Category Archives: Technology

Twittervision

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Bill Thompson and I had a hilarious conversation the other morning with an incredulous former newspaper editor in which we tried to explain why Twitter might be interesting, even if it is currently just leading-edge uselessness. Afterwards I thought that perhaps a movie might help. So I made one.

Later… Martin Weller pointed me in the direction of Flickrvision, in which David Troy (creator of Twittervision) does the same thing for photographs.

Still later… Liz Lawley has some interesting thoughts about it, e.g.

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful…

Etch-a-sketch goes broadband

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Photo courtesy of BT

From Technology Review…

British Telecom (BT) is working on a plan to eliminate the keyboard and mouse, and use accelerometers with tablet PCs instead.

The pilot project enables a user to scroll through menus or applications simply by tilting or rotating the tablet PC. The system starts with a specially designed adapter containing tiny accelerometers, which measure acceleration. The adapter plugs into any tablet PC via a USB cable. When a user moves the PC, the sensors detect the motion. Special software then interprets the PC’s movements and translates them onto the computer screen.

“What we want to create is a kind of broadband Etch A Sketch,” says BT researcher David Chatting, who wrote the applications for the prototype.

The trick, he says, is getting people sensitized to how moving the PC affects what happens on the computer. “One of my initial applications entails using the PC to manipulate a marble on the screen. I want to demonstrate to the user that how they’re holding the device affects what’s happening–that they have an almost physical connection to the content on the screen.”

For now, Chatting’s applications are simple. A user moves the machine left or right to toggle between a few menu choices on-screen, and then pulls the machine forward to select a menu item. “We aren’t trying to duplicate all [of] Windows Vista or Mac OSX,” Chatting says.

Phew! That’s a relief.

eyePod video

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Mmmm…. Here’s an interesting gizmo. You plug it into your video iPod and — Bingo! — you’ve got a 50-inch virtual screen.

Alas, I do not possess such an iPod. But even if I did, would I want to look like this?

Er, no, thank you very much.

Wonder what he’s watching.

Readers with thicker hides can get one for £149.00 from here.

Lies, damn lies and Internet statistics (contd)

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Following my post of yesterday, James Cridland has done some really interesting digging into the statistics from his Media UK site, which gets over 2m page-views a month. Since it’s his site, he knows what’s going on. He then compares what Google Analytics, Alexa and Compete claim is happening on the site.

He found some curious discrepancies, and concluded that

Compete is under-representing my traffic by over two-thirds – as well as demonstrably not following any trends in mediauk.com’s site traffic. The figures are almost entirely unrelated to my website’s traffic. This is bad. Are websites basing purchase decisions on Compete’s data? In which case, do I have a legal case against them?

We’ve not, yet, mentioned comScore. That’s a blog post for another day, I suspect: because there’s so much more there than meets the eye, it’s not funny.

And to think that investors and VCs base valuations on these numbers…

Web 2.0 epidemiology

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From David Pogue’s Blog

It seems to me, though, that we haven’t even scratched the surface. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, but there are dozens or hundreds of huge Web 2.0 ideas that have yet to materialize.

I was thinking about this — a LOT — as I lay in bed last week, sicker than I’d been in years. I hadn’t eaten for two days, and I was nervous about being well enough to travel to a speaking engagement the next day. (Is it just my imagination, or are the bugs getting a lot nastier these days?)

I kept thinking: Surely I caught this from somebody — somebody who now knows what this virus’s course will be.

[…]

Somebody should come up, then, with a Web 2.0 site where people could report what they’re catching and what you can expect from it. You could see a map of your region and watch the red cloud or the blue cloud spread closer and closer to your neighborhood, the better to step up your hand washings. As you lay in bed, miserable, you’d know that at least you had only 24 hours to go. Or whatever.

[Update: Yes! A number of people have alerted me to the beta version of http://whoissick.org, which appears to be exactly what I’m describing!]

Hmmm… yes it is. Here’s a screenshot:

Lies, damn lies and Internet statistics

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Robert Scoble has an interesting post about the unreliability of Web stats.

