Archive for the ‘Useful stuff’ Category
A suggestion for Muti May 4th, 2008
I just started submitting stuff to Muti again and I thought I’d see what happens when I submit a duplicate post so I re-submitted the Iron Man/Audi ad post. When I submitted it I got the following message:
My suggestion is that where submit a duplicate link, there should also be a link to the item being duplicated so I can either vote on the already submitted item or check out the original link and decide whether to submit anyway. Just a thought.
Technorati Tags:
muti, submissions, duplicate, suggestion
Posted in Sharing, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
Video on Flickr! April 9th, 2008
There have been rumours that Flickr might get into the video business too after being so successful with photos and these rumours have been confirmed! If you are a pro (in other words, a paying user) you can post small video clips to the site. I like the way Flickr sees these short video clips as “long photos” …
Video! Video! Video! The rumours are true and ‘soon’ is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.
90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of life to share.
Will this service replace your regular video services? Probably not, but it does add another option for those short clips you’d like to include with photos rather than go and post them to some other location and try string them all together.
(Source: Laughing Squid)
Technorati Tags:
flickr, photography, video
Posted in Media, Useful stuff, Web 2.0 | Comments (0)
Enhanced Internet banking using tags April 3rd, 2008
This is a cross post from my personal blog. The idea isn’t so much to use social tagging but more to apply tagging technology in a very pragmatic and useful way.
Here is a thought for the likes of Standard Bank and FNB (the two banks I use at the moment): add tagging functionality to your Internet banking services to improve their usefulness.
My thinking is that it would be great to have the ability to add descriptive tags to line items in my bank statements/transaction listings. My bookkeeper often has to check with me what various transactions are for and it would be really handy to be able to go in and tag various line items with references or even add descriptions to items.
Just a thought …
Technorati Tags:
internet banking, tagging, descriptions, utility
Posted in Infrastructure, Tools, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Nudjit … new gadget blog on the block February 4th, 2008
I just received an email from Nic Haralambous which he sent out to 300 of his closest friends and contacts about a new SA gadget blog he, Justin Hartman and Gregor Rohrig have launched:
The site aims to inform, entertain, and alert South Africans about the gadgets that are available to us. Our gadget reviews don’t just highlight the technical aspects but will also judge how well they work, where one can get them, and if our local technology infrastructure can actually support these electronic toys.
The site offers detailed written reviews, quirky video posts, aggregated gadget news from all across Africa, user ratings, and hot links from popular gadget sites from around the world.
My first thought was “bastards!”. I have been toying with the idea of a gadget blog myself given that there hasn’t been a local gadget/computer online mag worth talking about (no, those are not worth talking about). I clicked on the link and was confronted with this fine piece of design:
Then came my next thought … “bastards!!”
This site has to be one of the best looking gadget sites we have here in SA, if not on the Web generally. Instead of looking yet a blog with a variation of a variation of a common WordPress theme, these guys have put together an online gadget magazine that I can see myself visiting often, if I wasn’t such an RSS junkie lately (which brings me to my one big gripe about the site).
The site pretty much covers the essentials and I can see that the guys have added content going back to last year to flesh it out a bit (always a good thing). I subscribed immediately even while uttering obscenities under my breath because they did this so well while I just thought about doing …
My one big gripe is that the feed is truncated and I am forced to visit the site to read the posts. I understand the desire to drive traffic to the site itself for advertising purposes. This is common when sites rely on advertising but it is not very user friendly. I use NetNewsWire to handle the bulk of my Web consumption. I subscribe to somewhere between 250 and 300 feeds at the moment so I would prefer not to have to actually visit a site unless I really want to view something in my browser instead of in NetNewsWire. This is just a hassle for me and anyone else who works in a similar way. I would much rather see full feeds published and I could even live with ads in my feed.
These days with Feedburner Pro being free, publishers can get quite a bit of information about their subscribers and how they consume the content so I think the argument that users be directed to the site itself isn’t as valid anymore (but then, what do I know?). I actually tend to skip over sites that don’t publish full feeds and only visit the site if something really compelling pops up. I currently have 9 tech blogs I subscribe to (376 unread posts as I write this) so my attention is relatively limited and I tend to prefer the more detailed feeds. But that is just me.
Otherwise this blog is fantastic. It is well designed, has a great focus and I wish the guys well with it. I am really excited to see that the blog is published under a Creative Commons license although the NonCommercial ShareAlike license means I can’t grab content under that license for this blog (I make a whopping 50c a day in ad revenue so this blog is cooking …). Great job guys.
