Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
If you've not checked out Radiopops yet, go sign up now. Its a beta/prototype by the BBC radio labs team. It also shows the type of thing we are thinking and building inside the BBC but can't really make public easily. This is mainly a technical issue about platforms and scaling but I think its better that its made clear this is a prototype that have it hanging around the BBC for years because its not build with the house technologies not the most handy for the job.
So anyway, with ceTwit now installed on my phone and running smoothly with updates every 20mins. I'm going to be across twitter a lot more that I was before. What's also great is ceTwit now supports Ping.FM, so I can update all my status from one client and keep an eye on people are talking about.
Yahoo is going to shutdown its DRM licence servers, so if you've bought DRM music from the Yahoo store its going to stop working soon. This already follows the shut down of the unlimited music store a while ago. When MSN did this a while ago they at least switched on another load of servers and promise to keep them running till 2011. Without going into the whole DRM is a stupid idea and killing music debate data portability wise, the only way to get your LEGALLY purchased content to play on your computer in the future is to burn it to a Audio CD and then rip them. For people who have seen my dataportability talk, I have a slide (44) I use to talk about what happens when services shutdown. Well everyone laughs when i talk about one by one transfering images from a online service, well imagine burning 100's of albums to audio cd just so you can rip them again into a free or open format. This is insane and should not be tollerented by people who paid for music. Oh a quick plug, if your affected by this whole thing, give the open rights group a shout.
Its not just Yahoo at it, AOL have also decided to suspend some of their services and give their (in some cases – paying) customers a dilemma over getting there data back. Xdrive, AOL Pictures and Bluestring. There in talks about selling the services and if not AOL have said they will consider burning CDs and DVDs for its customers or allow them to transfer to other services. It will be interested to see if it allows access to other rival services.
I've been poking people on Facebook for a long while now, but I was talking to Kate on the weekend and she seems convinced its slightly dirty. Now this might just be Kate's strange but fascinating mind, however I got to say I'm going stop poking some people from today.
Cory Doctorow came to the BBC's Festival of Technology last week and during his short time there (well Alice is ready to give birth any moment now, good luck by the way) he mentioned his thoughts on social networking sites like Facebook. I didn't have my camera turned on but I remember the thrust of the talk which was something like this.
I certainly have got fed up of people asking to be a friend. And rather that flat out reject people, I've collected a good number of people who I haven't responded to yet. It is painful when I open facebook to see there are still 45 requests to be my friend, but I do after a while log on and start ignoring the requests – simply because there are too many and i'm in a bad mood. On Linkedin I'm less strict because the data on my profile is public anyway. While on Plaxo Pulse I'm super strict about tagging people because it affects what they can see about me. I don't watch everyone who watches me on twitter or jaiku because messages sometimes go to my phone or mostly pop up in my im client.
I was once believe it or not told off by someone for not “friending” them back on Twitter. I told the person, if they know anything about me they won't be offended. I follow currently 124 people and 585 people follow me. Thats almost 5x the amount of people following that me watching. So I started looking around to see what the ratio was like for other people I know.
I don't think this says much but its interesting that only scoble gets a 1x ratio, the nutter that he is.
This was dropped in my email today from partricia500@yahoo.com.
Hi cubicgarden
pice23 (a SlideShare user) has sent you a private message.
'HELLO My name is partricia i saw your profile today at(www.slideshare.net) and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address ( partricia1000@yahoo.com ) I believe we can move from here. I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life ) p/a/r/t/r/i/c/i/a/1/0/0/0/@/y/a/h/o/o/./c/o/m/'(*note: This is a private message. You can message back “pice23” on his/her profile page)
(**You can change your message permissions by editing your profile here)
How did I know it was spam? Easy, look at the writing style first, very child like and very jumpy. Speilling is also bad. Why the hell would I send a email to the email address which is spelt out twice (as to beat most spam catchers). The call for action “I am waiting for your mail to my email.” Then the profile page has no slideshows, joined in Jan 2008, no contacts or friends, no activity and last logged in 5 hours ago. Go social engineer someone else losers.
Technorati Tags: spam, email, yahoo, socialenginnering, socialengineer, crap, scam
Funny video which seems to be doing the rounds at the moment. I would say there is a slight bubble in some corners but there is a genuine change which can not be ignored (oh did I meantion I posted a powerpoint about whats changed).Back in bubble land, there is few IPOs and therefore no money from the general public. This is important, as there won't be such a large crash if a bubble pops.
