History repeating itself in realtime with Tweetbe.at

The entire world is re-awakening to the phenomena of real-time, short messages, ala Twitter. It was the lone vehicle to carry the news of revolutionary protest in the streets of Tehran following the failed elections in Iran. It's not only captured the attention of the global news media, but stolen it from them. Even the White House and it's State Department validated the site's role and geopolitical importance. One former Bush administration official has called for it to receive a Nobel Prize. Even Oprah's using it these days. Heady stuff.

But this isn't the first time technology like this has 'shrunk the world' and shone a light in dark places- In 1991 the news of Soviet coup d'état attempt was carried over IRC despite a media blackout in the country. Reports from the first Iraq war were carried over its channels as well.

And IRC is as old as the hills. In spite of that, It's always allowed for realtime group conversation -or- private one-to-one dialog. You don't need to create an account, big personal network, or audience of followers to start-up and jump into a conversation. You can monitor channels of topics and come and go as you please. It's a pretty damn efficient twitter, way before Twitter (and cell phones, text messages, even AIM for that matter)

What Twitter's done to the individual messages of SMS (and by extension, chat & IRC) is marry them to hosted nature of the world web web. Individual statements in 140 characters, published as html documents; those documents aggregated into user profiles & feeds.

With so many documents being broadcast and so little inherent organization to it's delivery, Twitter can be very much like being in crowded room where all your friends are shouting at themselves and each other. Third party software like Seesmic Desktop and Tweetdeck are powerful tools that help manage these twitter feeds like mini-email, but neither helps you discover the rest of twitter at random or topically, like you do on IRC.

Thankfully, developer Alex Bosworth has connected the dots and come up with something that marries the two. It's a proof-of-concept alpha called Tweetbe.at.

If you use twitter, you know that putting #hashtags in your messages is a way to tag or catagorize them. The idea behind Tweetbe.at is that #hashtags represent IRC channels of tweets. You need to log-in using your twitter account (not with password, but OAuth) and then you can visit or create and participate in as many channels as you want. If you like, It allows you to fold in other search terms and user's feeds so you can develop and refine the channel. The important thing, whether you want to moderate the channel or just sit back and watch, is that you can now surface more relevant tweets you may have otherwise missed, or use it to get into @reply conversations with new & interesting tweeps you otherwise may not have ever met!

Well done, @p1bx

"We want to push social down into every experience on the phone"

Andy Rubin, creator of the original Sidekick, driving force behind Android, and VP of mobile engineering at Google wants you to be able to see your friends photo & current facebook status on the caller ID when he calls.

That's one of the things the company's pushing as the launch of the next Andriod phone, the myTouch 3G, approaches in August.

In terms of technological innovation, the biggest steps forward are an enhanced battery life from the G1 and the Voice Search application. According to T-Mobile's site:

Search by voice lets you find what you’re looking for, hands-free. The built-in GPS knows your location. So when you say, “Pizza” you get back your closest pizza places first. Search by Voice also comes in handy to help find long or hard to spell words, like amphitheater.

Over 5,000 applications are available for Android - Contrast that with over 50,000 for the iphone, and it does seem pretty small. However over the long haul there should prove to be more applications available on Anrdoid devices than on Apple ones. Especially given that Andriod is open source and Apple is, well...Apple. Say's Andy:

With Android, there can be 1,000s of different products built, and the magic here is that all those products can be compatible and all of them can be hosted by the same [application] marketplace...it's in an earlier stage of adoption

Other enhancements to Android include a multiple desktop concept which will be familiar to linux users. Another application that looks to figure prominently will be Sherpa a GPS-history app that learns what you do and where you go, and makes search easier.

The phone is available for pre-order now, and hits T-Mobile stores in the US August 5th. It retails for $199.00

The battle for control of user experience will rage on.

Whether on the desktop, in the browser, or the mobile device - The Giants of computing technology want to control the way you interact with the digital word.

The Google announcement of an impending Chrome operating system -as an extension of their browser by the same name- drew a huge reaction this week from all quarters of the web. Speculation and conjecture were rank amongst the bloggeratti. Handicapping Mountain Veiw's strategy & the potential impact to industry titans Microsoft & Apple, was (and still is) the meme de jour.

The take here on the Grid is that controlling the user experience is central to any company making software or interactive applications.

Google's revenue comes from advertising, but they are fundamentally a (web-based) software, or user experience company. Apple's revenue comes from selling hardware and devices, but they are fundamentally a software, or user experience company (the user experience company, many would argue). Even Facebook, Myspace, Digg etc are earning revenue from advertising, but if you stop and think about it, are fundamentally software, or more generally, user experience companies. (made valuable by virtue of facilitating electronic interaction for, and being a destination of multiple users)

Big bad old Microsoft, OTOH, still makes it's money selling software, but has to do web stuff & sell hardware in addition to that just to support and defend the legacy revenue stream.

The problem for a company like Microsoft is that software (like file storage & management, apps, etc) is going to eventually move to a web-centric, subscription based model.

So is Google trying to monetize the experience, bring it out onto the web more often, or get into your machine and control it?

The answer is ALL OF THE ABOVE. Ultimately the web is out in the cloud and on our local machines. It doesn't matter what the form factor is (pc, notebook, netbook, phone) or where the code running it lives.

