Pretty neat July 18, 2008

I logged in to let my OpenID work on another site (I am not terribly active at actually writing down my thoughts) and saw that someone from the Houston Chronicle had tried to contact me a few days ago, wanting to interview me about Twitter. I have e-mailed her on this, and by posting here I pretty much confirm that it was me. I really don’t know if I’m the best person to talk to, but I do use twitter, so I guess that counts. I also use twitterrific, mobile twitterrific, twittervision, twitterlocal, summize, and I have ideas for things that are posted elsewhere on more Serious Blogs. I’m even trying to sit down and actually learn PHP/MySQL so that I can create some awesome applications for Twitter (one of the reasons I was so upset Summize got bought, I was hoping my apps would work for other services too once Summize implemented searching them, hopefully Tweetscan’s identi.ca search will turn out to be good).

Why is the Chron interested in Twitter, though? The top google hit for site:chron.com twitter is a I don’t use twitter, only self-important people use twitter story. That’s one of the questions I asked in my heart-felt 1:30 am e-mail.

Also, while checking the dashboard I also caught some other responses I didn’t expect, like a Perian developer surprised his app was being used on the AppleTV and confused about ‘replacing Apple’s H264 decoder’. I’ve since contacted him, too, and offered photographic evidence.

Twitter acquires Summize, we’re doomed July 15, 2008

Oh boy. Twitter acquired summize. We’re fucked! Summize, used to power some pretty awesome sites (like Get Satisfaction’s “overheard” feature), will now start failing more often, and the part about adding other services is now gone.

Here’s the About Summize section from the Summize.com about page (courtesy Google Cache):

Summize’s mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews. Additional sources of online conversations are coming soon!

Now here’s the About Twitter Search section from the search.twitter.com about page:

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline?

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.

Notice what is no longer there? The searching of other services! I left this comment on their blog:

NOOOOOO!

Now Summize will start to fail, have tons of downtime, and worst of all, will completely drop their previous commitment to add MORE SERVICES to their search! Poor Jaiku, Pownce, and whoever else nobody cared about.

Tweetscan, you just got your lucky break to take over the Twitter & other site search market (they already search Identi.ca!), will you take it?

Will they accept it? I don’t know.

Update: Summize blogged it too, so I commented there as well. Just in case it gets lost:

I too dislike a little bit that Summize finds deleted tweets. It does help, sometimes, for conversations where one side doesn’t want to keep a record of a spat, though.

As well, I’m not happy about the acquisition. Aside from the obvious “lol now summize will failwhale”, the statement about wanting to include other microblogging services has been completely obliterated.

Interestingly enough, Summize has just made way for competition.

(Andy Mabbett had commented “Congratulations. Now please teach your software to stop “finding” deleted tweets.”)

Wayne is good June 24, 2008

Creating Our Own Happiness

by Wayne Coyne

Worse than sitefinder June 20, 2008

You know how site finder made every domain name resolve? Well, how is it different with the dozens of parked domains that DON’T EVEN HAVE A buy this site LINK THESE DAYS so they can’t be domaining.

I came up with a few good domains for my serious blog, but they’re all parked. They’re not used properly, just parked, and with no way to purchase the domain. LAME. This should be against ICANN rules because it causes spam addresses to resolve, the main problem with sitefinder. It also annoys me.

We have the technology to prevent Jap suicides June 19, 2008

I brought up real life social networking before in an incoherent rant, and there’s now even more proof that it needs to become a reality.

Obviously Twitter could be helping a little bit, who knows how bad it would have gotten if Twitter didn’t exist (for background, Twitter is _huge_ in japan, and seems to be slowing down the lack-of-contact social problems).

I really think that getting people together in person as well as online is mega important. Brightkite is already starting the process, and people need to stop joining just to act twittery, and start using it to say “hey! we both use brightkite! we must be into similar things!” (brightkite actually lets users tag themselves, but that’s a bit awkward)

[EOF]

The American Dad After School Special June 15, 2008

Steve’s Crush, Stanorexia, Intervention, Inside Out.

