Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Add NO MATCH to your profile picture and lets tell them we’re really not happy with what you’ve done choosing to be bought by Match.com
You can download my one here and add your own picture. Mine fits perfectly with the online now sign as you can see above.
Continue reading “NO MATCH: Update your okcupid profile now“
In March 2005, Judge Robert Restaino jailed 46 people when a mobile phone rang in his New York courtroom and no one would admit responsibility.
So we invented Locale. Problem solved.
Locale was recommended to me by my good friend Sheila. And within a moment of playing with it I started thinking wow this app can do so much for me.
Locale simply makes the android phone do (setting) something when a set condition is triggered (situation). And thats about it. But this is the clever part, there are loads of plugins to make locale work in different ways.
One of my current favorites is the speak Text and Email setting which does just that. When I’m at home, I usually have the phone next to me on the sofa or on the coffee table. Using "say my name" it will speak the email or text out loud to me, so I don’t even have to look or touch the phone. Of course it also says the person calling if thats the case.
The problem is I don’t want my phone to read out messages when I’m in a public place. But this is easily solved with Locale!
I have a situation setup to say if the phone spots my ssid for wireless and/or its pluged in via usb and charging. Then change the setting to allow speaking aloud and reading my messages.
Its that easy!
One of the most common situations I’ve seen and setup myself is to turn on wifi when at home (once again using the SSID) and turn it off when your not near wifi again. I also added a setting to change the ring volume if I’m at home and when I’m not.
There are tons of conditions and sensors which can be bought and setup. From Battery, Bluetooth and Cell stations to Time, Orientation and SSID for the conditions. Volume, Sync, Brightness, Gtalk, Lock, Ringtone, Wallpaper, Wifi are some of the settings which can be tweaked based on the condition (and these are just the free ones).
I said a long time ago, (maybe before I started blogging even) that controlling your profile on the phone would be the key to mastering it. Problem was that changing profiles required too much attention. I mean who has the time or can be bothered to change the profile each time they walk into a meeting or get on the bus? Instead Locale does all the hard work by turning your phone into a series of cleverly thought out sensors…
…and this is just the start. I keep coming up with interesting uses for locale like for example if I was on Foursquare, gowalla or facebook places. I could tell my phone to automatically send a http post to a url when I’m in the location (by gps, 3g, ssid, etc) to automatically sign me in to a location.
So why is this great application not available on the iphone platform?
The control of the operating system, is squeezing the innovation at the app level. Heck i’m not the only one saying this. And this level of control will ultimately be the downfall of the iOS platform (imho).
Do I have to say anything more?
Every bloody person I know is on Facebook now. And since Facebook started opening up to 3rd party sites like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Upcoming, Flickr, Last.FM, etc there's even more of a reason to use it. The weird thing about facebook for me is how odd a mix it is of web 1.0 and web 2.0. For example its got the community and participation stuff down really well but its interface and experience is franky dirty and feels like it belongs in the internet archive.
I heard a interview a while back talking about how facebook was going to replace the operating system on your machine. Although I laughed, I can see what they mean now. I imagine its the starting destination for a lot of people, and with its mixture of chat, photos, groups, etc all blended together. I guess this what Yahoo tried to do with Yahoo 360 somewhat failed?
I decided to split up my posts about the girl geekdinner because something happened later when we got to the pub in Victoria afterwards.
Walid from Trustedplaces.com was showing me some of the new features there planning. Obviously these are not to be repeated so I won't. But we got talking about the Trusted places taste tester and Walid pointed out a site I've never seen before called Imagini. Now how we got on to that subject is about profiling. I was suggesting to Walid it would be great if you make the profiling data available to the user so they could tweak it or share it. Glyn asked about the business motivations for doing so. I didn't really have a answer except it would be very cool.
So why?
Well imagini tries to map out who you are by asking you about 13 questions. Its results are poor and very general. But worst still is once you've done all that work, you get rewarded with a widget, some facts about yourself according to them, some travel sites you might like and being added to their facewall. The author calls it VisualDNA, theres lots more about VisualDNA including this part which talks about the reasoning behind it.
Did you know that businesses around the globe spend a staggering $18 billion per year on market research, trying to work out better ways of understanding what we all want? On top of this, about another $350 billion is spent every year advertising to persuade us to buy what’s been produced and available…
We think that this is totally outdated and simply not a sustainable way to carry on. It just makes sense that the future must be about producing less whilst meeting peoples needs more. We believe that the changing way in which we are all using the internet will make this possible by enabling people to get together and share information about what they like, want and need.
Our view is that the way to start assisting this process is to open up a completely new method of communication – a language that everyone who can see can interact with and understand – a language of images that enables people to understand each other in a different way.
The reason we have chosen images as a way of doing this is because about 90% of the way we all communicate is non-verbal. This 90% is made up of all sorts of different components that include many visual aspects such as who we look, act and behave.
This may sound cool but I'm left thinking, what else is it for me?. Now imagine it created a APML (Attention Profile Markup Language) file along with everything else. Then that would be something special.
This got me thinking too, what if other more established places like Trustedplaces, Last.FM, etc also gave away a APML file as part of the profile of each user?
One of the things I loved about APML is the Implicit Data (U-AR) and Explicit Data (I-AM) elements. You can just imagine how simple it would be to output APML from something Last.FM. (whats below isn't true APML markup, just my lazy json like writing)
Implicit (U-AR) last.fm {
concept{ Ferry Corsten = 0.87 }
concept{ Armin Van Buuren = 0.90 }
concept{ Sugar Babes = 0.1 }
concept{ Lemonhead = 0.00001 }
}
Anyway thinking about Glyns question about the business angle, I still don't quite have an answer except to say I've been following Steve Gibsons Security Now which recently has been talking about multifactor authentication.
Well I was thinking APML could be useful for 1 and 3 but started thinking about a 5th factor. Something you know about someone. So a question could be does friend1 prefer ferry corsten, Armin, sugar babes or lemonhead? Maybe? or Maybe not?
Anyway I look forward to seeing more applications and services using APML or something like it. I think there's business reason behind APML but I can't put my finger on it right now. Hopefully someone like Trusted places gets it before Digg who just annouced something similar to trustedplaces.
