[okfn-discuss] [ANN] TimeMapper - Create Elegant TimeMaps from Google Spreadsheets in seconds

Mon Oct 14 22:34:19 UTC 2013

On 14/10/13 02:42 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On Monday, 14 October 2013, Gene Shackman wrote:
> 
>     Looks nice, but why do you have to sign up using a twitter account?
>     And why google spreadsheets? What if you don't have an account with
>     either of those? For future applications can you design it so you
>     don't need twitter or google?
> 
> 
> Twitter: happy to have another sign in mechanism but want something
> quick and convenient for most people that involved them already having
> reserved a unique username. Specifically we wanted to avoid being
> responsible, at this point, for doing the whole signup process (storing
> passwords, doing password recovery, handling spam accounts etc)
> 
> Re google spreadsheets: its the best simple tabular data backend and one
> that very large number of people use. JSON and straight up CSV could
> easily be supported but they are more complex and are more complex for
> non-techhies to use (e.g. can't just be any CSV would need to be one
> CORS accessible etc).

Spammers can join Twitter... There are registration lifecycle managing
libraries available. And data can be cleaned before importing by
interfacing with e.g. Refine.

I understand the tradeoffs, but those are two very closed dependencies
for an otherwise excellent project in the Open ecosystem.