I’m not so sure I want to claim my ID June 14, 2008

Jeez, man. I’m a real jerk on this website. I’m apparently really not that bad in person, several “internet friends” have said so. Same for on Skype, I’m a nice to talk to fellow. So why would I want to go to claimid and say, hey, this is me, this is me, this is also me. I want to start a real blog about similar stuff that I write about here, except do it professionally. I don’t know if I’ll even continue this site that nobody cares about, maybe just to riff on stuff on the side. Anyway, it’s absolutely nuts to think that most people are going to want to claim their id. Maybe some frat boys or sorority girls who think that everyone needs to know how awesome they are and then get ‘creeped out’ when someone shows them that they just revealed everything someone would need to know to steal their identity (including their home address), but while I think it’s a very noble idea indeed (like XFN is), it’s just not going to work the way we are today.

I would love if people could, for example, join okcupid with the express intent of making friends. Myspace isn’t there to make friends. Facebook definitely isn’t, most people think you’re creepy if they don’t already know you in real life. What are we so stuck up on? Why are we so scared of other people? Has the media done this to us, made us afraid to say hello? Sure, I’ll probably not want to be friends with everyone, I’m not interested in sports and so I’d probably piss off some jock if I said hello and he assumed that meant I was “queer” or “a faggot”. Likewise, if I say hello to a girl I am quite liable to piss off her boyfriend, which has happened in the past. Guys can’t be friends with girls? Oh well.

In short: I love the dream of brightkite, dodgeball, and the like. Making friends merely by social networks? “Hey, Jill is nearby, wanna go say hello and not do something creepy like pre-arranging a meeting?” That’s awesome! People in real life NEED interest tagging, the idea that my phone might tell me that a person nearby shares similar interests with me and we’d probably have a lot to talk about simply makes me excited about a future where the shyness barrier doesn’t apply! But right now, that looks like a distant distant future. Hell, I can’t tell Delicious Library to sync with LibraryThing, GoodReads, OR Shelfari. What chance do I have of a real-life mobile social network on the fly?

Ugh. This post sucks. What an awful rant.

Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review, reviewed June 3, 2008

I’m sometimes ashamed to admit that I subscribe to the RSS feed for MacApper. Originally, they highlighted some neat new mac apps. Now they highlight whatever they’re advertising. I could be missing something, sure, but if a free alternative to a product exists you surely won’t find them mentioning that.

Onto the ignorance. I just picked up Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review by Peter Craddock. He obviously notices the huge back button, and while I thought most mac users read Daring Fireball (and thus would have caught his review, which mentions the small toolbar buttons fix. Peter thinks this is just a ‘problem’ and that it cannot be fixed.

Next he notices the awesomebar, but he really doesn’t. It’s like he just started Firefox 3, let it import his Firefox 2 data, and then wrote a review based upon cursory glances. He calls it “the “recent use & favourites” drop-down menu”, but doesn’t even notice it’s built in search capabilities (it will search your recent history, so if you type ‘dar’ and you went to daring fireball recently, it’ll be ’suggested’, there’s a demo video at the BBC).

On the find bar, which he finds disconcerting, is that it doesn’t work exactly like Safari. I actually agree, I wouldn’t mind some functionality to do this, but then again, I wouldn’t want it to work exactly like Internet Explorer for Windows users. I looked deeper into this expecting that there simply HAD to be a bug asking for Safari 3 (I don’t think this was in Safari 2) type functionality, so I searched for ALL find bar bugs on mac and found nothing even close. So Peter: feel free to file a request for enhancement bug. I filled out some of the boxes for you. (If you have to sign up first, just come back and click my link, it SHOULD work. Let me know the bug number in the comments when you create it!)

I don’t have issues with much of the other stuff except the hatred for Larry UI. It’s for EV, is a major benefit for phishing protection, etc. I guess they could put the ‘welcome’ page on a https site for example purposes. But, go to paypal.com, and you’ll see the certificate issuer and verification that it’s really paypal. Good stuff.

(I ended up taking too long to get this posted, I was going to post it almost immediately after the post I’m reviewing, but had trouble finding the info on he Larry UI. I hate not citing, so I saved a draft then never came back to it. Sorry )

Dead project “Comictastic” still costs $15 June 3, 2008

When Rogue Amoeba kills off an app, they make it free. When Panic kills off an app (Audion), they also make it free. When Spiny software kills off an app, they still charge you the same amount but won’t give you any support. Comictastic, dead since 2006, still costs $15.

Assholes.

I hope PopeyesChicken isn’t real May 29, 2008

Tweet about “chicken” lately? Then you know PopeyesChicken exists, because within hours you’ll receive an @reply letting you know about popeyes certified bonafide chicken. As well as why you should have picked popeyes instead of whichever place you went to.

Hilarious. I’m hoping it’s a parody account, and if it is, I just made a parody of a parody account.