IMHO the timezone info is relevant (if at all) on a per post basis. So ideally it is referenced per post on a locatio basis, defaulting to the default location when available.
Why could the TZ be important? Well - for some statistics. It could be nice to use this info to answer questions like "who of my peers is a night owl?" ;-) It could also be nice info for some spectacular visualization (mesh up with a globe, 3d animation of who posts when and where in my network etc.) I am quite sure those that are in the marketroid business care a lot more. Long turn it might even assist as an input vector for spammer identification. However - I would agree with Brion that it is "just" a nice to have and not that critical. So in closing I would like to see it as a byproduct of geolocation and a possible (optional) setting of a profile, which could be autopopulated at setup of account based on geo-IP (we believe you are in Munich, so we set the TZ of that placeN correct if we are totally wrong). The focus should be message related an not person related. People travel. I simply like being able to tinker with such info. If it is there at a low cost - cool. If not, so what? Jan -- Jan H Wildeboer | EMEA Open Source Affairs | Office: +49 (0)89 205071-207 Red Hat GmbH | Mobile: +49 (0)174 33 23 249 Technopark II, Haus C | Fax: +49 (0)89 205071-111 Werner-von-Siemens-Ring 11 -15 | 85630 Grasbrunn | _____________________________________________________________________ Reg. Adresse: Red Hat GmbH, Technopark II, Haus C, Werner-von-Siemens-Ring 11 -15 85630 Grasbrunn, Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Muenchen HRB 153243 Geschaeftsfuehrer: Brendan Lane, Charlie Peters, Michael Cunningham, Charles Cachera _____________________________________________________________________ GPG Key: 3AC3C8AB Fingerprint: 3D1E C4E0 DD67 E16D E47A 9564 A72F 5C39 3AC3 C8AB ----- Original Message ----- From: statusnet-dev-boun...@lists.status.net <statusnet-dev-boun...@lists.status.net> To: Brion Vibber <br...@status.net> Cc: StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net <StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net> Sent: Wed Dec 30 07:58:26 2009 Subject: Re: [StatusNet-dev] Time zones - do we really need them? On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 15:28 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote: > While looking at our preferences, I noticed we have a fairly generic but > unfriendly timezone selector, done as a drop-down box with a raw list of > zone names -- this makes you find and select something like > "America/Los_Angeles" or "Asia/Tokyo". > > Not only is the list very long and confusingly sorted, but the names are > all either English or acronyms, making it hard to internationalize. > > It occurs to me that we very rarely actually output formatted dates in > the web interface anyway... most of the time we output relative times > like "a few seconds ago" or "3 months ago". > > > In fact, about the only place I can see that we're outputting a fully > formatted date is on an individual notice like this: > > http://identi.ca/notice/15645070 > "Brion Vibber (brionv) 's status on Friday, 27-Nov-09 19:19:11 UTC" > "Brion Vibber (brionv) 's status on Friday, 27-Nov-09 11:19:11 PST" > etc > > though we also have tooltips on the approximation eg "about a month > ago": "2009-11-27T11:19:11-08:00" > > > My own inclination would be to drop the timezone preferences entirely; > in the rare cases where we output a formatted local date we can let > client-side JavaScript do the actual date formatting with the client > system's actual time zone and language settings, with a UTC/GMT fallback > for clients with JS disabled. > > This drops an unnecessary and hard-to-select option field from > preferences and site administration panels, and avoids inconsistencies > when you travel or move and forget to update the timezone. > Any objections or suggestions for further refinement? I generally agree to dropping the preference, because there is the case where people either don't care or know which one to pick. I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of identi.ca users have made a choice. Having said that, I do like how timezones are selected on OS installations i.e., alternative to the drop down selection, user clicks a location on the map. This would require JavaScript to be enabled, however, the fall-back would still be the select form control. Jan and Glen gave additional ways to derive the timezone value: On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 18:42 -0500, Glenn McGurrin wrote: > You could also merge the ways, geolocation to do it if available and > then fall back to ip geolocation or javascript and finally if all else > fails go to GMT time. > > Jan Wildeboer wrote: > > Couldn't we use some automagic to map locations and timezones? So we > > still > > have the correct timezonr but no need to ask for it? > > > > This also means that no location, no timezone. Which is acceptable IMHO. AFAIK, UAs must enable JavaScript in order to make use of geolocation. At the end of the day, this means that, user manually (e.g., in profile preferences) providing that information is most reliable. In any case, I think it is important enough (not a must but good for human and machine reading) to retain the timezone information in one way or another in notice items, hence, I'd still like to output that in HTML i.e., in notice item timestamp's @title. -Sarven _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev _______________________________________________ StatusNet-dev mailing list StatusNet-dev@lists.status.net http://lists.status.net/mailman/listinfo/statusnet-dev