Technorati Tags:
nudjit, gadget blog, gadget, south africa, justin hartman, gregor rohrig, nic haralambous
Posted in Content licensing, Devices, People, Useful stuff | Comments (8)
Plaxo Pulse: Facebook clone or innovation? February 4th, 2008
One of my new favourite services on the social web is Plaxo’s Pulse. Plaxo is one of the few companies that seems to be putting out updates every few days. I have had the rare experience of asking for a feature only to be told that it is there already, baked into the service (not that I am the most attentive of users, mind you). Anyway, Plaxo announced a new public profile for users which is developed using Google’s new Social Graph API. One of the things that struck me about my updated profile on Plaxo is its similarity to my Facebook profile, at least in terms of it structure and appearance. Here is my Plaxo profile:
And here is my Facebook profile page:
There is an obvious similarity between the two and aside from a couple layout issues, the real difference between the two is that there is more content and more applications on my Facebook profile, thanks to the Facebook application platform. I don’t think this status quo will persist too long because Plaxo is part of Google’s Open Social initiative so it is really only a matter of time before I should be able to start adding Open Social widgets/gadgets/thingies to my Plaxo profile.
So one question that comes to mind is whether Plaxo is hard at work mimicking Facebook or whether Joseph and the lads are aiming for something more? The one big thing about Facebook that detracts from it, at least for me, is that I have to jump through a couple hoops to get some of my content imported into my profile and to create a lifestream in my Facebook profile as opposed to a steady stream of application updates. I don’t use many of the native Facebook services like its photo sharing service or notes for my blogging mainly because that stuff is all intended to be used in-house. Sure there are feeds for certain items that I can publish and pass around to my friends but the portability of my Facebook lifestream is pretty limited.
Plaxo, on the other hand, is taking a different approach. Plaxo doesn’t dictate to me which services I have to use to share my photos or blog posts in my and the public activity stream (aka my Plaxo “news feed”). Instead Plaxo gives me the opportunity to basically add anything with an RSS feed and then decide who gets to see it (business contacts, friends, family, specific groups etc). It is also worth mentioning that Plaxo enables users to create distinct personal and professional profiles which is sorely missing in Facebook. This is what the Plaxo activity stream looks like from my perspective (like Facebook it depends on who I am connected with):
By comparison, here is my Facebook news feed:
Again there are similarities but one of the main differences is that the Plaxo activity stream/news feed/public stream takes advantage of incoming feeds and streams to populate it and uses finer controls over who gets to see what to ensure that incoming content is more relevant to the person seeing it and privacy is respected (items shared with friends are only shared with friends, they don’t appear in the public stream). I am not a fan of the relatively closed system Facebook is to me. The recent hubbub over Scoble and the Plaxo script he ran serves as a reminder that despite the apparently open nature of the Facebook application platform (especially with recent reports about Facebook opening up even more), I am still forced to use approved Facebook services and not the services I am using anyway (at least not directly).
This is pretty much where the similarities end. It is also important to look at the bigger picture and at what Facebook and Plaxo offer holistically. From Facebook’s perspective, what you get is a profile and the ability to connect to other Facebook users as well as to take advantage of the Facebook applications. It is all about the Facebook experience. The way I see Plaxo, it is a facilitator and not your entire social ecosystem. Plaxo began with the ability to synchronise your address book and keep up to date with your Plaxo contacts’ changes in their address and contact information. Since adding Pulse to the mix the whole Plaxo experience opens up completely and becomes more of a base for your social experience. Plaxo doesn’t make any claims to own your information and your content (explicitly or implicitly) but rather seeks to facilitate your sharing of that information with the people you choose to connect to.
To me, my address book is the focal point of my social experience on the Web and this is borne out whenever I see a service invite me to tap into my address book to find my friends and contacts. Plaxo didn’t add that service after establishing the social network, it started with that and the social network is an overlay on top of my address book. What I really like about my Plaxo profile is that I can comfortably use that as my “home page” because it contains my public contact information as well as a sample of what I am doing. My Facebook profile also has my contact details but I want to be able to present that information in an uncluttered environment and also present the appropriate information to different groups of people. With Plaxo I can show personal information to my friends and family and my business info to my business contacts. I like being able to do that.
