or something like that because as I said, I've been seeing a steady stream of people in China joining onXiam.

So I just wanted to say welcome to all new members, especially those of you joining us from China. I hope you like the site.

Slow and Steady

2006-07-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

It's been four days since my last post...let me catch you up on what I've been doing and where things are in regards to a site update.

First of all, it's been a busy week at my day job. Couple that with training for my third Chicago Marathon in the evenings after work in heat that has been in the 90+ degree range with dreadful amounts of humidity and what do you get? You get an extremely tired developer who is not getting home to eat dinner until 8 or 9pm every night. Translation: Work on the site has been a bit slow this week. However, just because it is slow does not mean that it is not happening.

Like they say to novice marathoners: Slow and steady will get you to the finish line.

I've been working an hour here and an hour there...basically whenever I can. When I'm out doing my training runs, I'm working. I'm thinking through logic and trying to figure out solutions for features that I want to put in as well as suggestions that I've received from the community. When I get home, I try to build a bit of code. Add another function or start another page. And I'm happy to say that it has been paying off.

I'm in the final stages of testing the long-awaited "Add a site to onXiam" functionality. I've tried to simplify the process as much as I possibly could. Instead of asking you, the end user, to do complex thinking, I've tried to encapsulate all of that complexity on the backend as much as I can. I won't lie...It has not been easy, but I feel that the result is pretty straightforward. I've managed to make it almost the same as the current "add an identity" page. I just need you to give a little bit more info in order to make the site available to everyone. Once the page gets launched, I'll be happy to hear your thoughts about it, and if I can improve it in any way, I will.

It still needs just a bit more testing, but it is close. Look for it this weekend for sure.

This Just In: 300 and Counting!

2006-07-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, BrainSyke joined the onXiam community. And that was all it took to hit the 300 user mark.

Welcome, BrainSyke. Glad to have you here.

It's great to see the train keep rollin'. I know that you have all been spreading the word about onXiam via blog links and sidebar badges. Thank you so much! The more people that join up, the more connections we can make, and the more communities we can all discover.

Weekend Update - The Good and the Bad

2006-07-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

Somehow during a weekend of 75-90 degree days, I managed to find the time to get to work on some of the new features that are on my list for onXiam. After many hours of struggling with some stupid mistakes (you know, the ones that are staring you right in the face and you still don't see them), I finally had the site stable again with a long overdue new feature: static URLs!

That's right. Instead of my profile page being http://www.onxiam.com/user.aspx?kevinkmp, now it is http://www.onxiam.com/people/kevinkmp/. As you can see from the first link, the old way still works, but yes, now you can have a nice clean URL for your homepage on onXiam. I know that this should not be a difficult thing to implement, but let me just say this: When using asp.net on a shared webhost, it is incredibly difficult. But alas, that is all in the past, for now let us all celebrate with joy and marvel at the beautiful new URLs. Please. Celebrate. Now!

While I was working on this feature, I put up a message in the header section of all pages explaining that I was promoting code. I'll continue to do that in the future as well. For the most part, the site will remain functional, but there will be times when I have to do a hard IIS reset, so if you happen to be logged in at that moment, you'll get bumped out to the login screen once the reset takes place. Sorry about that, but these little annoyances come hand-in-hand with new features.

One thing that I feel really bad about is that due to the URL stuff taking much longer than I anticipated, I did not get the "add a site" page up and running like I had said I would. I am really sorry, but I just ran out of time. However, that is priority #1 as of right now, and it will be up ASAP.

But for now, please enjoy the brand spankin' new URLs.

More New Sites Added

2006-07-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

I've added some more sites at the suggestion of you readers. Thanks for pointing these out and asking for them to get added.

And fear not! The first enhancement to be rolled out will be a page that lets you add sites yourself. Look for it this weekend.

All the most recently added sites can be seen on the latest page, but since you're here already, I'll just mention the 10 most recent:

Back At Ya!

2006-07-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to take a minute to say thanks to some of you who have been spreading the word about onXiam.

Briconcella was the first to write about onXiam on the Tech Bee blog
Tmarkelz gave me a shout over on 360voice - the original video game blogject! Accept no substitutes!!!
Eauxpie informed the SecondLife crew about onXiam, resulting in Torley posting this which then led to Ruggedmug making this awesome post!
Ramen Junkie had some nice words to say on his blog

I keep discovering more comments and links all the time, so I just wanted to publicly thank you all for helping to spread the word.

