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.
Category: socialware-online
The slow but sure move to Identi.ca
Guys I live twitter, its been amazing. Most of the people I know are on it and in time we may look back at it like the start of email. But thats the problem, its not email its one network email, its like texting way back in 1996, when you and your friends all had to be on the same network to be sure you would get the text message (sms). I'm sure others older that me will tell stories of when email use to be the same, but luckily I've never known that restriction.
Identi,ca is microblogging done correct, its Affero GPL licence, as API friendly as Twitter (same API really) and supports federation remarkable well. Now this isn't the 1st time I've talked about this service, you may have heard me talk about la.conica and identi.ca many times. But whats interesting about identi.ca is I'm starting to see it being put in next to Twitter in clients. So for example I use Twhirl most of the time and now identi.ca support is there and its not just a add on, its all there. I've started noticing that Identi.ca's clients list is also growing. But whats also getting me really excited is seeing la.conica being put into Drupal and other places. So not only can you have your community blog but you can also have communal microblogging.
I'm personally starting to actively use identi.ca more and more. I'm sure at some point i'll start looking up friends on identi.ca and other systems and add them. Hey I may even start saying different things on them. I can certainly see one day when my default is identi.ca and it posts on to twitter via some bot or service like ping.fm. Unless of course Jaiku gets going again.
even Facebook needs maintenance
More reasons to be on Twitter
Symmetric Follow and Second Twitter Accounts
Getting a load of blog posts out before I go out on the town tonight it would seem.
So my thoughts on Symmetric Follow and Second Twitter Accounts. Well I don't own a second Twitter account unless you maybe count the Geekdinner one I setup ages ago and the BBC backstage one, I'm still considering setting up. But I also don't believe in this idea of symmetric following, aka following the people who follow you. I actually think it breaks the usefulness of Twitter if you follow everyone back and Twitter already has another ways to see people who you are not following.
I remember at FOWA 2007, someone came up to me and said they followed me. I was very flattered as such but then they started to rip into me about not following them back. Well I was gobsmacked. I mean I'm only human, why would I follow everyone and anyone who followed me? Strange stuff…
Why you should use Twitter…
Its New years eve, and I'm already getting messages via text saying “Happy New Year, thought I'd send this out before the networks jam up or fall over.” Oh how different things would be if most of my friends used Twitter or to be fair some other microblogging service. The notion of sending out a Happy new year to the world would be so easy and not require 200+ text messages to each of your friends phone. Yes microblogging solves this problem totally. So maybe save us all the heart ache and sign up to Twitter tonight, hey even if you get to stage 2, the mobile phone company will love you tonight.
I'm not doing a good enough job on my friends on why they should dump Facebook and use Twitter instead, so I thought I'd post up this excellent guide to Twitter from weaverluke, found via [The Obvious]
What shocked me when flicking through the pages was the fact I was quoted. It all leads back to this tweet ages ago.
See I was on a train to Manchester at the time and had just bought the Pacemaker. I was using it on the train up and it crashed and I had no idea how to restart it. The instructions didn't say and the website was so full of Flash that I couldn't navigate it well enough to find how to restart it. I twittered it asking for help, but everyones taken it as if my heart pacemaker. Well sorry to say its not that, just a Dj Tool.
Maybe this will go down in Twitter fiction/folktales as a tale for ever more. Eitherway, its another reason to dump facebook and switch to Twitter.
Somewhat seperated at birth?
First major casuality in the microblogging sphere, goodbye pownce
Woke up today to this.
We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownceOur thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,
The Pownce Crew
I didn't use Pownce that much, it was just one of the end points on my ping.FM sends and never really logged in but I did monitor the emails. I didn't know I had 82 friends requests! Data portability wise, i'm glad to see the ability to take your data with you, in XML/RSS too which is good. I never uploaded any media, so have no idea how it deals with those things. Goodbye Pownce, its been fun but Twitter is growing in strength and with open source solutions like indenti.ca poping up all over the place now. I won't be surprised if plurk and a couple others follow suite soon.
