Category: xml and web 2.0

Tristan Ferne found this the other day,

CEO David Sacks says there are now 10,000 networks and 50,000 users just one week in. Yammer’s business model is to let people use the service for free, spreading it throughout the enterprise. When and if a company wants to take administrative control over the account, Yammer charges $1/user/month. Administrators can set access controls, such as IP controls and SSL.

The company already allows interaction with the service via the site, an AIR client, iPhone, Blackberry, IM, SMS and email. This evening they’ve also launched an API to allow third party developers to build Yammer into their applications.

Maybe it might start at one dollar a month but who knows what it might turn into, because by then your enterprise social network is in there hands. I have no idea why we're not running to Laconi.ca faster. Maybe because it will actually require someone to set it up, keep it running and administrate it?

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So I've been thinking a lot about cloud computing recently and wanted to share a couple of interesting uses of sensor to cloud to visualisation application.

While at BarCampBrighton3, Tom Morris showed me Rescue Time. I originally poopoo'ed it because Miles had showed me about a year ago something exactly the same but it only worked on OSX. But after a little research, I had found the community driven Linux version and was up and running shortly afterwards. My main reason for doing this was to track what I'm doing for work and myself. So I'm now generating tons of data and have to find ways to filter/transform it automaticlly into our BBC time tracking system. Of course I wouldn't have signed up if there wasn't plans to allow you to take your data away later. There's already widgets which are useful but a API is being planned along with other developer tools.

Generally my computer has a little sensor (application in this case) which it uses to work out what application your using and for how long. The real number crunching is then done in the crowd along with the other stacks of data from you and other users. The data is then turned into information which in much more digestable. Don't get me wrong this isn't new, much talked about Fitbit does the exactly the same thing. The little sensor will track how much activity you have been up to while walking, running, working out or even sleeping. This is then sync'ed with a computer and made sense of in the cloud. I think the Nike+iPod thing also does roughly the same but also like Fitbit, I wonder how much of the data will be available to reuse, share and takeaway?

Your creating the data and although they are doing the analysis and processing, is it really a fair swap? I mean once they have the data its entirely possible for them to find trends across multiple users and offer advertising, discounts, etc to those users. So revenue shouldn't be a problem. But if these guys were to make the data available again, you could just imagine the kind of services and applications 3rd parties will make. Something I was alerted to a while back was the amount of services which are offered off the back of Basecamp's API and Data.

Cloud/Utility computing is powerful and with good portability and interoperability it can work to form a good ecosystem for both the user and the provider. Unfortunately this is all being over looked or considered at a much later stage. No wonder people are very edgy about cloud computing.

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The good news is that there is activity showing at Jaiku after months and months of it just ticking over. There are now unlimited invites, so if your after one, ping me a email or pm on twitter with your email address. Oh the same goes for Boxee which has recently been updated (more about that another day).

I can't help but wonder if jaiku left it too late to be a dominate player in the microblogging world? I mean there is no douht that being based on jabber/xmpp/messaging, makes it stronger, scalable, more robust, cleverer and mobile/im happy. But with the jaiku team split up and googlified it was just ticking over while others started to get there platforms together.

I've mentioned before indenti.ca and the software which drives it laconi.ca. As Leo Lapour pointed out in a interview, the ability to have both local and remote communities is a killer feature. Local as in the twit army server and remote as in you can pull your profile from any other laconi.ca install and messages can flow across servers in a federated fashion. I mean thats powerful and honestly think companies must be crazy to use something like twitter or even jaiku over something they can host themselves and still be part of a much wider community. For example, BBC Switch (BBC teens) could now host there own microblogging service which has strict guidelines over language and subject matter but take advantage of the ability to use your profile from another community site running laconi.ca. Maybe this might not be right for teens but someone could also switch a config setting and not allow outside messaging inwards or the other way. The option is in the hoster's hands.

Maybe i'm wrong, but if I was Orange or another mobile phone operator. I would have laconi.ca hosted and be actively throwing them support, money, anything to get it up to speed. I would also be developing software for my latest phones which use our install of laconi.ca from default. I mean the only off putting thing for mobile operators is this could eat right into there Sms/texting cashcows. But if they expect to build a future on sms/text, there sadly mistaken. Imagine if they came up with some killer software too, what would that do at Jaiku? Once the xmpp work is done to laconi.ca there will be little difference between the two (only the rss lifestreaming stuff really). I guess the smart move would be for Jaiku to open up and allow interactions between the two platforms? Jyri care to comment???