Two Hundred and Counting

2006-07-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

The last couple days have seen a steady stream of people joining onXiam. Earlier today we hit number 200 when hangry signed up.

Unfortunately in the midst of this excitement, I've also found myself busy for every single minute of the last few days. I would like nothing more than to sit down for a few hours and finish up some updates for the site, but my life is just not cooporating at the moment. Things should free up a bit by this weekend, so I plan on attacking some development at that time.

Thanks to all who have joined -- it seems that you have all been spreading the word. I appreciate it!

The Big 1-0-0

2006-07-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

When Chadrick clicked that "Sign Me Up!" button, he became the 100th member of the onXiam community.

Welcome, Chadrick.

And welcome to everyone else too! I hope you are able to make some interesting connections using onXiam.

Second Life Influx?

2006-07-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

So all of a sudden I am seeing an influx of Second Life people joining the onXiam community!

One new member after another is showing up on the latest page, and most if not all of them seem to be somehow tied to Second Life. For instance, new member Eauxpie is "Richard Linden" in Second Life. Eauxpie, I'm singling you out because it seems like you were the first one to start this rush! Can I ask where you found out about onXiam?

So welcome to all of the new people who share the revered Linden name in Second Life! Thank you for spreading the word!

I hope you like onXiam. There are more cool things to come.

-Kevin

onXiam On Digg

2006-07-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

It looks like onXiam user ldmorris426 liked onXiam enough to submit it to Digg. Currently the story/link has been dugg 4 times. If you like onXiam too, then go digg it to boost visibility.

Thank you ldmorris426 for the submission!

A Special Welcome To: Gleeb Torin!

2006-07-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to extend a special welcome to new onXiam user Gleeb Torin. Why? Well, in addition to using onXiam to track down another onXiam user in SecondLife, he is also the first person to enter an identity in his profile for Nintendo DS Animal Crossing, and I just thought that was pretty neat!

So if you play Animal Crossing, be sure to look Gleeb up!

On a somewhat related sidenote, I have to admit that I am surprised that there are still no World of Warcraft identities listed! I don't play WoW, but I know how huge it is and I thought that I would have seen a few WoW identities by now. What gives?

Discovering Connections via onXiam

2006-07-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

This is great! Over the weekend I received an email from onXiam user tmarkelz which read:

"Ha ha... social networking in action... contacted via SecondLife via onXiam via 360voice."

He then pasted the text of an IM that he received inside of SecondLife from onXiam user Gleeb Torin:

"found you on onXiam.com, via 360voice... I look forward to the next community night, that last was a blast :D"

What does that mean? As I wrote the other day, Trapper wrote on the 360voice dev blog about 360voice being included in onXiam. That exposure resulted in a steady stream of readers of that blog joining onXiam. New onXiam user Gleeb Torin apparantly read about onXiam in the 360voice blog, signed up, then saw in Trapper's profile that he has a SecondLife persona and contacted him inside of SecondLife!

It is so exciting to hear about connections like this being made! This is just what I had in mind when I conceived this site. Scenarios like "hey, this person looks interesting...I wonder what else (s)he does online..." Well now you can find out!

Thank You 360Voice!

2006-07-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Trapper is one of the guys behind 360Voice. He was kind enough to give a shoutout to onXiam over on the 360Voice dev blog. I wanted to say thanks to him for doing that because it definitely helped to raise the visibility of onXiam to a wider audience.

Since he made the post talking about onXiam, I have had more than 20 new people sign up to consolidate their online identities via onXiam. It's really fun to check the latest page and see new names every time!

Now I just need to get some more exposure via del.icio.us, digg, bloglinks...and don't forget about the badges! I'll work on getting some more badges ready soon too.

New Sites Added

2006-07-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've added a bunch of new sites to the onXiam collection. In order to keep people better appraised of when new sites get added, I decided to add a section to the Latest page featuring the 20 most recent sites that have been added. Of course, this has also been enabled as a feed in case you want to monitor what new sites get added.

I realized as I put this together that watching this feed would be beneficial for two reasons:

You see a site name and say "Hey, I participate in that community! I'm going to add it to my profile!"
You see a site name and say "Hmm...I've never even heard of that before. I wonder what it is? I'm going to go check it out..."

As I was building this initial version of onXiam, I was amazed at just how many communities there are online. Not surprised, just amazed. I feel like I am pretty active online, but I feel like a hermit when I see the myriad of communities that are available! Hopefully onXiam will have a positive impact on that front as well.

Organize your identities and at the same time, discover new communities in which you are interested.

