User Account Management

This section details the functionalities and design of the page that users use to manage their account.

Introduction and basic functionalities

What we envision for this part of the system is a very simple web page where each user sees a list of rectangular regions in serial fashion (one on top of the other), each of which represent a data source for that user (i.e., a Twitter account, a GMail account, a generic IMAP account, a Google Reader account, an RSS feed, ...).

When the user first creates a new service all the rectangle has inside is a drop-down which the user will use to select the type of service she is configuring (all of the "data sources" mentioned above).

After she chooses the type (ex: Twitter), the system will automatically initiate the OAuth process and, after it's completion, it will present her with all the configuration settings available to that type of account.

I'm hopping someone (me?) will draw up some sketches of the type of interaction we envision here to make it more clear how we think this should work.

Open questions

• Should we present every possible configuration parameter right there on the rectangle or should we show just the more basic stuff and have a "disclosure triangle" of some sort to show the extra stuff?

• I'm assuming we are going to use ajax to get the configuration options for each type of account in real time, without a page refresh, anyone want's to tackle this?

• The configuration parameters for each account are derived not only from the account collectors (a GMail collector may have some specific configuration needs that are diferent from an RSS feed one), but also from the available pool of available data analyzers (as in: do you want to perform basic Bayesian filtering on stuff you receive form this source? Do you want me to send it through to a multi-user group-analyzer thingie, etc, etc).