Almost every entrepreneur I talk to lately whines privately about the stats they see on places like Compete.com, Comscore, and Alexa. Today Tom Conrad of Pandora told me that they are extremely low. He says his service requires registration, so he has very accurate stats of who’s signed into Pandora and he can’t figure out why the stats services are so far off of the real stats.

Lots more in the post. It’s also attracted some very thoughtful comments.

Posted in Web

Clunkiness is the new black

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There’s been quite a lot of chat on photography sites about the Canon G7. Why? Because of its ‘clunky’ feel. It reminds people, apparently, of ‘real’ cameras. The top view, for example, is supposedly reminiscent of a Contax or even an M-Leica.

A guy in the Financial Times even claimed it was a ‘rangefinder camera’. Odd that this doesn’t appear in the technical specs.

Stand by for a new trend in ‘retro’ digital cameras.

Facebook to do advertising. Well, there’s a surprise

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Odd that it took them so long. Nick Carr has some sharp observations, plus a suggestion.

Yesterday, Facebook let it be known that it would launch a free classified-advertising service, which will compete with Craigslist. That’s a smart move. Facebook’s core users – college and high-school kids – are also big users of Craigslist. When Facebookers go off-network, Craigslist is probably one of their most likely destinations. So creating an in-network version of Craigslist will significantly expand Facebook’s control over its members’ online time. “We don’t try to lock people up or take more of their time,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fibs to the New York Times today. Then he tells the truth: “If we can provide people with efficient tools, they will use the site more.” Every page view Zuckerberg steals from Craigslist is money in his pocket.

But if Craigslist is a big draw for Facebook members, my guess is that Wikipedia is an even bigger draw. I’m too lazy to look for the stats, but Wikipedia must be at or near the top of the list of sites that Facebookers go to when they leave Facebook. To generalize: Facebook is the dorm; Wikipedia is the library; and Craigslist is the mall. One’s for socializing; one’s for studying; one’s for trading…

Twitter: big idea or leading-edge uselessness?

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I’m puzzled by the buzz about Twitter: why would anyone want to know the tiny details of what I am doing at any given moment? But lots of people I know are intrigued by it and I can’t quite see why.

David Weinberger has just posted the best case I’ve seen so far for paying attention to it.

I’ve been twittering. I’m not entirely sure why, and I feel too old for it, but I’m finding it fascinating. And more than that.

Twitter and other such sites (e.g., Jaiku) are “microblogs” where you can post very short messages (e.g., 140 characters) and see the scroll of messages posted by your buddies. You can Twitter via the Web site, IM, or SMS on your cell phone.

In general, people seem to post what they’re doing at the moment, plus occasional quotes and ideas of interest. So, by definition it should be trivial. But, Twitter is about the intimacy of details. Without it, I’d hear from people maybe once a year, when I run into them at a conference or they send a holiday newsletter. (Actually, I don’t get any of those any more. Two explanations: 1. Blogging has obviated them. 2. Nobody likes me. Third explanation: Both of the above.) We then engage in the odd ritual of narrative construction called “catching up.” We give the headlines in each of the big areas in our lives. The kids are fine, the job sucks, we botoxed the cat, etc. But with Twitter, you see the day-to-day life of your friends.

A lot of it of course I don’t care about. But it turns out that I do like hearing that Paolo Valdemarin, an Italian friend I see every couple of years, is sitting on his porch, drinking wine and watching the sunset. I do like hearing that Jessamyn West, who I unfortunately run into very rarely, is working on a presentation to librarians, which she then shares with her Twitter pals. I do care that BradSucks, a Canadian musician I’ve only met once, is rehearsing for a live show. This is, to mangle Linda Stone’s phrase, continuous partial friendship, and it’s a welcome addition to the infrequent, intermittent friendships we’re able to manage in the real world.

It helps that the volume of flow is so impossibly high that there’s zero expectation that anyone is keeping up. “Hey, dude, why didn’t you know that? I like twittered it two days ago?” is just not a reasonable complaint.

I don’t know if Twitter or one of its new-and-improved competitors will survive, or what it will become. It’s hot at the moment, which usually means that it’s not going to be hot soon. But it’s a powerful platform for something, and even in its current state, it addresses our desire to fill every interstice with social connections.