Blogging, microblogging, miniblogging, moblogging, vlogging. What next? Humans are social creatures, and as such, we like to express ourselves, usually verbally, but print will do, whether on paper or online. Science Fiction legend Harlan Ellison wrote a story called I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which isn’t relevant other than for me to suggest that Twitter and its alternatives will always find a following, even if we end up with a dozen of these tools. (Though there must be some saturation point, since at some point they have to monetize their service. I doubt all of them can be profitable.)

The latest to the collection of Twitter-like digital soapbox tools is Meshly. Webware describes Meshly as a “nanoblogging platform” built around instant messages. And Meshly lets you vote on each item posted. Right, sort of like Digg, but on each tiny little message. Sorry, but you’d have to have no life whatsoever to want to watch and vote on minutiae of thoughts. (Am I missing something?) Take away the silly voting, however, and I think this could actually be useful.

So we have Twitter/ Jaiku/ Tumblr from a web browser, MySay from cell phones, Meshly from IM clients, and who knows what else. And I’ve just registered a domain where you’ll soon be able to post to your lifestream thoughts and posts just by imagining your text. You will, however, have to attach a USB cable to your noggin. Then anyone can know all of your thoughts, all of the time. I have a mouth and I plan to scream.

Originally posted on April 25, 2007 @ 1:04 pm

The toolbar powered social bookmarking site StumbleUpon have launched its new design, and it’s looking pretty good. Also, it’s looking pretty much like social sites tend to look, something my buddy Muhammad Saleem points out over at Pronet Advertising.

Here’s a screenshot:

The sub pages makes use of the layout from the front page pretty well, with tags to the right and listed stories to the left. That big welcome blurb you see on the front page isn’t used however, maybe it could be if they added some moderated top story system, although the blurb’s a bit big for that. Videos just list the videos, the best way to do it actually.

All in all, I think it’s a pretty decent redesign that could do with a bit of polishing (especially spacing around the top). Go check it out.

Originally posted on April 10, 2007 @ 2:41 am

Eureka! Thanks to Yee, who pointed out to me that Slide could accept an input RSS feed. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. What I want is to produce a slideshow based on the Twitter public timeline. I previously piped the Twitter feed through Yahoo Pipes‘ content analysis module. Basically, this module extracts some meaning from each tweet (Twitter item). What Yahoo Pipes does when this pipe is run is produce a page full of images. So each image supposedly represents each tweet.

But I wanted for people to be able to include the result on their web page, if they’d like to. The Yahoo result takes up too much space. I wanted to produce an HTML badge or a slideshow or some compact way to present the images. I tried Teqlo, but while it’s a great tool, it’s not that kind of mashup tool. Next I tried SplashCast, which you can see I’ve gone nuts with the past few days. While I love SplashCast, it can only take Flickr or YouTube RSS feeds. Then Yee tipped me off to Slide, which takes any RSS feed that includes images and produces a slideshow.

You can view the show on Slide’s site, which also shows thumbnails of all the images in the slideshow, or you can embed their player HTML badge code into your site, like I’ve done above. And voila! The “Every Twitter Tells A Story” web 2.0 monster mashup is finally complete: from Twitter through Yahoo Pipes transformed by Flickr and displayed in Slide. (By the way, you can also turn your slideshow into a screen saver.)

While it’d be nice to have manual control over the slideshow, Slide’s display is still tons of fun. Now, the only variation I’d still like to try is to find an application that will not only display each Flickr image and it’s text, but also the original tweet text for each image. My thought is that SplashCast is the most ideal vehicle fo this, but the functionality is not currently there. Still, I don’t doubt they or someone will come up with the right app. Isn’t the plug-n-play web amazing?

P.S. One other thing that Slide has is called SkinFlix. Silly name but you can wrap a skin around a YouTube video. Here’s the TV skin wrapped around a blooper video from the Supernatural TV show.

Originally posted on April 5, 2007 @ 2:30 pm

I’ve been in the rather interesting position these last two weeks of working exclusively from my laptop whilst waiting for a new floor to be laid in my house…and job that was suppose to take 2 weeks and now looks like taking 4. Aside from missing the obvious things, such as my 22 inch LCD Monitor, working from a laptop has presented some other challenges, for example I don’t have Microsoft Office on it to write letters. I’ve had a gmail account for a long time, but I’ve never really embraced a lot of Google’s other offerings. Today, presented with a complete lack of organisation, I’ve made the switch, so I though I’d share.

Google Personal Homepage

I’ve never really found Google’s personalized homepage offering appealing before, but then again that’s when you could only use it in white or white. It now comes in different flavours, only 6 additional choices, but they make the world of difference in terms of aesthetics and usability. There’s something much more soothing about the product when it’s not all stark white with a bit of blue.

Now I don’t subscribe to the meme that Google Personalized Homepage should be used as a RSS reader substitute. It can be, and I’ve added a couple of news feeds to my main page, but you can easily incorporate a Google Reader box as well that allows you to scroll through feeds that way, or switch across. Gmail integrated nicely…sure, I’m still using gmail directly, but it’s nifty for when I first log on in the morning.

[Read more…]

Originally posted on April 8, 2007 @ 9:27 pm