Technorati Tags: slideshare, video, bubble2.0, bubble, money, ipo
While at BarCampLondon3, I noticed there was little discussion about Facebook. This is unusual because everywhere else you go, its all about facebook. I first thought it was the influence of being in Google, but actually no. I mentioned it Rachel Clarke and she reminded me that that BarCamp is made up of people who are really in the know, the people actually doing stuff and not just talking about it. Facebook was put into its real context at BarCampLondon3 rather that most conferences where's its over hyped or talked about to death.
Anyway one of the talks I did go to talked about friends lists and how artificial they really are. One of the points which really got me, was the notion of old friends which drop off the radar. The speaker asked how many im buddies to we all have compared to how many we actually talk to? I looked at mine afterwards and saw I have close to 250 im buddies across 6 im accounts (3 jabber, 1msn, 1aim and icq, 1yahoo). Its time for a clean up. So to simplfy things, I'm sticking to just my cubicgarden gmail one and maybe my ian forrester jabber.org one. If you want to talk to me on any other network (except skype) your out of luck now sorry. But it doesn't really matter, you can still email me on facebook.
Some may say this stupid or even brave, but the face was that looking at the gaim logs, most of my talking was done over the jabber network and my msn/aim/yahoo friends to be on facebook anyway. Also Miles mentioned to me today, that you can send messages via other jabber servers on to other networks now. I am tempted to im everyone on the other networks and say I'm moving but why bother? I like to think of this as uncluttering my im list using network effects. This is also a great time to do this, as having my phone im client running up to 4 different im accounts was frankly stupid.
Technorati Tags: im, barcamplondon3, barcamp, jabber, xmpp, friends, facebook, gmail
Google has announced OpenSocial, a new open API for social networks. The new standard will allow developers to create Facebook-like apps on any social network site that implements it with the same calls.
The open API will have three parts
- People
- Storage
- Activity stream
All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and Javascript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.
This is huge because finally we're starting to see a common standard being build into different social networks. There are some caveats however like no support for Facebook or Myspace. But good to see Plaxo and Linkedin involved in this API project. I told you Google were up to something…
I recently asked a friend about why they had joined Facebook as it tends to hate internet applications which collect data and involves some kind of social aspect.
well, to me all these manage-your-friends-online apps only have one purpose: advertising and adress collection. they are one of the reasons people receive f*cking penis enlargement spams and similar trash.
i believe in modern communicaton, face to face and i already hated the expressions facebook and ringo from day one. they describe that the people are incabable of communication although they have all the best means in our modern society. facebook – i collect my friends faces, the exterior apperance gains importance over real personality values, a quick glance instead of a serious conversation, that's what it symbolises.
the people are plain lazy and comfortable, that's all, i hardly receive any proper emails like the real letters i used to get, ususally short sms style messages like abbreviated postcards. hm, i find that sad ;(i still receive and send a lot of snail mail and i love it!
Its weird because I only get snail mail with bills and official documents in it now, the rest is junk or miss-directed mail (I get a lot of this).
Pop!Tech is one of those conferences you would love to go to if you could one afford it and two are special enough to be invited. But whats great about Pop!Tech is that they have every year since about 2004 provided a live stream into the conference. With Maine only 5 hours behind London, its not too difficult to catch most of it at home or while working. Tomorrow being Friday, I might have to find a spare machine and have Pop!Tech streaming on it to the whole department. But to be honest the best way to experience Pop!Tech is at home on a Xbox running Xbox Media Centre.
Its very simple to get Pop!Tech streaming on xbmc. Simple create a blank text document with *.strm on the end for an extention. Then stick one of the urls in the file. So for example I have 2 files, one called Poptech-300k.strm with the url – http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592848 inside of it and Poptech-700k.strm with http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1592849 inside of that. Navigate to the files via the xbox and select them. The Xbox should now start to buffer the content. I've set my buffer to 10meg which is insane but I'm watcing the 700k stream over the 300k version.
What seems to have changed this year is that Pop!Tech has now included archives. This might something to do with the TED talks coming online a while back as podcasts you can download without any DRM. Well Pop!Tech have gone one further by applying a Creative Licence, so you can share, edit and remix under a non-commercial use. Can things get any better?
Maybe i missed this or this is still pretty new. Dopplr now has a facebook application. Its pretty smooth and works as expected. Good work guys!
Now if only there was a facebook application for Upcoming events instead of Facebooks own dodgy events system. I would also love to totally replace the facebook images with Flickr.
So I've been using Microsoft Money for quite a while to manage my money but since moving to gnu/Linux, I've not really converted the money file over to anything else. I was checking out the KDE application Money2 but started thinking there has got to be a better way to do this?
Well in steps Mint fresh faced from the Techcrunch conference. When I first heard rumours about it, I thought it was something to do with that terriable credit card company in the UK with the same name. However Mint.com promises to refresh money management by adding all the goodness of Web 2.0.
