Discovered Intersect

I discovered Intersect today and I’m exploring it. So far I think it needs a little pop-up calendar in the ‘enter time’ field.That said, it picked up on ‘today’ just fine, and knew what I meant my Moncton.

Anyhow, Moncton is my home. I live here.

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Stephen Downes - about 1 hour ago
After I submitted the first entry I was taken to the timeline view. The trimeline right now shows exactly one day, divided into hours, but I can step forward and backward to other days.

Right away I wanted to import my Google Calendar to it, or better, sync Google Calendar with it.

Stephen Downes - 42 minutes ago
OK, I got the timeline by clicking ‘home’. Now I’m trying to find people. I don’t think there are many people here yet. I found out about Intersect by reading an article from Madeline Moy on Intersect, which was linked in a paper.li page for Alan Levine’s Twitter.

I suppose if I had signed in with Twitter I’d have more people I could find, but I’m really wary of mixing my contacts from one service into a new service. Call me old-fashioned.

Now – since I wanted to link to Madeline’s article, I’m wondering how to link to articles.

Stephen Downes - 42 minutes ago
Also, I wanted to edit the original submission, but there seems to be no way.

Stephen Downes - 41 minutes ago
Test link to my home page…

Stephen Downes - 41 minutes ago
OK, so it accepts links – I really don’t like the no-edit thing – so here is Madeline Moy’s article.

Stephen Downes - 40 minutes ago
Sorry, that wasn’t the article, that’s her life – this is her article.

Stephen Downes - 37 minutes ago
OK, so I went to her story line, to the story, clicked ‘thank’ and thanked her (no indication of why – I’d like to “thank, with an explanation” (to cite Luba). Then I clicked on ‘borrow’ and now her article in on my timeline. Hm, that wasn’t really the intended effect. I didn’t intersect with her story then, I intersected with it now.

Timelines are complicated. It’s really hard to get stuff like this right.

Stephen Downes - 37 minutes ago
Oh nice, it takes words surrounded by ‘’ and automatically italicizes* them.

Stephen Downes - 36 minutes ago
… words surrounded by the star character, that is, this: *

Stephen Downes - 32 minutes ago
In ‘places’, if you click ‘find this location’ (at least in Chrome) it pops up a dialogue asking if Intersect can track your location – I allowed it (because I’m testing – not sure if there’s a way to repeal that yet) and found it very accurate, down to the block.

Stephen Downes - 31 minutes ago
Also, I notice that when I ‘borrow’ the author borrowed from automatically becomes a ‘contributor’ to my timeline. No ‘friending’ or any such silly thing that I can see so far. But I think there is a follow feature…

Stephen Downes - 27 minutes ago
OK, I picked someone at random and tested following. I can see her timeline, map, etc.

We can create ‘family’ and ‘circles’, so I imagine we can keep events private to smaller groups of people.

Stephen Downes - 25 minutes ago
I also invited some people. I wish I had access to my address list, because I always forget email addresses. Then again, there’s no way in the world I’d share my email list with an online service like this.

Stephen Downes - 24 minutes ago
I see now that I can delete comments.

Patti Aro - 19 minutes ago
Welcome to Intersect, Stephen.
You can edit your story after submission. Look for the green Edit button just below the Search Stories field at the top right.

Stephen Downes - 19 minutes ago
Went to my ‘you’ screen. Uploaded a photo and created a bio (edited from my home page). Now I see on the ‘you’ screen where I can create stories of other events, and upload photos. I don’t want to upload, but maybe I can connect to Flickr?

Stephen Downes - 18 minutes ago
OK, I’ve added 14,111 photos from Flickr… heh

Stephen Downes - 6 minutes ago
Creating an event – loaded photos, entered a description, found the location – the map kind of grayed out when I tried to specify the location but then it game me a popup, and found Moncton Colosseum without difficulty. Video load failed; it was an ‘unsupported site’ – Google Video. Then I went to save, and nothing happened. All the buttons were broken, clicking them did nothing. Except, ‘cancel’ worked. I checked before I left the page (in another tab) but the event had not been saved. Had to back out and start over.

Stephen Downes - 4 minutes ago
OK, this time when I clicked ‘publish’ (not ‘save’) it worked fine, creating this event.

What would be really neat would be if I could see all the other timelines that intersect at this point. Maybe it supports this, and I just don’t see it because I’m the first to record this event.

Stephen Downes - 2 minutes ago
OK, that’s it, I’m done for now. Let’s see what happens when people see this. Now… how can I export my story and comments, with all the metadata….

Yeah. Thought not.

Postscript

That said, I really like Intersect, a lot. At this point I would consider using it as a primary event content entry point, assuming it allows easy access to upload sites like Flickr or Blip.tv. It is elegantly designed, potentially very powerful. It turns out that I can edit, though the edit button is located in some faraway place (I still haven't seen it as I write here but I'll take the comment as a given). The one glaring weakness is the lack of an export function. I'm happy to create my content here, but I want to be able to house it anywhere.