So while there are similarities between Plaxo Pulse and Facebook at some level, I don’t see Pulse as a Facebook clone but rather an illustration of what Facebook just can’t be for me - a really useful and fun service that appropriate in multiple contexts, not to mention more open and flexible. Now all I need to do is figure out how to expand Pulse’s functionality with OpenSocial …
Technorati Tags:
data portability, facebook, opensocial, plaxo, scoble, public profile, lifestream
Posted in Companies, Infrastructure, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services January 27th, 2008
I read this post on the Jive Software blog titled “XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services”. A lot of the technical stuff goes a bit beyond me so this summary on Read/Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick was pretty handy. As I understand the whole idea, XMPP (also known as Jabber), the protocol that powers Google Talk and a couple other IM apps/services may be better suited to many new media services and applications than the protocol that is so dominant on the Web at the moment, HTTP. The important aspect of XMPP is that it enables a two way communication process rather than the one way flow that we see with HTTP (ok, I know that isn’t strictly correct but this is how I think about it) so instead of you initiating contact with a Web service using your browser by clicking a link or something like that (HTTP), a Web service can contact your machine first, let it know there are updates and initiate an update process (XMPP). Maybe a better way to explain it is like this:
- When you want to update a page in your browser you need to click “refresh”. You initiate the process of communicating with the web server the page is on and request the updated page data; and
- When you use an XMPP IM client like Google Talk, for example, the IM server will contact your Google Talk app and send it updates without you having to do anything. This process is more efficient than constant polling the server to check for updates.
XMPP opens up possibilities for people wanting to develop services and apps that spontaneously update as and when updates are available rather than constant polling a server for updates. The one application of this that appeals to me is my feedreader. Your feedreader polls the various feeds you subscribe to for updates on a schedule and downloads new feed items when they are available. Imagine what happens if your feedreader runs on XMPP:
Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I’d love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else’s server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.
Receiving your feeds as and when they are published may not be a priority for you but this is a pretty good illustration of some of the possibilities. It is also pretty interesting that Google’s Android Mobile OS incorporates XMPP, at the very least because I can certainly see how XMPP could be a great protocol for widespread mobile applications, particularly where those mobile devices are constantly using a cellular connection or wifi.
I doubt very much that this is the end of HTTP but rather it could be the expansion of a generation of apps and services running on this dynamic protocol. It is probably the sort of development that could once again fuel speculation that IM (or the likes of IM) could overtake email as our dominant means of communicating across the Internet. Not sure about that but it is an intriguing possibility although I am not sure that an email replacement that shortens the already pretty quick delivery times of our messages is a good thing. It is bad enough that email creates an expectation of much faster responses to messages we receive (so much so that productivity gurus recommend you only check your email every couple hours or so to maintain some semblance of meaningful productivity) but if we start exchanging data between people using XMPP-based solutions that expectation becomes more unmanageable.
Where XMPP will probably be a tremendous benefit will be for machine to machine communications, the kind of services that are not immediately apparent to us humans and perhaps even running behind the scenes. IM is in your face, you see the updates coming in and either have to respond to watch messages pile up to be dealt with later. The feedreader example may be a good application for XMPP not because of the immediacy of the updates but because it could mean that my less powerful device can pick up updates automatically and on the fly using a more efficient update process. I can imagine that waiting for a mobile device to scan through hundreds of feeds could take time to update whereas a feedreader running on XMPP is almost always up to date so I can grab my device and run instead of waiting a couple minutes for an up to date sync.
Of course there are probably dozens of more useful applications of XMPP that haven’t even occurred to me that we could see rolling out.
Technorati Tags:
xmpp, jabber, protocol, internet, web, http, android, im
Posted in Feeds, Infrastructure, Sharing, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Interesting things about NetNewsWire 3.1 January 26th, 2008
There is some useful information about NetNewsWire 3.1 on inessential.com This item caught my eye because of a comment Stii made on Wired Gecko a little while ago about NNW not playing YouTube videos. It turns out that this feature is available, just turned off by default:
It plays video and Flash
The most common feature request in the feedback I read today is that NetNewsWire should play video, Flash, YouTube, etc.
It does. It’s turned off by default, but it’s easy to turn on.
Open Preferences, click Browsing. Click the News Items tab—to enable Flash and video, make sure the box next to Enable plug-ins is checked.
Click the Web Pages tab and repeat to do the same thing for web pages.
A couple things to know, though:
1. On some machines, you may have to enable plug-ins for both news items and web pages in order to make them work in web pages.
