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

Who am I? cubicgarden or ianforrester?

Been thinking about changing my identity a lot recently and even got talking with FactoryJoe I mean Chris Messina about this at Next09. The video sums up the debate pretty well, but I still can't decide if I should use ianforrester instead of cubicgarden.

As Facebook continues dragging the world online using their real names and photos, Chris Messina, David Recordon and John McCrea grab a few minutes to chat with Josh Elman (Facebook) and Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) out on Lake Austin about their philosophical differences when it comes to using your real name versus a pseudonym on the social web.

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Software ahead of the curve: ZOË

Zoe in action

I've been thinking about doing a series of blog post about software and people a head of the curve, so here's number one of many.

I got talking to Dj Adams at a recent Manchester Geekup. Dj Adams is one of those guys who I followed like jon udell and when I was getting into web development and xml. One of the things we talked about was a piece of software called Zoe.

Zoe is a web based e-mail client with a built in SMTP server and Google-like search functionality that lives on your desktop. Zoe is written in java and uses Lucene technology to provided instant searching and threading of your e-mails.

Zoe was a very interesting project but dropped development a few years ago. Looking back on it, there was some guiding principles/concepts which were ahead of the curve. Dj Adams in his blog post talks about Twitter's killer feature, Everything has a URL.

and everything is available via the lingua franca of today’s interconnected systems — HTTP. Timelines (message groupings) have URLs. Message producers and consumers have URLs. Crucially, individual messages have URLs (this is why I could refer to a particular tweet at the start of this post). All the moving parts of this microblogging mechanism are first class citizens on the web. Twitter exposes message data as feeds, too.

Even Twitter’s API, while not entirely RESTful, is certainly facing in the right direction, exposing information and functionality via simple URLs and readily consumable formats (XML, JSON). The simplest thing that could possibly work usually does, enabling the “small pieces, loosely joined” approach that lets you pipeline the web,

Zoe had this feature, now admittedly Zoe was meant to be run locally and not on a public server (there were little or no controls for privacy, it relies on other stack elements like https and certs to do that.) but it was great because every email had a addressable url. Searches and RSS also benefited from having urls which was great. At the time, this wasn't even mentioned as a feature and that might have been because one the focus was on googling email (this is pre-gmail too) and two because the urls were pretty damm ugly. If I understood Java, I would rewrite this part of the application and give it nice clean urls.

Zoe was well ahead of the curve and we're still not even there yet. Stowe Boyd got me thinking about Gabriel García Márquez's quote Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. I like the idea that I can sometimes share some aspects of my inbox with other people. I also like the idea of being able to delicious some of the stuff I get sent. There are lots of issues around permanence, but of Zoe us just pointing the way. I can see Google adding permalinks to Gmail in the future but there needs to be a killer reason for the change. Right now I can't quite work out exactly what that is/will be.

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My / location /

I like what Stowe's proposing here. I specially like the fact I can now say I'm in /Manchester UK/, which should make pin pointing me much easier that just /Manchester/ alone. It also means you can be more descriptive if there the system or application supports it, such as /Bar TV21 on corner of the northern quarter, Manchester/. This certainly beats L:Manchester.

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Hulu plans its UK domination

US VOD site Hulu is now talking with British broadcasters about creating a UK version of the service, in the wake of failed Project Kangaroo. NBCU International president Peter Smith told me the NBC/News Corp (NYSE: NWS) venture is “talking with all the partners you’d expect”. Smith said the aim was “local partners with local content – put that rich cocktail of local and US content together”.

Hulu is coming to the UK, and it looks like there will be a fight between iPlayer and Hulu. Kangaroo will be eaten alive if this does happen but so will the weaker players like itvplayer, 4od and 5 on demand. Obviously I don't actually know this for sure but it certainly seems that way. The real question is if Youtube and Bit Torrent will ruin Hulu's plans. And will the likes of Boxee and XBMC unite them in a totally different user controlled experience.

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Wake up America, protect your pin

Latest Diggnation includes a story from Tru-TV's (think cheap TV, like Sky3) version of the Real Hustle (yes remember the Real Hustle was first on BBC). The Cash Machine Scam is basically the scam/criminal act of skimming cards at a cashpoint and using a mini camera to spy the pin code. I did try and find the equivalent from the UK's real hustle but its so common and everyone knows it, I don't think the show even bothered. I do however remember a scam where they put a card reader on the outside of the bank's door opener, so you would need to swipe your card to open the door. Most people would swipe there card there going to use inside.

