Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Dear Delicious User…

delicious

Received this in my mail yesterday,

Yahoo! is excited to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, Hurley and Chen have firsthand expertise enabling millions of consumers to share their experiences with the world. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.

To continue using Delicious, you must agree to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks to AVOS. After a transition period and after your bookmarks are transferred, you will be subject to the AVOS terms of service and privacy policy.

Reasons to let Yahoo! transfer your bookmarks

• Continue uninterrupted use of Delicious.

• Keep your Delicious account and all your bookmarks.

• Enjoy the same look and feel of Delicious today plus future product innovations.

What happens if you do not transfer your bookmarks

• Delicious in its current form will be available until approximately July 2011.

• After that, you will no longer be able to use your existing Delicious account and will not have access to your existing bookmarks or account information.

AVOS? Really? Yahoo, sound overjoyed about the whole thing… to be honest I’ll switch over and see where the rabbit hole goes…

Switching over to Tweetdeck

I switched over to Tweetdeck a while ago… I use to use Gwibber on my laptop/desktop machines and Peep on my Android phone but recently switched…

HTC Peep was ok but honestly it use to wind me up when it wouldn’t update when the storage was quite low. No warning either. Gwibber was great but I found it slow when adding lots of columns. I tend to have a column for all the people I’m following (home) one for replies (@replies) and finally one for Private messages (d msgs). On top of that I have searches for events and the such things. Tweetdeck handles these pretty much in its stride, but Gwibber use to do odd things.

I think it might have something to do with being connected to Twitter x2, Identi.ca, Facebook and other services.

The one thing I do miss from Tweetdeck is the ability to connect to a identica and status.net server. Instead there’s accounts for Facebook (which actually works very well) and Google Buzz. Honestly I’d switch out Buzz for status.net anyday.

I don’t know how the news Twitter might buy Tweetdeck will effect everything but it looks like status.net and even the open microblogging standard isn’t coming any time soon. I may switch back one day, specially if Gwibber 3.0 is as good as it could be.

The internet operating system for real

Chrome Extensions

I switched to Ubuntu over 4 years ago, and its been pretty smooth.

But its recently got even smoother thanks to Google’s Chrome browser.

Why? A lot of people don’t even know Chrome supports extensions like Firefox…

Evernote winds me up no end… I started using Nevernote. Its a java client which mainly works with evernote but to be fair its quite bulky and a little slow. However Google launched there web store and a whole bunch of html5 apps have made it into the web store. A few of the apps include Evernote clients which not only connect to Evernote but also keep a local store of the notes. Making Evernote finally fully usable and reliable on a Ubuntu laptop.

As you can also see, its not only Evernote, its also Tweetdeck without installing Adobe Air (because when I last checked the 64bit version was bad, and who wants it on there machine?). I actually stopped using Gwibber because of Tweetdeck in Chrome (sorry to say…) Readitlater, Dropbox, etc are more like Firefox extensions than full applications. I guess Mozilla’s Prism is more like the chrome applications. I did try a while ago to run Evernote in Prism but it really wasn’t built for it, maybe things have changed now but I’m using Chrome more and more, although I also use Firefox 3.6 still for most of my general stuff.

There’s a lot of low level chatter about the internet operating system but google are doing a great job actually making it happen… you can see why the concept of chrome os is fascinating

Colour in the right context

Colors of Deepawali

Stowe Boyd reflects on MG Siegler’s color experience in a bachelor party in Mexico

Maybe the $41M pre-launch injection of capital has sucked all the oxygen out of the discussion about the app. A bunch of folks were using it at the recent Podio launch party in San Francisco, and we all thought it was cool as hell.

Color really shines in a setting of maximum social density and activity — like parties, concerts, or conferences. It may be equally interesting to use in a voyeuristic way in areas of high population — like wandering through Soho — if there are enough hipsters around to give you their perspective via photostream.

It won’t displace other photo sharing apps, like Instagram, but it will change the way we experience the most socially rich events.

Absolutely, color in the right environment could be interesting and even useful. Now we know how there doing the proximity/matching. It makes total sense that you need to be in a venue which is used for a shared experience (or as stowe calls it maximum social density) like a club, bar, conference, concert, etc. If (and it seems like it) this is there patient pending technology, then there is absolutely no doubt that there will be other proximity photosharing services popping up real soon..

The concept of proximity based photosharing is going no where, but I think color certainly is. To be honest, I’m just happy to be able to use the correct spelling of colour again *smile*

A collection of good talks from the BBC

I got to point to a few good presentations I seen recently from my managers.

The quality of the presentations have certainly got much better in recent times. Its also worth pointing out that Matthew Postgate will be giving a talk at Thinking Digital this year. And of course Matthew is well known to many from his presentation at TedXManchester.

Its all about the Top10?



Been meaning to blog about Harry Jones’s next venture for a while…

I was shown a beta of it a while ago and I got to say upfront I’m a close friend of Harry’s and yes I did teach him in university (Ravensbourne college of design and communication). At the time he was doing lots of Flash stuff and singing from the Adobe/Macromedia song book but I slowly broke that down and I kind of remember one day he turned to me and said he gets it (referring to XHTML) not the actual technology (Harry was very smart and picked it up instantly) but the concept of the web being readable to not just humans but to machines and devices.

Anyway a while he launched Top10.co which is a place for all those crazy top 10’s. Top 10 makes it super easy to create your own list but the magic comes when you remix someone elses. What it does is create an instance of the top 10 someone else did and allows you complete control over the list. So in the video above you can see some artificial but funny disagreement over cheesy 80’s action film between Harry and the other co-founder (don’t give up your day jobs to be actors  guys….). But as its a instance, its still linked to the original, so you can see an aggregated view of everyones top10.