Identities on MSN

2006-07-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

I just fielded a request from tijir asking to get MSN added as a site. Being the happy-to-respond-quickly guy that I am, I started looking to gather the necessary info in order to add MSN, and I'm running into a few questions.

MSN provides so many services...are they all tied together under a unified identity? I know that is what their Passport service is for, but I ask this because while I do have a Passport account (I log into Passport with my Hotmail address), I don't use MSN messenger and I don't have an MSN Spaces page.

Does anyone out there know if your Hotmail name is the same as your Passport name is the same as your MSN Messenger name...and so on?

Thanks for the help - and to those of you who also asked for more specific sites to be added, they are on the way. Man, I really have to get that "add a site yourself" page built ASAP! :)

Back in Chicago

2006-07-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone.

I just wanted to say that after attending Supernova 2006 and driving cross country with my girlfriend I am now back in Chicago.

Work on the site may continue to be a bit slow due to unpacking boxes -- the cross country drive was part of moving my girlfriend from SF to Chicago, so we have some unpacking and things like that to do. I've been giving a lot of thought to what things need improving and what things I should add first, so I think that I have a good direction in mind.

I'll certainly announce all updates and enhancements that I make to the site here. Thanks for sticking with me and allowing me some time off so soon after launch! Hopefully the best is yet to come!

-Kevin

Onxiam in San Francisco

2006-06-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

As mentioned, I'm out in San Francisco attending Supernova 2006. Another nice thing about being here is that I've been able to see old (and new) friends who heard about onXiam and signed up on the site. For instance, just yesterday I saw Claudinerlco, Quasistoic, Homesliced, Schmeesy and of course Scrapplequeen. I even learned at dinner that Claudinerlco and Quasistoic could possibly be considered "Flickr famous"! I had no idea!

I've gotten some great comments, encouragement and feedback from these people and others, and it really makes me feel like building onXiam was a good decision. As always, I'm open to any other comments and suggestions that would help make the site better. Please keep in mind though that I won't be home to do any real work on the site for about a week, but I'm happy to put any suggestions into the queue!

You and Your Identities

2006-06-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

I'm at Supernova, and I just listened to a discussion panel titled "Who Owns 'You'?". The panel had Seth Goldstein from Root Markets, John McCrea from Plaxo and Kyle Brinkman from MySpace. The discussion primarily focused on privacy issues as they relate to personal information now that people are volunteering so much more personal information online on various.

Honestly, I was hoping that it would take a turn and people would start discussing open networks vs closed networks, online reputations, user behaviour...things like that. But it really just revolved around how to protect your privacy online. Maybe I was just hoping that it would be a discussion that would be very closely related to the question that I tackled when I created onXiam, namely "Who Are You?". But like I said, it stayed focused on personal information privacy. Oh well.

A Shoutout

2006-06-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say thanks to Trapper for giving an online shoutout to onXiam.

While Trapper is a good friend of mine, he is also a techie, so it made me happy that when I first told him about the idea of onXiam he said that he thought it was great. And now that the site is live, it's great to see that he still thinks so!

And if any of you reading this don't know this already, Trapper is 1/2 of the team behind 360voice - a site that lets your Xbox 360 blog about what games you are playing and how good or bad you are doing with them! So if you have an Xbox 360, go hit up 360voice.com and get your Xbox blogging!

Supernova 2006

2006-06-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

I am at the Supernova conference in San Francisco. So far the talks today have been quite interesting, and I've already come up with a few new ideas for the site. I'll do my best to absorb as much as I can and put some of it into play when I get home.

If any of you are here, please feel free to say hi!

Thanks for the Feedback

2006-06-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

To everyone who has signed up so far and offered their kind words of encouragement and suggestions for future enhancements, I just wanted to say thanks.

Your feedback really helps. It's great to hear that you feel this endeavor has merit, and it was even nice to hear a few "why didn't I think of that" comments from all of you as well!

I'll be keeping my eye on things here and when I get some time, I'll try to add some more coolness for you all.

All my best,
-Kevin

Lucky Number Twenty

2006-06-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

A big hello to Julius!

You are the 20th member to sign up on onXiam!

Welcome!

Sorry About the Hiccups

2006-06-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

Today I tried to upload "one quick fix"....yeah right! After hitting refresh, I was greeted with a big ugly error screen. Hmm....what did I do wrong?

About an hour later I had it sorted, and all was right with the site once again. So my apologies to any of you who experienced any strangeness while I was uploading files and resetting the site over and over and over.