2. Plug-ins are off by default because they’re unstable and eat lots of memory. (Flash in particular.) So if you run into memory or crashing issues, the first thing to try is turning off plug-ins.
I have been using NNW every day and although it does seem to be a little unstable on Leopard (at least, my installation of Leopard), I am really happy I gave it another try. I have asked that a future version or update to 3.1 enable automatic downloads of images. That would really make this a true offline feed reader and make me happier than my puppy on my lap (he is only happy when he is on my lap … go figure).
I was thinking the other day that with a wide enough screen I could see myself using Safari less and less to browse web pages I connect to through NNW. I am not sure which engine NNW uses for web pages (I imagine something like Webkit?) but having everything integrated into one app is really handy.
Do you have any thoughts about NNW or its Windows sibling, FeedDemon? Let me know.
Technorati Tags:
feed reader, feeddemon, feedreader, netnewswire, youtube, flash, safari, web browser
Posted in Feeds, Useful stuff | Comments (1)
Flirting with NetNewsWire January 7th, 2008
I hauled out NetNewsWire 3.0 this weekend, upgraded it to 3.1 beta, and tried it out again. I thought I would give it another go after reading a review on Shawn Blanc’s blog. I exported my subscriptions from Google Reader, imported them into NNW and fired it up.
NNW will sync with Newsgator and you can use it as a standalone feed reader (there are also options to sync via ftp and .Mac accounts). It is a really good looking application and has some great features I miss in Google Reader like the ability to subscribe to password protected feeds.
Compared to Google Reader the NNW interface is fantastic but what NNW lacks are the easy keyboard navigation options that you have in Google Reader (”j” for the next article, “k” for the previous one and so on). NNW can be a little clumsy in comparison and there is no easy way to share feeds and feed items like there is in Google Reader that I could figure out in NNW/Newsgator.
So, after a little experiment with NNW I am back to Google Reader. Ok, you can all take another breath and the world can continue turning …
Technorati Tags:
netnewswire, newsgator, google reader, feed reader
Posted in Feeds, Useful stuff | Comments (2)
Pownce not pouncing anymore? December 21st, 2007
Tyler linked to a post on TechCrunch about Pownce’s apprently imminent demise. I took a cue from Arrington and requested a comparison of Twitter’s, Jaiku’s and Pownce’s traffic on Compete.com and got this graph:
I have been using Pownce a bit more lately and while I don’t see it replacing Twitter for me any time soon (mainly because the traffic just doesn’t seem to be there), I am beginning to see Pownce in a different light after my initial thoughts on the service shortly after it launched. A lot of that is due to the way I now see my social presence on the Web (I have been planning a post about that which I should publish soon).
The recent launch of the mobile site has also shifted my perception of how Pownce could be useful to me. I can see the link and possibly even event sharing aspects of it come in handy as I go about my day and pick up things here and there. I do think there needs to be as many easy ways to access Pownce as there can be if it is going to pick up users. Leah and Kevin are heading in the right direction but it remains to be seen if Pownce can begin to attract traffic from Twitter’s userbase.
The problem with services like this is that you wind up going where all your contacts are and the majority of people are using Twitter, for all its inadequacies. It is interesting to see that Jaiku’s traffic is also dipping relative to Pownce and Twitter. In fact, according to that graph, Jaiku’s traffic dipped below Pownce’s after a brief rally in October.
I hope Pownce can find new life and keep going. It is a fun service to use and has a couple features that Twitter sorely lacks like threaded comments, no 140 character limit on posts and a couple more options for post structures. Interestingly enough, Plaxo’s Pulse has similar posting features to Pownce and I wonder if that undermines Pownce or not.
Tags: pownce, twitter, jaiku, pulse, plaxo, dwindling numbers, users, stumbling, faltering
Posted in Useful stuff | Comments (0)
chilipod 1-14: Merle Dieterich of JoziKids (part 1) September 2nd, 2007
In this episode of chilipod I present part one of a two part interview with Merle Dieterich from JoziKids. I really enjoyed this interview and I think you will find it pretty interesting.
As always, this episode is available in two formats:
- Enhanced chilipod (AAC/iTunes format); and
- Normal chilipod (mp3 format).
The music we have used in this episode (and which we may use in future episodes) is a track called YFM Late Remix by a crowd known as Deep Fried. The track has been published on the ccMixter:sa site under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Technorati Tags:
jozikids, merle dieterich
Posted in People, Sharing, Useful stuff, chilipod | Comments (0)