For example I setup a top 10 after my blog post about the films you should have seen in 2010.

Here’s the aggregated view (master list) of everyone who has contributed to the top films in 2010, and of course my top 10.

So interestingly they have catered for both the popular stuff in the actual list but also the long tail in the variety of weird and wonderful lists you can make.

Its all public, so thats great. However there are problems… The first one is the non-ability to embed the top 10 list. I know it supports Facebook and Twitter (in actual fact you sign up using one of them, wheres the openid guys?) but I just want to embed or even copy the information to somewhere which is mine. May seem slightly old fashioned (can’t believe I just said that) but its important. I’d also like to see better use of there blog… When I first saw it I first thought it could be like Okcupid’s OKtrends… You know, “we have 100000 users who picked films of 2010, and we aggregated all the lists together to show the top film choice across all lists is Inception…” type stuff. Right now its just fluff about the company which is a yawn to be frank. Heck even this is the types of films which make it to the top of most film related lists, and here’s the ones which tend to be in the middle ground… Come Harry… Data is the new source code (think I just coined a new saying)

So as a whole I think the concept is good, but it really needs someone to think about uses of the top 10’s. I’d also like to see a format which makes it easily transferable. Like a opml file with top10 extensions… but thats further down the line and I expect most won’t be interested in such a thing. Although when I explain what you can do with such a thing, it gets very interesting… Maybe I harry should pop up one day soon for a chat but he’s one busy son of a gun…

Anyway good luck and good to hear he’s moved on from all that Apple crap which he had to deal with a few years ago. Oh and congrats on getting engaged to the lovely Tiffany…

Geeks talk sexy part4: The dynamics of relationships

Chris and Simon

Ed and Alice live together and will soon marry. She decides she’d like more sexual experiences before settling down with the man she loves, so she convinces Ed they should “see other people” (as in, sex with strangers), even as they continue to live together and plan the wedding. They discuss it. Each knows someone who thinks this idea is cool; each has a friend who thinks they’re nuts. Things start reasonably well, but soon their relationship goes awry. Can the genie get back in the bottle and Ed and Alice return to companionship – or does seeing other people put an end to how Alice and Ed used to be?

Geeks talk sexy part 4, kicked off with a edited version of the film, seeing other people. This time it was a slightly lower key affair with a total of about 12 people showing up to find out what the dynamics of relationships meant.

The dynamics of relationships started without the wonderful Samantha Bail (Sam has a university course she needed to spend far more time on, shes ignored it for too long really). We (me and Simon, who has helped out with geeks talk sexy from near the start) weren’t sure if she was the reason for the large turn outs earlier but it was a quieter more intimate event this time, which actually worked out nicely.

Right from the start we asked some very challenging questions about previous relationships and there thoughts about monogamy. We always planned to discuss in the first half about relationships including hacking them. Then in the second half about non-monogamy.

So in the first half, we de-constructed what it means to be in a relationship… At one point we started to project manage a relationship using planner (which is like Microsoft project). Assigning time information to tasks, we were able to see if Agile methodology could be applied to relationships? The idea seems to work quite well but applying the time information was challenging to say the least. For example, there was a question: At what stage do you change your facebook status to say your in a relationship? And do you say in a relationship with person x? On top of that, we explored hacks people use in relationships. Someone suggested sending flowers to the other person, and this was followed up with a discussion of applying this to a cron. Now thats hacking a relationship…!

Up to that point we talked about relationships in a monogamous way. Now we were asking people to think out side the box. In the break we played the 4thought with Clair Lewis.

Clair Lewis from Manchester has two partners, Phoebe and Gordon, and cannot understand why anyone would have a problem with her loving two people at once

After the break and a cocktail later, we were deep in discussion about  the map of non-monogamy. There was plenty to be said… too.

Before long we were on to the special guests (Chris & Simon) who explained how they went from a everyday married couple to become poly. A very interesting tale of love, trust, commitment, compromise and  understanding. Simon said it right when he explained you can love more that one person… You love your parents, your sister/brother, your children, your partner. A relationship isn’t just sex, love takes many different forms.

People later added there own experiences to the mix and before you knew it, we were all questioning our own thoughts about monogamy and would we be able to manage having a non-monogamous long term relationship, and if so which type? I certainly think the Unicorn Polyamory would be high on a lot of men’s lists, but as Louise said… Its called that because its not reality…

Lots to discuss and simply not enough time to discuss it in… It was over the road to Common to continue the conversations till the late hours of Saturday night… The event was a great success, its just a shame we had so few people this time around.

Another great Geeks talk sexy… and maybe the end of our regular scheduled sessions this season. However there’s at least one more, this time a flirt & walk workshop with Nicole from Flirtology and the art of the pickup with our budding pickup artists Simon & Andy. Places are very limited, but expect a grand end to season one…

Continue reading “Geeks talk sexy part4: The dynamics of relationships“

An appetite for disruption mix

Its been a long time since I have done a mix and recorded it mainly because my pacemaker no longer reliably records mixes any more. However I can record mixes the old way using my laptop and the analogue interface.

I also switched from soundcloud to mixcloud, which unforgivable doesn’t have the option to download the actual mix like soundcloud use to. But I expect I’ll upload it somewhere else in the near future for those who want it on there portable music player.

So here’s the first effort… I bring you my appetite for disruption mix.

Retweet error or something more sinister?

Retweet error
Dave mee from Madlab Manchester tried to retweet a message about geeks talks sexy the other day but couldn’t because his iphone4 wouldn’t let him. No idea why, does anyone else know?

The picture was from the official iPhone twitter app – ironically (as Dave puts it), the only two accounts who have thrown this error up have been myself and Loz Kaye’s. Two people pushing for open platforms and transparency… Both accounts are listed as unretweetable?