If Google can control the experience it reinforces their other properties and future ones they roll out. It also paves the way for subscription based services, like file storage.

It's a multifaceted approach to be sure, from all players. At the end of the day, they all want the same thing: To control us, er...the user experience...and we let them, because they usually give us such cool toys to play with :)

The browser as a two-way window

Opera has released an alpha build of their new web browser Unite. I don't know if they've fullfilled their promise to, 'reinvent the web' or not, but the software is pretty cool.

Depending on your level of engagement with the internet, your web browser is like your window to the world and much more. While many users passively go with system defaults such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari, 3rd party browsers such Firefox and Opera are perferred by many power users.

So what's all the hype about? It's simple yet powerful: Unite is a robust, multi-tab browser with a literal web server package built right into it. What that means is, this software has the capability to turn *your* computer into a web server, as long as you're online and it's running.

If it's not immediately evident why you would -or- should want to do this, let me explain:

We're already uploading our photos, music, and personal content to different 3rd party websites and social services. We don't need to store our info locally. We can host it somewhere else -for free - and it's publicy available to anyone, anywhere.

Here's the only dilemma with that: While all your content is in the cloud, it's still in various different sites (silos) like Your blog account, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, etc. Projects like Friendfeed go a long way to aggregate & stream all that activity - but it's still push delivery and users interaction with your content or resources isn't granular or ala carte. You're also at the mercy of any one of these sites, should they go down, lose your data, or worse.

The other problem is sharing your music library over the web. You can upload to rapid share and be a dj on blip.fm, but your core library is still likely 'personal' unless you're runing some kind of media server. Apple iTunes can be shared over the web with apps like Simplfymedia, but you need an account and have to run their software.

You can't simply call up your MP3 library or host / transfer large files from your PC to any web-connected browser/device easily - unless you know how to configure & your own ftp server with dyndns, etc...until now.

Opera has pre-configured everything with a nice graphical interface that maps file destinations or directories on your system (music, picture, file folders, etc) to a series of dynamic URLs that you can share with others, selectively, or keep private. You can always change the URLs or even move/delete files if you're concered about too much traffic or exposure/privacy issues - or you can just close it and not run Opera Unite :)

If this catches on it, it could be really, really cool. Opera is encouraging developers to come up with more applications.

More to come...

I've set up a "Chat Lounge" on my notebook using Opera Unite.

Feel free to drop in, if any friends or myself are online, choose a screenname and say "hi"

Waiting for Google Wave

I know it's still in developer preview, but I cannot wait to test out Google's Wave platform. The idea is simple, yet transformational: Conversations as live, hosted, documents that your friends are interacting with.

It's the combination of email, chat, twitter, facebook, etc - essentially all the communication services they aim provide but everything, live, at once. Google's social graph, if you will. Google has intentionally set out to make Wave an open source protocol and a federated platform, which means that individuals or even enterprises could run their own private Wave instances.

I tell you what: While Google puts the finishing touches on Wave, Ray Ozzie and Microsoft would do well to pick-up Twitter, or even partner with them. It competes with their investment in facebook, but it doesn't matter. It's worth the hedge.

Twitter, though only 140 characters, is both a destination, ecosystem, and a protocol. Microsoft could keep things exactly as they are right now, so as not hurt the ecosystem or destination aspect, and even open up and extend the twitter api/protocol. (embrace and extend?)

Microsoft typically behaves kind of "evilly" in these instances, but I think under Ray Ozzie it's possible that they could play much nicer and not hurt the buzz and vibe that twitter has going for it. They could eventually normalize it for the enterprise which is where Wave would be going with Google's Apps.


Just some thoughts as I eagerly await a Wave invite...


Edit: I know Twitter is built on Ruby & LAMP or something like that. This obviously is much different from Microsoft and their whole ethos of proprietary .NET stuff. It's completely off the wall, but that's the kind of world we live in these days - off the wall. It's just a damn shame to see Ray Ozzie bad mouth Wave instead of answering to it.


Edit II: Here's some of the video of Ozzie's spin at The Churchhill Club:

Almost too beautiful for the coffee table

I just found this book and had to share it with you




I think it was Omni magazine introduced me to this guy when I was in high school. I recall writing a term paper on evolution vs. creationism. I managed to work in some citations to McKenna's idea of the 'Stoned Age' from "Food of the Gods"into my evolution argument. Yeah, I was that kind of student ;)

His daughter's photography is stunning.
His legacy was clearly a lot bigger than just his work.

Where we're headed. (or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the Matrix)

Well, this is what's become of dodgeball...the original group location awareness platform that Google acquired a while back.



According to Google, Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile on these phones:

* Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
* iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
* most color BlackBerry devices
* most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
* most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
* many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

A summary of the post-modern set.

Hipster: The Dead End Of Civilization
(Cover story of Adbusters Issue #79.)

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Ouch. Harsh one, dude.

Make your own fake album cover with Web 2.0 sites!

Going through the steps of this is half the fun. Major hat-tip to @Chris Rowe for spreading this meme. Instructions are his (with my inclusion of the ever-sophisticated MS Paint) 

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title
of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use MS Paint, or photoshop, or similar to put it all together.

Here's mine: