Cross publishing 2.0: Letting users define their sharing practices on top of YQL

Abstract

One of Web2.0 hallmarks is the empowerment of users in the transit from consumers to producers. So far, the focus has been on content: text, video or pictures on the Web has increasingly a layman’s origin. This paper looks at another Web functionality, cross publishing, whereby items in one website might also impact on sister websites. The Like and ShareThis buttons are forerunners of this tendency whereby websites strive to influence and be influenced by the actions of their users in the websphere (e.g. clicking on Like in site A impacts a different site B, i.e. Facebook). This brings cross publishing into the users’ hands but in a “canned” way, i.e. the’what’ (i.e. the resource) and the’whom’ (the addressee website) is set by the hosting website. However, this built-in focus does not preclude the need for a’do-it-yourself’ approach where users themselves are empowered to define their cross publishing strategies. The goal is to turn cross publishing into a crosscut, i.e. an ubiquitous, website-agnostic, do-it-yourself service. This vision is confronted with two main challenges: website application programming interface (API) heterogeneity and finding appropriate metaphors that shield users from the technical complexities while evoking familiar mental models. This work introduces Trygger, a plugin for Firefox that permits to define cross publishing rules on top of the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) console. We capitalize on YQL to hide API complexity, and envision cross publishing as triggers upon the YQL’s virtual database. Using SQL-like syntax, Trygger permits YQL users to specify custom cross publishing strategies.