Announcing Open Glaze

Hi,

I am here at the first ever Quantified Self Conference and I am announcing a new Open Source Game Layer project called Open Glaze.

Here are the basics of my Game Layer philosophy that are influencing my work on Open Glaze.

  • This is not one monolithic system. Its a Unix software development philosophy. It is a series of tools that do one thing really really well, and you can chain them together to do interesting stuff.
  • This is not intended to be a platform play. Platforms are intended to be profit sources which is why they are so popular in start-ups, but I am not convinced that this model works in this area.
  • I suppose you could make a platform play out of Open Glaze if that is what interested you.
  • I am substantially non-committal on the Open Glaze software sub-projects. I will probably be open sourcing almost everything (unless there is a very good reason not to) and if the projects are not popular or useful, and cannot attract other maintainers, I intended to abandon them.
  • Everything here, is part of the huge experiment that I call Programmable Self experiments that do not work will be taken out back and shot.

What -is- Open Glaze? It is a series of tools:

  • TokenGeo. This is a website that lets you create reverse geo tokens. Take a look at the reverse geo caching box, for a reference. The basic workflow is, create token stickers that use QR code-based URLs that  to lead you to a place using your GPS enabled smart phone, and then, once you get to that spot, open up some new spot on the Internet (open a secret URL).
  • 1 to 11. (because this one… goes to eleven) is a place to create your own Quantting web forms, that log the results to Twitter in the Graffiter syntax.
  • LinkedLast is a method for using your Twitter feed as a controller for the destination of a QR code.
  • StatusPresent is a method for using your Twitter feed as presentation software, and to crowd source tweets for Q/A sessions. (not sure how this relates to healthcare frankly… but it was an experiment)
  • WalkOrGive is a website that uses the fitbit API and the Twitter API to create “giving performance gambling”. If you meet your step goals for the week, walkorgive will tweet your success to your stream and ask your followers to make donations to your favorite charity (using a PayPal link) in your honor.
  • Of course, more to come