Anyway, the American real hustle video shows a guy putting a skimmer with camera on top of the cashpoint's card entry. A lady comes up and uses the cashpoint, she leaves and the scammer takes the skimmer. Scammer goes to his van, makes a card and then goes to the cashpoint and uses it.

To anyone in the UK, your most properly yawning and thinking so? However in America this is all new, it would seem. Kevin Rose on Diggnation seems to think its some kind of joke. And to be honest, my experience of spending time in America, is consistent with Kevin's thoughts. People don't protect there pin numbers at ATM/Cashpoints. It was natural that the scammers would move in at some point and they must be making a killing there. Time to protect your pin…

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Wolfram Alpha?

There's been lots of talk about this new service, which to be clear isn't a google killer. Its not even a search engine its computable knowledge engine, which aggregates knowledge from data around the web and tries to make sense of it then relays the knowledge back to the user. For me Google returns Information while Wolfram Alpha returns Knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

I do wish it had results you could copy and a API or even a feed for results, I mean check out the results for redbull. Sweet but none of the information is actually in text. You can download a PDF but to be honest that's not much use. So technically amazing but the experience needs a lot of tweaking. Step in the direction of the Semantic web? Maybe, maybe not.

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On stage at Next 09

So the guys from Next09 have released all the video from the event 2 weeks ago. The video includes some really good sessions but also me on stage trying to show and talk about R&DTV on someone's Macbook. Thankfully they cut the first 15mins of me trying to get my laptop working after they screwed around with the display. Yes feel the pain, like scratching your nails down a blackboard.

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When you start sueing your fans, you know its all over

A ex-student I taught and good friend of mine, Harry Jones won his WIPO trademark case against Jonathan Ive and Apple inc recently. Yes the Jonathan Ive who now works on a lot of Apple products. For years Harry has owned the domain names JonthanIve.com and jonyive.com. Unlike most Harry bought the domain names because he loved the work of the designer with the same name. Harry was a fan and ran a fan site to honour his work. Unfortunately Apple and Jonthan Ive had other plans and put a lot of pressure on Harry to give up the domain name. I remember last time I saw Harry, he had a recording of Jonathan himself asking for the domain name. He also had many calls from Apple people trying to play good and bad cop with him. It was all very underhand and to be honest makes me even less of a Apple Fan.

Actually I was talking to Tara Hunt the other night about her presentation at thinking digital and her new book. And cited Apple as a company doing everything wrong but still loved by many. Well I fell straight into the trap, it would seem because in her book she talks about Apple and says Apple provide a fantastic customer experience. So much so that they can pass on everything else and still come out smelling of roses. And you know what that's just not right in my book.

Apple and Jonathan Ive put increased pressure on Harry to give over the domain name, and who's reporting on it? Hardly anyone. Will this convince anyone that Apple do bad things like all businesses? Nope. Anyway, I'm sure Harry is much happier now he's not being harassed by Apple people. The Wipo decision document makes for some interesting reading, some of the press can't let go of the money thing, its actually quite simple..

The Respondent has demanded USD400,000 for transfer of the disputed domain names, even though he had previously been offered USD10,000 by Apple Inc. This demonstrates that the disputed domain names were registered primarily for the purpose of selling, renting or otherwise transferring the disputed domain name registrations to the Complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of the Respondent’s out of pocket costs.

What would you do if Apple phoned you up and started bugging you about selling the domain?

  1. Hand over for there first price?
  2. Give it up for free because you love Apple so much
  3. Make up some figure on the spot and see what they say.

Now the answer may seem like number 2 for most of you Apple fans, but actually number 3. Its also silly to suggest that the domain name was primarily for selling when there bugging him about selling it. I'm not selling Cubicgarden.com but if the cubicgarden corp phone me up and start throwing around cash, you bet your dollar I'll be suggesting silly prices just like Harry did.

Good on you Harry for standing up to these bully boy tactics. Matt Mason said sueing your fans means you got no business model. Well Apple and Ive have been very short sighted, they could have given Harry even more material and maybe guided Harry who was in it for the fandom. So Tara, this has got to be a example of where the Apple approach is just bad for business. Shame on you!

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