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People always think about the big things when thinking about Data Portability. You know the stuff about moving your friends list or your whole account complete with its data. But what about the stuff which is just not accessible? (or at least seen to be accessible).

One such example hit me when Katie Lips (what a lovely name for a lovely woman) demoed Treasuremytext. Now I've come across this site a couple of times actually though Katie but never really been that impressed. I've always had windows mobile phones, so copying text messages off is as simple as syncing with outlook, turning into notes or copying and pasting. But at BarCampLeeds2, I started thinking about all those people who use those phones which don't allow such things. For example is it possible to save a thread of conversation off a iphone? It maybe even possible but how easy is it? Well services like treasuremytext are part of the data accessiblity landscape, making your data portable.

This should really be the default state of most of the applications/services we use right? Taking something untangable into something tangable which you can maybe takeaway.

Right this moment I'm having trouble with Tesco online shopping. Me and Sarah use to use the same account and so the recommendations and previously bought shopping baskets are for a couple not a single guy. Ideally there would be some APML output and input, so I could remove items and adjust the preferences (geez think of shopping list as concepts instead of items of food) then feed it back into Tesco or one of the rivials who should be looking for my online business. Hey even, I could feed the APML into a broker/comparison site which would work out what my monthly average would be if I use another supermarket. And this is so all do able, even Tesco supply a download of there prices and other information weekly (they may even support a API by now).

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Can I just say I love the internet! There is tons of great resources online and most of them are freely available to anyone who wants to invest the time. I can't understand people who say the internet is full of crap. A bit of media literacy about how to search, how to judge sources, friends recommendations, etc, etc and internet is a better that any other resource known to man. Simple!

In that vein, here's a couple of great little resources which have been recommended to me by friends.

How to bridge the distance between business strategy and design – recommended to me by Paul via Del.icio.us. I mean wow, I would love to hear this live, the presentation slides are pretty credible and describing enough that you feel like you could give the presentation
yourself with enough time.

Living digital – recommended to me by Kate via email. I've heard of this guy but yes this is a awesome presentation to google. Would love to get him to the BBC one day. A lot of this for me is shaking head in agreement but its so good to have that sometimes. Even today I hardly ever turn on the TV, its all about Internet content be it licenced, unknown or unlicenced. Its also good to see the technology is ready. My friend bought a Popcorn box a while back and a couple of other friends bought a xbox just for xbmc the other day. And I got to say I'm still having fun downloading what ever highdef content I can find and playing it back on my homemade xbmc box.

Background Patterns – recommended to me by everyone but Lucas was first. Lovely site, well thought out and the fact you can download the pattern is ideal.

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I mean to include this graph of ping.fm in the last blog entry but must have fell a sleep or much more likely the internet went off again (i've been having so much problems with my home broadband recently its not even funny). The graph shows how Ping.FM has or could be come a trusted message broker. Someone posted a comment about incoming XMPP support which seems to add more fire to this idea of a message broker.

But just when we were getting excited about ping.fm, when someone really does things correctly. identi.ca ticks almost all the data portability and openness tick boxes I can think of. Not only is the service a Opensource Creative Commons framework based on Jabber/XMPP but it supports OpenID and remote subscription via OpenMicroblogging which is OAuth and some established responses and returns. But no thats not all, it finally supports Federation, which means finally people really like owning there own can build and maintain there own and connect to the network when it pleases them. Simple this is awesome and I've already joined it.

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So I've finally signed up with Ping.fm thanks to David Owens giving me a update to date code for ping.fm.

So what is Ping.Fm and why do I find it very interesting.

Well according to the website.

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.

Its a service which will pass on your single message (or ping) to other services. So in practice I can message ping.fm and the message appear on plaxo pulse, twitter, jaiku, plurk, facebook and linked in. Of course it does more than that but those are the ones I'm interested. Whats even better is Ping.fm has im, email and applications of its own. So one of my biggest frustrations is twitters im bot which never bloody works, should be solved.

Its also good to see the setup with other services part is done without revealing your username and password when ever possible. But there are a couple services like twitter and plurk where you must. What would have been ideal is OpenID logins, but few of these services support that right now anyway. Actually on Plaxo, I had to go find the login details because I'm so use to using OpenID.

