I stupidly ate some out-of-date guacamole last night and spent the night praying to the porcelain goddess. So today I stayed at home and thought I’d try Live.Yahoo.com out and get back on the Twitter mill.
Initial thoughts are “dead easy” and “how can I pipe my Twitter status into this?”
Snap is an interesting idea that takes the normal passive mode of RSS and uses it for taking action. The example is a to-do list system that works inside your feed-reader. You subscribe to an interaction feed and can post new to-do items, mark existing ones as done, postpone others etc. The to-do list is a web-app running somewhere but all your interaction is through your feed-reader using RSS feeds and good old HTML forms.
What is interesting about this idea is that you could use your feed-reader to aggregate many applications. Not aggregate information but aggregate actions. You could have your email alongside your to-do list alongside your blog comment approval system, all in the feed-reader. Action feeds could come from desktop apps as well as web-apps, from Facebook as well as Outlook. The focus then becomes not “what application should I use now?” but “what item should I interact with now?” A bit of GTD in there but instead of having a list of to-do entries pointing at items you have a list of items.
It reminds me a bit of various PIM projects like Haystack which tried to create a unified interface for disparate information systems.
This is why web-applications need to separate out the data, why users should own and control their data separate from the applications that use it. We lost some of that in the transition from desktop to web applications and it would be wise to build it back in.
And I don’t think simple import and export options are enough. GMail should work live off of my cloud storage file-system. Google can cache my data for local processing but if I use another email client on my cloud-storage file-system then GMail should pick up changes just as with a local file-system.
Then when I break the terms and conditions of Google I simply lose access to their service and not my data.
…and the future is really blazin’ fast connections.
I agree with Greg. It makes the internet and all its wordly knowledge an extension of the device in your hand and yet it lets you detach from that one device.
Paul Yanez’s Media Player Framework work has an important impact on internet video providers; Monetisation of internet video has to be embedded in the content itself and not simply surround it. It is bigger than Paul’s work but his is some of the best out there and highlights why the ads need to be part of the video content; Pre-roll, post-roll, overlays etc.
YouTube puts its ads in the HTML around the video. These ads don’t survive the transition to an aggregated, full-screen player like Paul’s. The initial reaction by an internet video provider like YouTube is to prevent any system that doesn’t display the surrounding ads from getting the video content. This is a short sighted reaction though as it limits distribution and reach, exactly what you want your video content to achieve. Put the ads in the content and it travels with the content.
The same really goes for all content that we want to distribute. Textual content in RSS for instance needs to survive distribution without making the provider loose their revenue stream. They either provide only partial feeds which makes it difficult to read on your television or mobile or they take down the whole feed. That isn’t good for anyone.
A lot of what we are building now on the web though is bound to desktop or laptop displays. The content requires Firefox or Internet Explorer to display the supporting HTML to generate revenue. We seem to be preaching “any device” but practicing “so long as it is a full-blown desktop browser.” Part of the promise of the web is a hyperlinked network of resources. Not a hyperlinked network of portals that have resources embedded in them. Much of the time resources are content and that content needs to travel well to achieve our dreams of “any device.”
Otherwise Hulu and YouTube and Joost are going to block Paul’s project and that would be a sad thing for everyone.
A co-worker upgraded my iPhone to 1.1.3 last week. Unfortunately during the process the sound stopped working. No ringtones, no music, no voice calls, no alarms, no sound at all. This is the price you pay for having a jailbreaked iPhone.
Today I found a fix though which restored all the sound but left 1.1.3 working. Just go into Settings - General - Reset and hit the Reset All button. You will loose your customised icons, your alarms, ringtone settings and a few other minor bits but most of your data is left untouched and the sound is re-enabled.
Other than that glitch the 1.1.3 update is worth it. The Web-Clips feature is very useful, I now have Google Reader and my GMail accounts on the phone’s desktop, just one click away.
Time Machine just saved my bacon again. I attempted to get Webex running in Firefox on Mac OS X a few hours ago. At one point it asked me to trust an applet which I did and Firefox promptly crashed. From that point on Firefox wouldn’t load any website with JavaScript in it. Google.com worked fine but GMail.com crashed Firefox.
This is bad as the system I am developing has JS in it. Plus all those websites I use that have JS.
I uninstalled Firefox, removed all plugin and support folders and even killed Flip4Mac just in case. No luck, reinstall Firefox and loading it caused the same crash.
So I went into Time Machine, selected 10:00 this morning, restored my Applications directory and hey presto. Everything is working again. Whatever Webex installed is gone now and I’ve just sent 7 virgins to the Time Machine team.
Moral of the story is don’t spend an hour trying to hack it back together yourself. Just trust in Time Machine.
I wonder what old George W. Bush thinks of Iran’s first space capable rocket launch?
I’m not sure what I think about it. On one hand I want to believe that, like their nuclear program, this is simply Iran striding into a peaceful future. On the other hand the fear, uncertainty and doubt that the Bush administration spreads about Iran can hit home at times.
It does strike this atheist westerner as strange though when the Iranians exclaim “Allahu Akbar!” as the rocket heads for space. This is science and technology, not god and religion. Iranians should be proud of themselves for achieving this technical milestone. But then I am a westerner and Iran and her neighbors are quite a different world at times. Quite possibly U.S. American and Russian scientists and technicians praised the Christian god when their first rockets went up.
All very interesting.
A friend sent me a link to the 16gb iPhone story and while I am glad Apple are bumping the storage size up I do wonder what actual use it is. I have an 8gb iPhone and a 2gb iPod nano. Both are ample for my music needs even though neither can store all 50gb of my music collection. I plug my iPhone into the dock everyday at work and it updates the playlists as needed. Even when I am away from a computer for a few days I find 8gb is plenty of music and invariably batteries run out before music starts repeating.
16gb just wouldn’t change anything for me. I’d be able to store twice as much music, the majority of which I won’t get around to listening to. I’ll still need to sync regularly and rotate playlists to get full use of my music collection. A 60gb iPhone would change things, I could transfer everything to it then and not bother with rotating playlists.
So why 16gb? What does it enable you to do that you couldn’t do before? The extra money for the extra 8gb could be better spent on new music on your laptop/desktop. Right?
On this cold, dreary and early Monday morning one can hope for such givings as this:
Daily bits...