20080530

Feedalizr

Feedalizr version 1.1.2 alpha: "you can now post directly to Jaiku from the feedalizr interface."

A Jaiku client is keen, a usable app for Friendfeed would rock. However, the thing that kills the app is the cursed flashy blinking taskbar in windows. After every update, toasters on or not, you have to poke at the taskbar icon to make it stop with the blinking. I want a partial attention app, not one that demands clicks.

That's three sad little Friendfeed air icons sitting on the desktop unused.

twitter has a tumblr?

Twitter / Jack Dorsey: "We now have a status tumblr!: http://status.twitter.com/. We'll be updating it on the regular."

Twitter tumbles as it falls down!

20080524

Blame FriendFeed

Blame FriendFeed: "FriendFeed is Twitter, only slower. Here’s my demo of the difference between FriendFeed and Twitter:

Twitter: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast.

Ten minutes later….

FriendFeed: Hi, I’m having Sugar Pops for breakfast."


Heh! Have to Hide with Extreme Prejudice.

20080522

Eater SF: The Best Bars in America

Eater SF: The Best Bars in America: Esquire Magazine picks Zeitgeist as one of the Best Bars?

Esquire. Best. Zeitgeist. Pick one.

Twitter Blog

Twitter Blog: "We've gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we're not sure what's happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts."

Eww. That's gotta leave a warm fuzzy in the hearts of a stack of developers. Ah, well, better ever than sooner.

Twitter: An admission of failure, a call for help

Love the headless tweet image!

20080517

Epic

Robert Scoble - FriendFeed


"You used the word 'collection' for business cards of people. What's the epic rare foil collectible in that mix? :) - Eric Rice

Woz's card. Hehehh. - Robert Scoble"


Oh! Just so.

20080516

Social networking can prove guessing game

Business Edge News Magazine - Social networking can prove guessing game: "Joey Scarface has invited you to join his network on CosaNostra.com. Click here to accept his kind invitation. Click here to decline and get whacked."

Heh! That's what all bacn should be, more pointy.

20080515

Facebook Smackdown

Facebook Developers | Facebook Developers News: "Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

Whoa, Godzilla noises all around. Set Techmeme on stun.

The Social Platform PR Wars Continue: Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

* Thur May 8: MySpace announces its “Data Availability” initiative, whereby it will share public user profile data with partner sites like Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter.
* Fri May 9: Facebook announces its “Facebook Connect” initiative, which will let third party developers access Facebook user profile and friend data.
* Mon May 12: Google announces its “Friend Connect” initiative, which will let users do much of the same thing through an OAuth/OpenID/OpenSocial system administered by Google.


via Facebook Developers News. Seems like the first time that I've gotten news from the primary source in months.

ZOMBIE

DM's Esoteric Programming Languages - ZOMBIE: "ZOMBIE is a programming language designed for Necromancers, particularly evil ones. (Actually, what other sorts are there?) ZOMBIE is an acronym, and stands for Zombie-Oriented Machine-Being Interface Engine."


ZOMBIE runs in a multithreaded environment. Several entities may be animated at once, and each may perform multiple tasks at once. The relative speeds and orders in which the entities perform tasks is undefined, and should not be relied on by the programmer.

Entities and their tasks may be active or inactive. An active entity is one which has been animated, disturbed, or is free-willed. A zombie or ghost that has been summoned and bound is inactive. An active task is one that has been animated; an inactive task is one that has been bound, or that the entity has completed.


Ha! How much fun. I'll have to poke at this on some sunny day to see it work.

20080514

Severed Ways

Severed Ways

In 1007 AD on the mainland of North America, two stranded Vikings search against all odds to find their way home. As they struggle to survive in the vast forests of the New World, their paths diverge as one pursues a spiritual quest and the other reverts to his primal instincts.


YouTube - Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of North America

"A full speed ahead Viking epic complete with nordic ballads and metal from the likes of Morbid Angel."

Sign me up! Looks to be opening July 25th ...