Once your setup, you can just go to the site and type in your messages which get ping'ed elsewhere. But thats not where it ends, nope you can setup custom and service triggers which allow you to route a message based on a rule you setup or something a service does. So imagine Twitter stopped working (yeah when does that happen?), you could divert messages to another service which you may only use in emergencies. I was trying to work out if you get ping.fm to watch for messages which came through another service and echo those out to the rest of services. So say I SMS twitter, Ping.fm sees the twitter messages, notices its not on my Jaiku and reposts it there.

As mentioned before there is many ways to post to ping.fm but no SMS yet. Right now you can use a facebook application, a load of im bots including xmpp via gtalk, google gadget and even a iphone and wap client! Of course more importantly there's a developer API.

Why do I think Ping.fm is that great? Well its using the web as it should be. There was never a reason why you had to sign into different services to leave messages. Ping.fm is like a layer above all the crazyness going on in the social messaging space. I don't know if I quite trust it yet, currently my hand is forced because I hate the alternative. However these guys are going about the whole thing in the correct way. I love the fact there's from day one im bots and a api. This means once I've setup my services, I don't really ever have to log into ping.fm ever again. This might sound shocking but theres another service which is like this. Dopplr, is trying to be quite transparent in its deliver and use to people. So you can setup Dopplr with your personal calendar, its pulls out places and will inform your friends once you clash. No need to really go back to the site ever really (unless you want reviews and your carbon footprint). There is always a question of how these services will make money without advertising but I don't know maybe a pro version ala Flickr or they could sell the attention data being generated from the messages going through there services?

Who knows, but right now I'm pretty impressed with ping.fm. Once they have SMS gateways its going to be even better.

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From the Radio Labs blog titled Removing Microformats from bbc.co.uk/programmes

Unfortunately there have been a number of concerns over hCalendar's use of the abbreviation design pattern. Until these issues are resolved the BBC semantic markup standards have been updated to prevent the use of non-human-readable text in abbreviations…

This is has been debated to death in other quarters, but I think its great to see the radio labs guys come out and say in a non judgmental way what problems they've been having and how it conflicts with the BBC standards and guidelines. This is one of those good cluetrain moments which is difficult but so right.

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BBC Worldservice won Sony's first Multiplatform award just recently. The project was the Bangladesh Boat Trip which involved a team of people from across the new media space. Ben Sutherland along with many others internally and backstage's own Premasagar & Annesley of Dharmafly created a complete experience across different platforms. From James Cridland's blog.

As Ben Sutherland says on the BBC Editors blog: If predictions about sea level rises come true, much of Bangladesh will simply be erased from the map. Our aim, therefore, was to hire a boat and use it to travel the long, wide rivers of the country to meet the people most at risk. There were amazing stories […] but not only was the method of getting these stories remarkable, but so was our way of getting it out. We weren’t just using tri-media, and we weren’t just World Service. We were on Radio 5 Live, News 24, Radio Scotland – and on Twitter, iTunes, Google.

In the words of the judges, “it embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.” They even had the foresight to put those photos under a CC licence, to enable people like me to use them again.

James is right, the foresight to put them under a CC licence but I would also say they went one step further by creating the API for the website. This meant people could look directly at the data underpinning the whole project. How many people did? Who knows, I assume not many. But having the foresight to do this is great and a true testament to the move from Radio to true multiplatform. Excellent work.
I'd better also say I use to work for the Worldservice and have many friends who work there.

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Talking about things which are simlar. Can anyone tell me why I should sign up to Friendfeed when I'm already using jaiku as a sort of life stream and I'm already using Plaxo's Pulse? Don't get me wrong I do see some advantages to friendfeed but not enough to make me want to sign up.

I do find this area of aggregation really interesting but having already signed up to lifestreams (which I never use), Jaiku (which I read on my phone whenever I got 5mins spare) and Plaxo Pulse (which I like but am worried about the closed nature of it). I'm just not seeing anything new and interesting in Friendfeed or any of the other simlar services. Now if one of them was to create APML, I would switch in a snap.

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Ok I know there not exactly a like but I just don't understand why you would want to install something like alert thingy when you can use something a lot more intergrated like Specto. I can just about understand why to use Twitterfic and something like Pownce (although please stop asking to be my friend, I don't use pownce). But alertthingy… nope. Actually with Specto and Gnome-Do you can do everything twitterrific does with equal ease. Just my thoughts, obviously most of you will disagree.

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