So I've been checking it out, and to be honest I like what I see but I'm not convinced they can be trusted with my finanical information. Now don't get me wrong I'm no hot shot with millions in the bank but I still wouldn't want what how much I pay for lunch (not a lot thanks to Tesco) in the public domain. I'm not saying Mint are leaking this information, I'm just not sure. I've been reading there Privicy policy and it all looks ok but I have this naggy feeling that this is dangerious and should be avoided for a while longer, at least let someone else be the test muppet. I had this feeling when I first heard about Paypal and to be honest I do use it but tend not to keep money in it for long and I use its most basic features. All those advanced features like hooking it into your bank i've avoided because it worries me. Although in a recent episode of Security now, Paypal's Director of Account protection was on talking about the levels of security and privicy they have for users of their service. SecureID was one of the solutions and to be honest, if my bank offered that, I would gladly use it.
I guess my fear of using Mint is a little overboard but like linking my facebook profile to some of the other sites I use, I think somethings are maybe left alone till I can trust them. Trust is a funny thing, I mean I trust my bank, paypal, amazon, Tesco, Plaxo, etc. But I don't trust Facebook, Mint, etc with my credit card details. They haven't been around long enough to prove their trustworthness. There rep is 0 in my book. I need Facebook to stop mining my information and start offering me real uses. Mint I guess will have to rely on good feedback from people on there own blogs before I start using it.
Its all useless anyway, mint is american centric, requiring a zip code before you can sign up. Have they never heard of Open ID? Simon Wilison was right, all startups should use Open ID if they want people to use their service. Now Mint you've lost a customer because although I could make up a zip code, why the hell should I?
Excellent now you can create powerpoint presentations online using Google Apps, just perfect for those last minute presentations but whats this? No export? Oh dear me… Just imagine presentating your killer new startup and the wifi goes down. Next slide fails to load, actually all slides fail to load, and you have to babber on about how great it was going to be. Maybe it will support Google Gears in the future?
Ok so I'm not going to do some complete review of Plaxo 3.0 beta, but I'm seeing some interesting new features being added to the next version of Plaxo.
The first major change is Open ID support. Now to be fair this adds to the already AOL login support on top of standard Plaxo login. So now there's 3 different ways to log into plaxo. Unfortually its not that simple because the Plaxo clients seem to only support the previous types of logins. But then again, how would you do Open ID in a desktop application? On the plus side you can attach your Open ID(s) (yes multiple open ids) to an existing plaxo account or start a new one in the same way.
There's this new feature called Pulse which is like a life stream from all your contacts. How it seems to work is Plaxo looks through all your contacts and finds all the blogs, flickr feeds and amazon wish lists attached to that contact then display them in your pulse section. This is very much like the activities part of facebook and like that there is no rss feed of the aggregate results which is a real shame.
The last major change is Calendaring sharing. Which for me does away with the major advantage of upgrading to Outlook 2007. Instead of subscribing on the client you can use Plaxo's inbuild ical client to subscribe to ical feeds and other types of feeds. This actually makes mores sense that telling your laptop to update that feed every hour. My only problem is it won't subscribe to my friends ical from upcoming, which is a pain. You can also make your own calendar sharable as a ical feed (either full or just free/busy time can be used). So in actual fact this would have solved me and Sarah's calendaring problems. We could have both gone back to Outlook 2003, although I have to say I quite like 2007 and since I've stopped using the ical options, its a hell of a lot more stable. Could the endless calendar
Plaxo already had a developer API for years and a whole of host of goodies like the ability to export and import almost every type of file including Mozilla's LDIF format. But finally a minor addition is… sync to Google Calendars. Yes now you can sync them up and Plaxo also added Linked in support (premium only right now), Windows Live and Hotmail syncing. Now if they would just add sync to Thunderbird and Facebook, then I'd be really happy.
Generally Plaxo just needs to open up a little more by adding back the ability to export data (without switching back to the previous version), work more on their mobile options (please give us over the air syncML support) and keep adding more sync choices. I do for some reason trust Plaxo a lot more with my data that Facebook or even linkedin. Plaxo has always been good about not mining my contacts for data to be used in advertising or anything sketchy like that. However Plaxo isn't facebook and this pulse addition is worrying that they will try and follow suit. I mean it kind of makes sense because they have your contacts already but I don't want to be too social about my private data, thank you very much.
Will all this help more get into Plaxo? Yes I think so and to be honest I just signed up to their premium trial because of useful services like duplicate watching and linked in support. If I stay on beyond the free trial is questionale but worth exploring non-less.
meta-technorati-tags=plaxo3.0, plaxo, site, syncml, mobile, calendaring