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis

Google Spreadsheets Become Wikis: "In other spreadsheet-related news, you can now embed forms in a web site by just copying some code, there's a new option to duplicate questions and users can add their own answer to a multiple-choice question."

Yay, Google dropped the awful invite to spreadsheet and even the need for a google account. Shocking and most certainly the right thing to do.

20080512

Google Friend Connect

Google Press Center: News Announcement: "Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community."

Google Friend Connect

Google Confirms Friend Connect

I was able to talk with Google engineering director David Glazer to get some more details. The point of Friend Connect, he says, is to “, give users a shortcut to connections they’ve built up somewhere else.” So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs


The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).


Google Friend Connect Previews Tonight

The user experience is simple. When a user comes to a site in the Friend Connect program they can sign into any social network that is sharing their data. Their data is not actually shared with the site. Impressively Google is supporting OpenID and OAuth in addition to their own standard OpenSocial.


Google Friend Connect Tries to Strangle the Social

Those hard questions are the ones that these companies are supposed to be working on together through the Data Portability Working Group, though. The Group has published best practices documents tackling a number of difficult questions already.


Welcome to the social mess?

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability, OpenID, DataPortability: Managing a bunch of different log-ins and passwords suddenly seems easy and straightforward.


Heh, Interop dead. Backlash at 11.

Now we need a WWE-style smackdown between the beasts ...

Interesting times ...

20080511

FriendFeed is back

Paul Buchheit - FriendFeed: "“FriendFeed is back and should be completely caught up in a couple of hours. Sorry for the trouble.”"


Wow, FriendFeed really *is* the new Twitter. - ⓞnor


Funny that I saw all of the down messages on Friendfeed via rss and not in twitter.

20080510

6 seats removed from some BART cars

6 seats removed from some BART cars: "Six seats are being removed from some cars to create more space for people to stand and to accommodate the growing number of on-board bikes and the luggage hauled by passengers heading to and from San Francisco International Airport."



Average weekday ridership 360,000
Original seats per car 68
Seats to be removed per car 6
Train cars reconfigured 20
Train cars planned for reconfiguration 80
Cars systemwide 578
Trains systemwide 65


Thank Goodness! I'm all for more open access and fewer scuzzy seats.

20080509

Twitter / Kevin Fox

Twitter / Kevin Fox: "When Obama wins, the White House Press Secretary Goa-uld won't have to find a new host every 18 months."

Ah, and here I though that the white house was taking it out of them, not putting it in ...

Facebook Connect

Facebook Developers: "Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook."

Facebook Connect Pulls Back The Curtain: Data Portability: "As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date."

Buh? I don't see how that's going to work.

Funny, after this week I guess I'll have to traverse the social backwaters changing my quip ...

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another? Are they that anti-social?
http://hownottoblog.com/index.php/2005/03/18/


As John McCrea says "What a Week!"

20080508

Steve List Homepage

Steve List Homepage


Cheap Trick, Heart, Journey (together!)
Foreigner
REO Speedwagon
Billy Idol
Donna Summer
Daryl Hall & John Oates
Dr. John
Creedence Clearwater Revisited
The Tubes
Night Ranger
Judas Priest, Motorhead, Testament
Tom Jones
George Thorogood & the Destroyers
Yes
ZZ Top


Quick! What year is it?

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project

DataPortability - MySpace officially joins the DataPortability Project: "We are excited that MySpace will join the rest of the community to continue the design, documentation and implementation of a set of best practices for inter-operable Data Portability between trusted applications and vendors."

MySpace joins DataPortability,: "Whilst a number of high-profile launch partners have been announced (Yahoo!, eBay and Twitter), it’s worth point out that access to this project will be available to everyone who agrees to the T’s & C’s."

MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability: “After this announcement I had the pleasure of speaking with a reporter who was on the briefing call. He explained that MySpace said that due to their terms of service the participating sites (e.g. Twitter) would not be allowed to cache or store any of the profile information."

Weird. At least MySpace has lots of good data to throw around. Heck, I'd be happy with just basic profile data onto a handful of sites.

