It's been a month and a day since my last blog post. This isn't down to
a lack of enthusiasm, just the pressures of work combined with not
having my own personal computer to use in the evenings! I'm hoping for
new MacBooks to be out soon and solve that particular problem.
In the meantime, this blog is going into hibernation. Let's see if it
survives the winter...
---
I'm currently pretty active at foomandoonian.posterous.com, so you know...
Mozilla have a prototype called Prism that lets you turn web applications, like Buzzword or the Aviary suite into stand-alone apps, that still use the browser's engine, but presents the app in a new window. You may not realise that the slick new Google browser, Chrome, lets you easily do the same trick.
Last month, the mixtape website Muxtape went down, leaving the understated message: 'Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.'
Users jumped to the pretty reasonable conclusion that Muxtape is effectively dead, although the official support tumblelog says: 'No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.'
Dead or not, seemingly the same instant Muxtape went down, Opentape.fm sprung up.
Opentape's creation and design are inspired by Muxtape's success and sleek interface. We were disappointed with its untimely shutdown and wanted the web mixtape movement to continue.
Molly Wood on Buzz Out Loud expressed a theory that 'the RIAA's constant crackdown on sites and services that ought to be fair use is creating cockroach-like, drug-resistant strains... like Opentape'. Speculation aside, Opentape is all the cooler for being open source and easy to install on your own website. The same slick Ajaxy page is all there, except instead of the links to buy music on Amazon, Opentape has a direct link to the MP3. It also has a flash player you can embed elsewhere:
Here's another simple service that I like - MeeID. Pick a name, add a picture, write up to ten lines about yourself. Each line can be a link, but doesn't have to be. At least some HTML is allowed.
That's about it. You can link your profile to others, but even this feature is pretty limited. The obvious use is to have your MeeID page be a central reference point. It's the link you stick in your Twitter bio, or on your moo card.
Hopefully they'll add some OpenID features, because I can see this simple approach appealing to a lot of people who are put off by the relative complexity of places like ClaimID.
(I can be found at http://www.meeid.com/foomandoonian/)
Today Google launched a new open-source web browser called Chrome. I'm not going to waste your time with some made up on-the-spot analysis and opinioneering - instead, here is a handy list of the key things you need to know:
The University of Texas, Austin has kicked off a project to study the best way to preserve the history of online worlds.
read more | digg story
I hope the creators are thinking beyond the 'twitterverse', as they have one cool feature that many other Twitter clients don't - they are not riding on the Twitter brand. There are no bird metaphors in the name or the design, so if they are so inclined, they could add support for Plurk, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, FriendFeed, Blip.fm, bit.ly, Kwippy and all the other services that are crying out for unification in some form or other.If you've spent even a little time on the popular website Twitter you will notice a few things about it. You may notice that there is quite a bit of downtime, or the avatars won't load, maybe your tweets don't get submitted or you can't follow people, sometimes. I am here to tell you today that these aren't even the biggest of problems that Twitter faces. Furthermore the main reason why Twitter is ruined right now, is you.
When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was a fantastic idea. For a creative person like myself it could be the ideal avenue to throw out some funny lines that I come up with and get instant feedback. It was like a dream world where I could harass people in new and hilarious ways, all the while getting instant feedback from the harassed and anyone who cared to read. Then reality kicked in.
I soon started to notice that Twitter was being used for sub-awesome ventures. I started getting attacked by a barrage of lameness like "eating food" or "I'm bored" and even the dreaded "driving to work". Uggggggh... I found that my new avenue of awesomeness was getting crowded with genuinely boring people. People with no imagination, with no vision, and apparently no fucking lives.
You have a great way to meet and chat with an unending amount of new people, and you decide the best way to befriend them is to fill them in on all the boring little details of your life? Not only that, but these people tend to have 5x as many followers as me. How can this be possible when they have the personality of an acorn and I'm the king of awesomeness? Simple. Most of these people only care about building huge follower/followee situations and upping their "tweet" count. Wow, what an ultra fulfilling and rewarding life you must live.
Being the nice guy that I am I want to help some of these people. I'm not helping the tweet count and follower count whores, they've already sold their souls to mediocrity and are forever in my little black book of hate. I will, however, help those people who tend to just be completely boring. They seem like nice enough people, and I want to follow them back, I just can't torture my mind reading their banalities on my timeline.
So here are a few examples of boring posts that I've seen, and my version of the same line. This should help you lame people spice it up a bit...
Original: "Off to take a shower."
New: "Uh-Ohs, It's shower time... Join me?"
Not only are you adding some semblance of personality, but you also see who is attracted to you and out the gays.
Original: "Eating a sandwich."
New: "I'm mouth fucking a turkey club right now."
Some people may find this comical, others may find it kind of gross, but at least you're getting a reaction out of people besides indifference.
Original: "Listening to *insert shitty band here*."
New: "Rocking out to *awesome band*, drinking Red Bull, and hitting my spouse."
Not only do I expect you to put a little more effort into tweets, but I also fully expect you to change your tastes from terrible music and movies, to awesome ones. Maybe it's the generic lines from the terrible movies and music you intake that are taking you over filtering into your tweets.
With any luck a large majority of the twitter community will read this post, realize that they're a failure to society, and then change their ways. It's going to take a lot of work to get these disappointments to turn it around, so I'll need your help. The next time you see someone getting their boring on, I want you to textually bitch slap them right in front of everyone. I feel if you make fun of the relentlessly they'll either be forced to change their ways, or they will just kill themselves. Either way it's win/win.
Blip.fm is a new micro-blogging service, from Fuzz, that has a truly brilliant unique selling point - music. Twitter asks 'What are you doing?' but Blip.fm asks instead 'What are you listening to?' You simply search for a tune, scroll through a list of results, preview the ones you like to make sure it's working. Add a message and 'blip' it to the world.
Music is clearly the killer feature here, but that's not the only great thing about Blip.fm. It's really easy to find and add people with similar musical tastes. After each post, Blip will show you a handful of others who have recently played the same song, and ask if you want to follow them. Additionally, the main page dynamically loads in new blips, without you having to reload the page. All micro-blogs should do this, but it's particularly hand on Blip as it means you can just keep listening, indefinitely.
I do wonder about the legality of this, but ultimately this could be a great tool for music discovery. Let's hope it survives!
Here, have an invite to Blip.fm, on me.
In a smart move earlier this month, Twitter bought Summize, and turned it into search.twitter.com. Now Twitter should snap up some more services to capitalise on the work others have done using the API, and really jump ahead in the micro-blog space that they created. So, what else could they add?
Twellow is rough around the edges, but it is a great way to search for useful stuff on Twitter. Want to follow some people who are into the same TV shows as you? Solicit some advice from a web developer or Linux geek? Find some news sources? Twitter could grab Twellow, or probably knock together their own directory.
TwitPic is essential. Already tightly integrated, this is a brilliant way of sharing photos through Twitter.
Twitterfeed is a core service for anyone who wants to tweet an RSS feed. (And I'm not just including this because I did the logo!)
Another service already in perfect harmony with Twitter is Tweetburner. Your link-sharing stats could be displayed on an extended profile page, along with all your shared TwitPics and other goodies. This one probably makes the most sense, as the URL shortening market thrives largely thanks to Twitter.
Another service that just needs a lick of paint is TwitterNotes. Just by using a plus sign, this can identify your tweet as a note, and keep it handy for later. It even supports tagging. Postica has a more novel way of displaying notes, but lacks for any other real selling (or buying) points.
Twitt(url)y and TweetWire both search and filter out hot links on Twitter. This could make for a pretty interesting alternative frontpage, to answer the frequent newbie complaint of 'I don't see what the point is!'
Buy TwitterCounter, mix in the Tweetburner and Summise data, and you can provide users with some pretty cool analytics data! A TwitDir or Twitterholic style 'Top 100' would be popular too. And Mood Status might be a fun addition.
Identica is already offering a tags page, but Twitter could take the lead by snapping up Hashtags (or the less sexy Twemes).
Twitter really needs to revamp the follower/following management, and it could start by looking at MyTweeple, which does a great job of showing you a summary of information on all those who follow you, and all those you follow, making it easy to spot spammers or the anti-social attention whores who seem to be plaguing Twitter these days.
There's not really any need for Twitter to spend millions on acquiring all of these new features, but I think this list does go to show how much potential there is. I'm sure Obvious know what they're doing (or at least think they know better), but they would be daft to ignore the brainstorming efforts of hundreds of smart fans. To a large extent, the beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity, but I think all of these features could be added without compromising what is already there.
C'mon Twitter, shake it up a little!
This is another of these web services that I'm usually so fond of - a simple but terribly useful tool that does just one thing and does it brilliantly. Postica, sadly, is not brilliant - but it has a couple of useful features nonetheless.
The screengrab above probably explains the concept entirely. You can add notes to an otherwise blank page, choose a colour and move them around. You can also upload small (2-5MB) files by attaching them to notes (see the pink sticky). Probably the most useful feature is the ability to add a note via Twitter, by direct message (something I actually have been finding rather useful).
Finally, you can share notes, although I was only able to manage this using my own email address, so I think it may only work for those already on Postica, even though the FAQ suggests otherwise.
I hate to say it, but I don't think Postica offers enough. I may continue to use it for the Twitter integration, but with services like Evernote around, they need to add some other innovative touches if they want any attention.
The new Joss Whedon project is a revolution in direct-to-web production, showing that a web drama can be high quality. Imagine a cross between Mystery Men and the Buffy musical 'Once More With Feeling', and you probably have the vibe.
The idea came about during the Hollywood writer's strike earlier this year, when many writers were giving the web some serious consideration. Let Joss explain in his own trademarked Whedonspeak:
... I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first. [read all]
Neil Patrick Harris is brilliantly cast as Doogie Howser, gone evil. Nathan Fillion plays his nemesis, square-jawed superhero Captain Hammer (introduced in a My Space webcomic) perfectly. Another smart move was to cast web-savvy internet kitten (and actress) Felicia Day. of YouTube hit The Guild.
If you fancy watching a quick teaser, I've embedded it below, but why not just go straight to Act I...
Read more good stuff at Wired and USA Today. This bodes well for the future...
Summize had become one of the most useful and most polished Twitter services, a fact apparently recognised by Twitter who just snapped up the technology (and the five Summize engineers). The search engine has been rebadged with the Twitter logo and moved to search.twitter.com.
The Summize Blog has a nice potted history of the site and explains some of the thinking behind the search technology. The Twitter post also includes a neat little sketch showing how they plan to integrate their new toy into their main service:
This is a great move from Twitter. I hope they are considering buying up some of the other standout uses of their API, like TwitPic, Twitterfeed and Tweetburner (and maybe Twiddict too!). Moving in this direction will quickly put them miles ahead of the competition, which has really been hotting up lately.
Tweet Scan seems to have pipped Summize and others by adding new upstart micro-blog service Identica to its search index. Confusingly, the two searches have not been integrated. To search Identica you have to enter your term into a subtly different page.
Still, it's nice to see a Twitter-centric service embrace the new micro-blogging platform. It seems certain that the open-source Laconica will inspire many other Twitter services to embrace other platforms also.
Sorry for the lack of real updates recently, but I have been spending most of my time job hunting. Thankfully, with some success. This coming Monday I begin as a Web Assistant for BBC Wales, working primarily on the Nature site. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work for a company that gets the internet. I feel like I am a pretty capiable web designer, but there is no doubt in my mind that I have a lot to learn about good usability, accesibility, semantics and editorial skills, not to mention media production and distribution. I don't really know what the future holds, but this is one big step in the direction I want to be going.
At the moment I am organising a big move from Plymouth to Cardiff, and the first few weeks in any new job are pretty hectic, so don't expect many new posts from me. In fact, I'm thinking about shifting focus somewhat, but I haven't settled on anything yet.
In the meantime, you can catch me on the Twitter. Also, the foobot is still slaving away, keeping you up to date with the latest and greatest links from me. My Tumblelog, foomandoonian.net, is due for a bit of a revamp, but it still aggregates my content nicely. All of this is due for a revamp in the near future, so please stay tuned.
Bit.ly launched the other day to compete for attention with all the other URL shorteners, the classic example being TinyURL. In my recent roundup I showed how many of the alternatives had unique selling points. So what does the newcomer from Betaworks offer?
Pretty much everything, it turns out. Of course, it will shorten your URL, and like many others, you have the option to use a custom keyword to make the link more memorable (eg. http://bit.ly/foom). But that's just the start. A cookie remembers the last 15 links you shortened and lets you view stats like clickthroughs, traffic sources, thumbnails and even a mirror on Amazon S3.
If you're interested, Dave Winer elaborates some more on the thinking behind the service on his blog and Webmonkey has a simple guide to making use of the Bit.ly API.
Following on from my last post a few months ago, Twitter applications with actual applications, here are some other, less useful Twitter-related services. For more of the same in future, check out my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with 'twitter'.
It's no secret that Twitter is struggling to scale. Frequent downtime for maintenance, disabling core functionality under periods of heavy load and regular appearances of the Fail Whale have become a 'part of the charm'.
Twiddict is here to satisfy your addiction. Post your message here, and it will save it until Twitter is back online, then automatically post it for you.
Handy for stroking the ego (perhaps) is Twitter Counter. Just type in your username (or anyone else's) to get some basic follower stats. You can subscribe to email updates, but the nicest feature is the button provided to let you add your count to your blog, or wherever.
You can choose from several default styles, or make your own entirely.
Almost entirely pointless, but very pretty is TwittEarth. See live tweets rendered on a 3D globe. Also available as a screensaver.
Finally, this one is almost useful. TinyPaste lets you exceed the 140 character tweet limit. Just type your message in here and when finished it will convert your epic prose into a short URL to paste into Twitter, or indeed anywhere. (eg: http://tinypaste.com/abe9e)
There is also a handy Firefox add-on to speed things up. It'd be nice if it let you post directly to your micro-blog of choice though.
Ping.fm is either a valuable resource in this Web 2.0 era of endless social networking communities, or a sign that things have gone too far. Simply put, Ping.fm lets you update your status on Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, Bebo, hi5, Mashable, Xanga, Plaxo, MySpace and now Identi.ca, with more being added all the time.
You can send updates via email, IM, various gadgets, apps and widgets, or build something yourself using the API. In addition, you can 'group' your different services. By default Ping.fm defines 'micro-blogs' and 'statuses', letting you choose which group you want to update. When you're not using the web interface, you can use customisable 'triggers' (like @s for status updates).
And that's it. Another service that does a simple job, brilliantly. So now you can update all your services at once, and collect all the updates on FriendFeed or one of the other aggregation services. The cycle is complete.
If you want to sign up, the current beta code is "pingyoulater". Enjoy.
Twitter has a new rival in town: Identi.ca (although, as I write this the domain resolves to 'hewitt.controlezvous.ca'). This micro-blogging platform has one killer feature - it's open source. If you're so inclined, you can grab the source from Laconi.ca and start your own Twitter competitor today. Not only is the source free, but your content will be too, as you have to agree to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence to join up. Specific exceptions are made for private data like your, email address, IM address, phone number.
Wordle just makes 'word clouds', and a beautiful job it does too. You can customise the layout and colours and you can either paste in the raw text from anything, or link to your Delicious links page, like I did here:
I'm a big fan of Tumblr and use it for my lifestreaming site, foomandoonian.net.
One of the neat features of Tumblr is the pre-defined formats for different types of posts: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video. These are all very useful, but I've always wanted to have a 'list' option as well.
It is easy to become an OpenID provider, and hundreds have popped up. Even if you don't know what an Open ID is, you probably have one. The challenge for providers is to add a little extra into the offering. To use marketing jargon, they need a unique selling point.
ClaimID have one of the best, in my opinion. Quite simply, ClaimID lets you manage your online identity by 'claiming' ownership of the various places on the internet you appear.
If you can edit the source code of a page, then you can use a MicroID meta tag to verify ownership. Otherwise you simply list pages, like your del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitters, Google Reader Shared Items and anything else you want people to find. It is also useful to keep track of the more obscure sites you may have a presence on, if only to remind you of them!
Check out my ClaimID page for a working example.
There is, of course, the ubiquitous RSS feed, bookmarklet, tag support, basic social networking features, a blog widget and all manner of microformat goodness, including hCards, ensuring that the service is future (and geek) proof.
If you're anything like me, you probably sign up for every new Web 2.0 service you see. ClaimID is invaluable for keeping track of everything and is a single source to point people who want to know where to find you online.
Here's another great web service that does something incredibly simple, incredibly well. Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight content on any website, add a note and store that information for later reference.
Then you can share a short URL (like http://awurl.com/jmmppy93267)with others that links to the page, with all your highlighted text and notes. Twitter is supported, naturally, along with Facebook, Delicious, Live Journal and Tumblr, making it simple to share whatever you find.
So there you have it. If you don't need all the power and flexibility of Evernote, then you have Awesome Highlighter. Enjoy.
Since I have been away from my home PC for a few weeks, and am back using XP, I wanted to try Windows Live Writer. Very impressive it is too! I can write blog posts using my own blog styles, add tags, pictures and all the formatting I like. It is easily far superior to using the Blogger interface and also beats publishing from Google Docs, which I tried, but it added too much rubbish code. Here's hoping Mozilla, or someone, can come up with something just as nice.
I have been building up a list of useful Twitter tools to write another roundup. Twist is worth highlighting here though. It provides a simple analytic overview of whatever you search for, taking its results from the Twitter public timeline.
Above is a comparison search for 'plurk, pownce, jaiku, twitter, friendfeed' showing results for the last month. This is interesting because you can see when interest for Plurk spiked. It's dropped right down again now, but it's still fresher in peoples minds than the other services. Apart from Twitter, of course.
Compete also shows the spike, and makes it pretty clear that Twitter has gained a substantial lead in this space.
It will be interesting to see if Plurk gains any momentum. They turned down an interview with Leo Laporte on net@nite recently, so I guess they aren't ready to scale. I get the feeling they lack the mainstream potential of Twitter, anyway.
It's easy to miss a reply in Twitter, especially if you don't use one of the smarter clients like Twhirl. Here's a short but sweet tip that will help you never miss a message directed at you...
Pop over to Summize. If you're not familiar with Summize, all you need to know is that it's a really slick search engine that keeps tabs on conversations in Twitter. We're going to do a simple search for any mention of your username, so go ahead and enter @YourUsername (If you want to include your own tweets in the results, leave off the @).
Handy, eh?
Now bookmark the results page for future reference. Ideally, put the bookmark in your toolbar so you're just a click away. In Firefox, don't forget that you can use the RSS feed to make a Live Bookmark. Super handy!
Despite being generally out of touch with internet news, I have not failed to notice the dramatic uptake of Plurk recently. I didn't sign up immediately because of a negative gut reaction (I don't really have much 'emo-ness' to express) and a reluctance to commit to yet another social service.
Obviously, I couldn't resist - find me here (or get an invite here).
I rather like the odd cartoon graphics (even the zombie dog). The qualifiers and the karma system are neat features too. I'm not sure about the timeline yet though - it feels too tricksy and not practical. A more polished version of the mobile interface would be much clearer. The ajax trickery is well implemented, but it feels slippery to me, and I feel like it would be easy to miss posts. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet.
The interest in Plurk is probably more about users frustrations with Twitter than anything else. I imagine we'll be seeing a lot more microblogging alternatives popping up this year - and if they are all as innovative as Plurk, we'll have a lot of fun trying them!
I'm not likely to be blogging much this next week or so. It's pretty imperative I be finding a new job, so that's what'll have my full attention. I'll continue to microblog via txt at The Twitter, so I'll hardly be gone at all.
I'm not presenting Website Outlook to you as anything other than a curiosity, but a curiosity it most certainly is. Submit your website domain (or indeed, any other domain) and it returns a valuation. For example, Google.com:
Net Worth : $1.2 Billion
Daily Pageview : 550000000
Daily Ads Revenue : $1650003.16
Learn how to use Yahoo Pipes and TwitterFeed to keep your Twitter followers up to date on your latest blog posts and anything else you happen to be up to on the internet.
The menus at the top lets you name your pipe and the left hand menu contains all the modules you can use to create and manipulate your feeds. Lets drag the 'Fetch Feed' module into the main window. Now we'll need an RSS feed. In this example, I've taken my del.icio.us feed. The easiest way to grab the RSS URL is to right click on the link and select 'Copy link location' (or similar, depending on browser). Paste that into our module.
Ta-da. If you select that box and look in the debug window you can see the feed output. Repeat this for all the feeds that you want to broadcast on Twitter.
Make sure your pipe is saved and click the 'Run pipe...' link at the top. This will take you to a page that displays the appearance of the RSS feed and gives you a multitude of ways to put it to use. We just need to grab the feed from the dropdown menu at the right and keep it handy for step 3...
You'll need an OpenID to sign into TwitterFeed. I like ClaimID, but it makes no odds which one you use. I don't think a step-by-step guide is necessary here as the process is so simple: Enter your Twitter login info; your RSS feed and how often you want TwitterFeed to tweet.Mixwit simply lets you produce a mixtape out of whatever music you can find via seeqpod, skreemer or just as plain mp3's on the interweb, and embed them as a snazzy widget on your webpage. Well, you can see how cool it looks below...
Just as I was calling it a night, I noticed on Summize that the term Jaiku is trending. From what I can gather, most of the posts are Brazilian and they seem to be dissatisfied with Twitter and leaving en masse for Jaiku. Here is a translation of the results page, updated in real time.
Orgoo describes itself as 'your personal communications cockpit'. In real terms this means that you can send and receive email through multiple accounts, through a single inbox (unless you use free Microsoft or Yahoo webmail). It similarly collates all your IM accounts and uses Joopz to let you send SMS messages (in the US and Canada). The interface is one of the cleanest I have used - It's as polished as Yahoo Mail but with more of the simplicity of Gmail.
TinyURL is the original URL shortener. The service is very simple - take a long URL like:
http://omnomnom.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/chihuahua.jpg
icanhaz.com does the same as doiop, but with extra LOLcat, making for some amusing URLs: http://icanhaz.com/schrodinger. You have the option of entering your email address so you can edit your URLs later, but I could see no way of logging in. Just to be safe, I would advise against it.
TweetBurner caters to the Twitter market by giving you stats associated with your account, and making it easy to tweet your twurl (!). Again, the bookmarklet simplifies the process. Typical URL: http://twurl.nl/5wucdf.TechCrunch on Twitter. Nothing much to add, except the comments are great - in fact I think I'm now sold on the benefits of video commenting.
Muxtape quite simply lets you roll your own mp3 mixtape on the internet to share with others.
We Heart It is a simple image bookmarking site, without the elitism of Ffffound. The service stands out because it keeps things simple and does things well.