Twittergrader, at long last…
So after all the fuss about twitter rank, someone else has build a popularity contest which is starting to make the rounds on Twitter. Twittergrader is like twitter rank but (and this is the important part) doesn't require your twitter password. Twitter elite is the popularity part and interestingly enough it also does it per city. So although someone like myself will never be able to rank among the Scoble's, Lapour's, etc. In London I was in the top 10 believe it or not (not bad for a man who's not a big fan of twitter). In Manchester i'm number one, but like I said before I don't really care about popularity contests. Search is well search based around people and rankings. The twittergrader badge shows your own rank and points you to people you might also find interesting to follow. Generally the whole service is actually not bad, specially since no private information has to be given. Other services take note, this is a meme which you can't shake.
Print and the internet
I love what David Sifry and team have done in Offbeat guides.
Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The guides come with local maps, festivals and events going on while you're there, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more.
It kind of reminds me of Idiomag but the business model is a little more straight forward and I like the fact you only really pay if you want the PDF or book. Unlike Idiomag however there's no APML being built in the background and you can't point to other services you may use. I mean it would be super handy if offbeat guides would look at my dopplr account and see when I'm next going somewhere new and might need a guide. It could also take hints and tips from friends and add those to the list. Can I also say once again, outside the iphone bubble there are many other types of phones which they could also support using textual/tagged PDF.
Twitterank, a social engineering phishing nightmare
Its been highly talked about. Is Twitterank out to steal your password or not? There is a disclaimer saying there not out to steal your twitterz. But I got to say Brianoberkirch has this right.
Twitterrank is a vast conspiracy I created
to steal all of your passwords and shame Twitter into OAuthing. And to
make you look vain – Brianoberkirch
We laugh but who knows one day it will happen. Then how foolish will you feel as you put your vanity before privacy
I keed. But you really shouldn't hand out your password to some fly-by-night site.
– Brianoberkirch
And he's very right. We're far to ready to plunge our details into a site which has no history, feels dodgy and doesn't use any certificates of any kind. I know the author of the site has gone out of his/her way to alert people to the validity of the site but mistakes can be made too. Such things as poorly configured databases and applications leak user data. Also note, this ticks all the boxes for a scam. Type in your username and password and you will get to see what your ranking is. Social enginnering at its best. Hell send your friend your rating and ask them to join too.
Update Mashable is covering the story and Rainycat pretty much says the same. OAuth makes all this go away, this is why I'm a big believer in the open social stack.
USBCell sort out your PR campaign
I've been clearing out my junk box recently and found a number of things. One of them was a email from Diana from Moixaenergy aka USBcell.com.
Good afternoon,
Please find our press release today outlining Moixa Energy’s new Alkaline Awareness Campaign and ‘CO2 Saver’ USB rechargeable battery solutions.
Regards,
Diana
Then there's a few photos and there press release titled Award-winning British company seeks to educate consumers on the dangers of the disposable battery attached.
I'm sorry this is so lame and lazy on so many levels. Its basically spam and its frustrating because usbcell is actually a good product. Hell I actually own 8 of the AA type. If they spent 1min and typed in a query like this. They would see I'm actually a fan of USBcell, and they could have sent me some batteries. I most likely would have been more likely to check out the campaign and in the end blog about it. I'm going to write back to Diana and suggest she reads the Cluetrain and this blog entry. If Sarah was still blogging, I would suggest Diana look at her blog too.
Twitter IM bot not coming anytime soon
From Twitter Status blog
In October 2006, just three months after Twitter launched publicly, we added IM support—i.e., the ability to get and send tweets via XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk. I was a big fan of this feature, because this interface, which millions of people were already familiar with, seemed a perfect fit for Twitter’s real-time nature.
In December of 2006, we extended that support to AIM, enabling a much bigger number of users to interface with Twitter via the same system they talk to their friends on all day.
While off to an early start, since then, our IM feature has been, well…spotty. We first killed AIM support after struggling for months to make it reliable (which was a side-project to trying to keep the service as a whole reliable). And our Jabber support has been up and down until about four-and-a-half months ago when it’s just been…down.
Oh yeah that's why I'm using Ping.FM alongside a range of other microblogging services such as Indenti.ca and Jaiku.
Yammer – Microblogging for enterprise?
I'm not feeling Yammer.com. Someone suggested it, set it up and now everyones joining on it. Why Yammer over others I don't know. Don't get me wrong its a good idea, Twitter for enterprise but there's some things I'm not so sure about.
First one is the mobile access. Yes there's a iphone client (yawn!) but sms access is restricted to a few American carriers, so realisticlly after the Twitter announcement, yammer are not likely to offer SMS access to the UK. Which means our communication tool for the BBC is crippled. If Yammer were clever they would offer packages which companies pay for, so at least there's the opportunity for SMS/Text.
Second, does Yammer support the open micro-blogging standard? It certainly doesn't look like it. This is bad news, specially seeing how we now have about 70 BBC people using it now. I'm sure tomorrow it will double again.
Third, I did look through the Yammer terms and conditions which seemed ok-ish from a portability and licensing point of view. They have ATOM/RSS feeds for most things but where's the API people? Come on, this is becoming un-acceptable already.
Forth and last for now. What about Laconi.ca? Not only is it enterprise friendly, strictly supports the open microblogging standard and is moving to pure XMPP but it also federates with other services. I was trying to explain federation to someone the other day and they pointed out it works like usenet, email and irc (which bodes well, I think). Anyway, the next thing makes me sure Yammer isn't the right path is Twhirl's new support for Laconi.ca. There's something about the strict tight line between internal and external, which is interesting. At least with laconi.ca, its possible to blend the line in a organised way, but I want to know why I can't use my OpenID and why I can't import BBC people off my friends list elsewhere.
Oh I just noticed James has also blogged about the same thing but he has a totally different view point.
Even more spam dating emails…
So following from my post about spammers affected dating sites. Here's even more for your viewing pleasure.
From rosewood88 (member since 2008-09-05) – Hello sweet love one
Hello
pls u can get back to my box with my email here angel_mary444@yahoo.com thanks wait
to meet u soon becos i will only hv the chance to check my box ok.
I am angela mary wood, and i am 25 yrs old live in ELTHAM LONDON. seeking for a sexy
and caring partner who has a like minds like i do,simple mature lady,honest, family
oriented,God-fearing. submissive to her man. love gardening, camping and fishing
…like to spend most of her time in working and doing all housechores. my hobbies
include love making,going to the beach side,having fun,fishig,tv,traveling,listening
to music and making love with my husband alone.my Eye Color..black,Hair Color…black,
Height..5'10-(178cm),Body Type.average,Race..white cau,
all kinds of romantic songs,i can also describe myself as
kind/volunteer,sincere,loving,caring,i am ready to meet a man to love and a man who is
ready to care for me …..i just wanna meet a man thats why i decided to show my
beaty up in this site and this is my first time of doing something like this…i
just..wish to meet the right man to marry and settle down with for life.
I
hello ,
i am named as Grace Ansah. i am 30 years of age and very lonely
. i am a lady who is fair and pretty . i am respectful, truthful,
honest , patience, humble, lovely and also nice to all peoples. i
am a lady who is in ghana now . my mum was from the canada and my
dad from ghana. i am in ghana now but for the mean time , i lost
my parents when i was at the age of 28 in a car accident. i lost
them very bad and since from then i stoped schooling .. life
became very bad for me . i have stopped schooling and now living
alone. for the mean time i am alone and now looking for a man to
marry . a man who will love me only and care for me . a man who
will never hurt my feelings . a man who is going to be truthful
and honest with me . a man who will be caring , a man who will
marry and make up a sweet happy family with . i wish and hope to
hear from you to know each otehr aas well. i will be very nice to
hear u so pls reply me back.. this my email adress:
grace_ansah80@yahoo.com . or u can txt or call this number”
00233245483378.