But I keep finding areas where this just isn’t easy for those that contribute to the social.  My case in point would be restaurant reviews.  I have a few sites/apps that I use – Yelp, UrbanSpoon and MenuPages – and they all encourage and support reviews.  As I travel and look for feedback on new places to eat I would like to give back and share my experiences.  But in doing so I wind up adding my opinions and content to three different sites, making it difficult for me to step back and learn from that data.  I have to manage three separate accounts and if I want to pull up my favorites I can’t easily do that since they are spread out across the sites.

I can recall Marc Cantor going on about Microformats years ago and they have been widely implemented but this hasn’t prevented what naturally happens in a competitive space, that communities aren’t necessarily connected.  Clearly the technology exists to make sharing possible, but the nature of running a business means that most communities aren’t open.

Now we have several efforts underway through popular sites to make it easier to use the same credentials across numerous sites but this doesn’t fully address that your online identity isn’t portable.  In my example with restaurant reviews and votes I can’t visit one destination and see my library of reviews.  I hope that as the new generation of social sites mature that we go beyond just portable login and get into easily collecting our complete identity’s and contributions.

In looking for someone to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity, because if they don’t have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you.   — Warren Buffet

The Laws of Simplicity » Blog Archive » The Tao of Warren Buffet.

From Andy Martone’s presentation:

• At the bottom of a page, inject JavaScript to:
  • Check for a cookie.
  • If absent, set a session cookie saying “compression NOT ok”.
  • Write out an iframe element to the page.
• The browser then makes a request for the iframe contents.
• The server responds with an HTML document that is always compressed.
• If the browser understands the compressed response, it executes the inlined JavaScript and sets the session cookie to “compression ok”.
• On subsequent requests, if the server sees the “compression ok” cookie it can send compressed responses.

The iframe test only runs once so the impact to performance is minimal (and to start the sample size of those getting the test is a small fraction of your traffic).  The upside is that you quickly gain a savings by delivering Gzip payloads to any client that can handle them.  From their testing you might improve the experience for ~15% of your users.

Of course there are still those using seriously old browsers and just can’t handle the compression, but I would say that burdening them with an extra iframe might give them that final reason to upgrade.

via High Performance Web Sites :: Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression.