Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category
FlockedUp: a social network for thought leaders March 18th, 2008
Here is a pitch for a new social network called “FlockedUp” made by the wise and hysterical Merlin Mann at SXSW recently. It adds an entertaining filter to how we see social networks and the promises they make.
Technorati Tags:
social media, social network, social networking, merlin mann, sxsw
Posted in Fun, People, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Blueworld revamp March 6th, 2008
I never thought I would see myself writing this (or even saying this) but I felt like an old fart wandering around Blueworld the last day or so. Charl asked me to take a look around after an update so I created an account (easy enough) and started poking around.
The first thing that strikes me is that Blueworld is a bit of a mashup of MySpace, Facebook and JHBLive (there is even an hint of Orkut). It is a social networking site that allows you to create a personal profile, check out events and just generally what your friends have been up to. Profiles have the usual categories of information about your likes, your specifications and your current mood. I battled a bit uploading a photo to my profile and eventually gave up on that, moving on to other things.
Blueworld gives users the option of uploading photos and videos and publishing blog posts on the site. Much of the content comes with Muti-style voting so you can either vote “Love it” or “Hate it” and presumably affect that piece of content’s ranking on the page concerned.
Tags are a useful way to just mooch around and find stuff and if you do find something you want to share you have the option of sharing with the usual sites (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us etc). Blueworld also has its own internal bookmarking function. The groups are very similar to Facebook groups.
A really nice feature is the ability to drag and drop elements on your profile page around so you can make your photos, videos or some other aspect of your profile more prominent.
Although Blueworld has members who are a bit older, the site seems better suited to people in their late teens and early 20s. I am certainly not the best demographic for the site (getting older and I can’t handle so much excitement 
). If I were 10 years younger I could see myself spending a fair amount of time on the site although there would be a tension between Blueworld and Facebook for me. It would be interesting to know how many Blueworld users also use Facebook and which of the two services are used more. Blueworld has an advantage in that it is local and more relevant to what people are presumably doing here. Facebook is great as a connector but lacks that local feel.
There isn’t anything unique to Blueworld in terms of functionality and features but what makes this site work are its local flavour and the collection of tools and features like content sharing, bookmarking, social options and more. In a way it is similar in concept to the Zoopy site (albeit with far more functionality). Although their focuses are different, both sites are seeking to appeal to a local audience who want a South African site for their social interaction. You can do pretty much what you want to do on Blueworld and with a mobile element (which I haven’t really explored all that much but seems to be an sms service), Blueworld is a really funky site. I think there should be a mobile site of some sort (unless I missed it) given that the people likely to be using Blueworld spend most of their lives on their mobile phones. That is a feature that could take the site far beyond the Web site itself and out there into the general population.
Technorati Tags:
blueworld, review, south africa, social networking, social media
Posted in Blogs/Sites, Fun, Web 2.0 | Comments (3)
Google Maps is that good! January 30th, 2008
Imagine is Google is this efficient and responsive:
(Source: CrunchGear)
Technorati Tags:
google maps, parody, street view
Posted in Fun | Comments (0)
MacBook Paper - even better than the MacBook Air January 30th, 2008
So you’ve been wowed by the MacBook Air (or maybe you haven’t) but have you seen the MacBook Paper? The MacBook Paper has an infinite battery life, doesn’t require any sort of data drive and is available in a variety of sizes.
(Source: CrunchGear via Wired)
Technorati Tags:
macbook air, macbook paper, parody, video, spoof
Posted in Devices, Fun | Comments (3)
Is Scrabulous Officially Dead? January 25th, 2008
It is a dark day indeed for Facebook Scabulous fans. Mashable is reporting in its post titled “Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?: as follows:
Not only was Scrabulous the favorite way for Facebook employees to whittle away their work hours, but it was a favorite application to some 600,000 daily active users. The game that mimics Hasbro and Mattel’s Scrabble game has indeed become too popular for its own good, and the owners of Scrabble have asked Facebook to shut down the game application.
In true Facebook fashion, a group was formed to help save Scrabulous, but to no avail. It looks like Facebook has complied, as the application is no longer active. There’s now an error page where the board game application used to be. And while it hasn’t been confirmed that Scrabulous is gone forever, this recent development appears to show Facebook’s compliance with Hasbro and Mattel.
While I can appreciate the commercial considerations behind reigning in the popular game, I think this is just idiocy on the part of Hasbro. It should rather have sought to form a partnership with Scrabulous’ makers.
In the meantime, my wife has moved on to another game whereas before she played Scrabulous religiously. Really not the brightest move ever.
(Via Mashable!.)
Update: Ok, maybe it isn’t dead yet. Hopefully it sticks around a bit longer.
Technorati Tags:
facebook, game, hasbro, scrabulous
Posted in Fun | Comments (4)
Is Scrabulous Going Bye Bye? January 12th, 2008
Here’s a scary thought for hundreds of thousands of people … including my wife:
Is Scrabulous Going Bye Bye?: “
According to Josh Quittner, Hasbro may actually be shutting down the insanely popular Facebook application, Scrabulous. They must be one of the dumbest companies to make such a horrible decision. I have a better idea: acquire Scrabulous. The developers of the application took the time to build the app and profited a minor amount. Eliminating Scrabulous from the applications will surely cause an overall decrease in the site’s traffic.
Yesterday alone there was a whopping 569,206 users on the application. That ranks it the ninth most popular application yesterday. I am willing to bet that the Scrabulous revolt will go far beyong the Beacon revolt that started in the blogosphere. I have to wonder why it took so long for Hasbro to take any action. The application has been accused of violating copywright law for months but now the developers have officially received a letter from Hasbro.
According to Techcrunch, the discussion is now taking place among the lawyers. Are you one of the many Scrabulous users? Do you think we will see a mass exodus from Facebook if the Scrabulous team can’t defeat Hasbro?
“
(Via All Facebook.)
Technorati Tags:
scrabulous, scrabble, hasbro, game, facebook, tragedy
Posted in Fun | Comments (0)
BMW promotes Creative Commons licenses July 5th, 2007
The BMW 1 Series promotion has just launched and two aspects of the promotion really stand out for me. The first is BMW’s partnership with local video sharing site, Zoopy.com which is where entrants will submit their video and/or image entries. The second is the application of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license to all entries (Disclosure: I assisted BMW with certain aspects of the terms and conditions for the competition including the Creative Commons license). What the use of this license means is that entrants retain copyright over their entries and allow their entries to be published for general non-commercial consumption and with a suitable attribution of those entries to the people who submitted them.
In real terms this is a great way for people to share their content without the risk of a third party misappropriating those entries for commercial gain. At the same time the entrants receive credit for their entries and could find themselves doing more, similar work for their benefit.
Of course Zoopy.com deserves their share of credit for their participation in this promotion and their application of the Creative Commons license to these entries published on their site. This is an excellent way to help people promote their works in a more open environment than would normally be possible under copyright while retaining a degree of control over how their content is to be exploited.
(Take a look at Scott Gray’s post too while you are at it)
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bmw, 1 series, promotion, zoopy.com, creative commons, license
Posted in Fun, Sharing | Comments (0)
27-5 May 28th, 2007
We had a great time at the 27 Dinner last night at the Primi in Rosebank. Most of the usual crowd was there as well as a number of new faces. The speakers last night included Colin Daniels from The Times, Erik Hersman (the White African and proprietor of the fine Afrigadget and African Signals sites, to name a few) and Vinny Lingham who gave us a demo of a new development platform called Synthasite which he will soon leave incuBeta to run as CEO.
Colin Daniels’ talk was about The Times and lessons learned about controversy on the Web (the David Bullard controversy led to a massive increase in traffic to the Sunday Times site, more than double its usual traffic according to a graph Colin showed us from Alexa). I managed to capture a short video clip from Colin’s talk:
The Zoopy guys were running a competition where people could upload videos and photos from the evening and win a cool digital video camera. I was hoping to upload my videos to Zoopy instead of Revver but there was an issue with the upload so I resorted to Revver instead. Sorry guys!
Erik Hersman was also around to chat to us a bit about his projects. He took us through some interesting opportunities that are made possible using the Jabber platform. There is a pretty interesting mashup involving Muti and Mxit which is an “example how you can use the mobile tools that are available right now to build into your applications.”
He even mentioned a post we published a little while ago which inspired him to come up with this item:
Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove chatted a little bit about his wifi hotspot product which enables you to re-sell your bandwidth and actually make some money from it. I am curious whether there are any terms in the terms and conditions that ISPs use that would prohibit the resale of bandwidth like this? If not then this would make so much sense in so many contexts where bandwidth could be shared at a low cost to the group of users in range. It would certainly help alleviate the high costs of bandwidth in South Africa.
All in all, the event was a lot of fun.
Thanks again to Mike and his team at Cerebra for organising the event.
Technorati Tags:
27 Dinner, 27dinner, primi, rosebank, henk kleynhans, erik hersman, white african, afrigadget, african signals, the times, colin daniels, vinny lingham, synthasite, zoopy, 27-5
Posted in Events, Fun, People, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
Knowledge sharing … Microsoft style May 28th, 2007
I came across the Office 2007 channel on Revver and got a kick out of this video which illustrates knowledge sharing really well (even though it is more of an ad for Microsoft’s latest office software):
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sharing, knowledge sharing, video, revver, microsoft office 2007
Posted in Fun, Sharing | Comments (0)
Tyler Reed - podcasting proud April 12th, 2007
Tyler Reed, who recenly joined (yesterday in fact!) the podcaster in-crowd, has another achievement to be proud of… That of winning first place in the Apple ipodcast Comedy & Standup Category (Week 3) with his podcast, Jannie’s GPS System!
Well done Tyler! We can’t wait to hear more of it!
Posted in Fun, General, People, Podcasting, Podcasts | Comments (3)