Funny that DataPortability uses Tumblr for a blog, but, a nice way to round up the coverage.

20080507

Why Facebook Is Useless | sarahintampa

Why Facebook Is Useless | sarahintampa: "my most regular activity on Facebook is clearing out hundreds of invites."

Hay! That's what I should change my status to most of the time. I usually just log in to whack zombies ... (both real and app).

Describe FriendFeed in 2-8 words

Paul Buchheit - FriendFeed: "Let me clarify, the description should be appealing."


A website describable in two to eight words
you bring the friends, we bring the benefits
Friendfeed: The New Babel-on
Friendfeed: The third place.
stalking made easy
facebook without zombies

20080506

Twitter / Maki

Twitter / Maki: "Removing all the email notifications I get from social media websites, they add far too much clutter to the inbox."

Nice! I have a whole account slaved to the social. I clear the relevant folder after logging in and seeing what the in-system experience is like. Usually it's just a poor version of a mail client ...

20080505

Google Reader

Official Google Reader Blog: Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere.: "Share items with a note - If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader"

gReader now has 'share with note' which is a great idea but the cartoon bubble on the web landing page has got to go.

And a new bookmarklet (not the forgotten old Google Share bookmarklet) that feeds into the gReader stream, only what you highlight, though, and you have to allow javascript on the page that you clip. Now I have to figure which to use, Friendfeed, Social|Median, gShare, or bloglines ...

Also: I Am a Google Reader Shared Links Ninja

via Friendfeed RSS Post to Google Reader

Shyftr OMPL

OPML Support Is Here! - Shyftr Blog: "You can now import an OPML file or export your Shyftr feed list as an OPML file."

Whoa, you can go from a person's profile to their feeds, to reading their feeds in the usual interface and really easily subscribing (you have to backtrack to sort them, though). You have to enter feed edit mode to sort into folders, but, you can then edit feed title, description, and add multiple tags all of which show nicely on the reading header. View tagged feeds shows a tag cloud, clicking a tag shows matching feeds which can be clicked on to read. An implementation much stronger than folders.

Oh, and yet another bookmarklet which seems quite good at subscribing to yet another feed.

The ui is growing on me.

ashton @ shyftr and a pocket blog

via RSS feed of a Twitter follow of the TechMeme Firehose to Louis Gray: Shyftr Adds OPML Support

20080504

Twitter Blacklist

Twitter Blacklist: "Twitter as a social network has developed its own class of unfortunates that attempt to draw attention to themselves through spam-like methods"


This class of people has been neatly described in terms of the ratio between how many they "follow" compared to how many follow them:

1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer. — evan


@twitblacklist

There are links to a couple of Greasemonkey scripts using the list ...

heh, antifollowspammers.

Ugg @homebasedbiz4

20080503

feed of the now

The Patry Copyright Blog: "Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc."



Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups

Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups: "False identifications based on a terrorist no-fly list have for years prevented some federal air marshals from boarding flights they are assigned to protect"

Surprising no one. As Jon Stewart says, our goal is to export irony to the rest of the world.

Bloglines | My Feeds (8823) (26)

465/950 feeds bloglines
/192 greader

Gotta drag those gReader shared feeds from AssetBar back to gReader

gReader trends says that the Yahoo Mash blog is inactive and that I read feeds there on Tuesday and Friday.

20080501

BlogRize

Went in a fine circle to find BlogRize this evening. A RSSmeme feed of links from FriendFeed follows spit out a ReadWriteWeb story with an invite code. Which is certainly a roundabout way to get to a story that could have come through the RWW feed into gReader ...

After poking around for a while looking for the 'submit story' bookmarklet or form, I got turned back around to Louis Gray who had quoted "BlogRize is today's news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.' BlogRize tracks items from two sources - a person's blog, and their Google Reader shared items."

Ah! A blog's feed augmented with community gReader shares. Just so. Now, where are the rss feeds coming out of it (just to make everything quite circular).

ashton @ BlogRize