Oh and by the way, what was I doing when I broke everything? Well, everyone's links to their Flickr profiles should now be working. Flickr is a bit different than other sites in that you can have a screenname that is different than your username. So if you visit your profile page on Flickr, it may say "Bobby17", but if you look in the url you will see "flickr.com/photos/bobsmith/". That made things kind of difficult for me on my side, but I now have it sorted out.

Site is Live

2006-06-17T06:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, I flipped the switch, and onXiam is now live! My little brainchild is all grown up.

In honor of this moment, I thought that I would try to elaborate further on this burning question: Why did I make onXiam? Well, for starters, you could read the about page and learn how my mom helped to inspire it, but I'll try to expand a little bit on that story now.

I work in technology. I deal with technology everyday. To me, it's second nature to sign up for new online communities, give them a try and then either continue using them or stop. But I got to thinking -- how normal is this for the "average joe or jane"? I've had some non-techie friends who just don't do this. They are not at the leading edge of discovering and testing new web communities, but once these communities catch on (ala flickr), then this group of people is more than happy to sign up and use the service.

But how do you know who is using any of these services? Well, many of them will let you browse or search for a user on their site, but how do you know that "johnny4EVAR" on Slashdot is the same as "j4E-fragman" on 360Voice and he's also "babemagnet" over on MySpace?

When I was at ETech06, a strange thing happened to a friend of mine. A man approached him in the hall and said "Hello. I bought your CD." What does that mean? Check this out. My friend Trapper spends some of his free time making electronic music. He posts it in an area of his website. Apparantly what happened was this man had randomly seen one of Trapper's photos come through Flickr. He ended up clicking through to Trapper's website, found his music page and ordered a CD. Then strangely enough they ran into each other at ETech06.

What a random occurrance! But what if there were a place where you could explicitly do something like this? What if you could find a photo that you like on Flickr and then easily search to see what other online presences that photographer had? Hey, he is a writer! Hey, he composes music! Or hey, this girl plays World of Warcraft and Animal Crossing! And, she even hangs out in Second Life! That is where onXiam comes in.

Another thing that had lingered with me for some time now is the title of a presentation that Tom Coates gave at ETech06. The title was "Native to a Web of Data". I really like that title -- and I quite enjoyed the presentation as well Tom if you happen to see this via Technorati or something. I think that title conveys in a very succinct manner the state of the web today. Data is everywhere, and we are becoming quite used to that.

However, another term that has been tossed about for quite some time now is the idea of "everything addressable". Products have SKU numbers, books have ISBN numbers, but what do people have? Let me clarify, what do online personas have? FoxyGirl on Friendster could be an entirely different person than FoxyGirl on YouTube.

I'm not going to use my social security number as my online ID anywhere. I try to use the same name whenever I sign up for an online service or community, but sometimes that ID is already taken and it's just not possible. With so many communities popping up online these days, how can you manage it? And beyond managing it, how can you broadcast your presence to others? And how can you find other people you know if you don't know whether or not they are active in a particular online community?

These are all things that went through my head when I started building onXiam. I thought about services like Sxip and wondered if what I was thinking about doing was too similar to their offering, but then I thought "no, it's really not". I did not build onXiam to be an iron-clad identity manager. If you want to sign up and say "On Hotmail I am BillGates" you can do that, but to what end? What benefit could you hope to get by doing such a thing?

OnXiam exists to help people make connections. It is a network that is built on top of networks. Give it a try. Tell your friends. I'm quite curious to see what comes of it.

And feel free to drop me a comment here. I'd love to hear some feedback.

-Kevin

Here We Go

2006-06-17T06:32:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been poking around on the site and it seems to be running in a stable way after yesterday's server move, so this morning I woke up and figured "oh well why not?"...so I'm turning it on.

I'm going to be home most of the day so I'll try to keep monitoring it from time to time.

Domain Is Pointed, Testing Continues

2006-06-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

So I spent some time today getting the ONXIAM domain all sorted and pointing to the correct place. Then I uploaded all of the necessary files and worked on getting the site running.

I have to say that it's going quite smoothly so far. If this continues, I just may turn the site on and let it go live sometime tonight. I'll think about it over dinner...

Hello Everybody

2006-06-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is the first post on the newly created onXiam blog. The website isn't even live yet, but as part of the process of getting to that point, I wanted to create this blog and establish it as a point of communication. I'll be sharing information about enhancements and listening to any feedback that you want to provide to me.

Where do we go from here? I'm not sure yet, but it's been fun (and fast) getting to this point.

Stay tuned...