graemehunter.co.uk

Okay, you’re a member of several Social Networks now. There is probably one you use a lot, likely the one you started with, but you haven’t done much with the others. What if you could post messages or updates to several of them at once? This is where ping.fm comes in. Presently supporting Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter, and soon to add support for Myspace and Bebo, this is a simple web-based app that will allow you to post to all of these networks at once. Nice and simple to set up, and it does what it promises fine. It’s still in a private beta at the moment, but let me know if you want to try it, I have a code that may (or indeed may not) still work for signup.

You can also bundle up what you’ve been doing at the other end too. Friendfeed will gather together feeds of your activities on several social networks, blogs, photo sites, Youtube, Last.fm and several other places, and offer them all up as a single feed (this is mine). You can also add all your friends, and follow their feeds too. I personally find that last element a little intrusive, as you can do that without asking. You can do so and choose to keep it private, but for now I won’t do either for anyone that hasn’t tracked me down and added me in Friendfeed.

There has been a little surge of these bundling services, taking the API or feeds of several different sites, and offering them up as a whole new site. Both definitely offer something to the user, and I’m using both daily now. I do wonder though if they strip away some of the individual features of different sites to fit what all of them have. I am sure there will be several more such ideas coming in the next few months though.

Twitterfox is a handy little Firefox Extension for all users of Twitter. It keeps you up to date with your friends twitters, and gives you a nice quick interface for posting. It takes up a tiny piece of real estate on your status bar (an issue if like me you have a lot of extensions that place things there, I have run out of space on some of my installs, and Firefox gets a bit ugly when that happens).
What is also worth mentioning is that it is really nicely designed, the alerts and interface for reading/posting twitters is tiny and well done. I suspect that the style may well end up influencing other similar extensions, as it is the way to do it. I’d love similar for status updates to Facebook for instance.

Last week Apple announced its software development kit for the iPhone. The demo and announcement was generally met with enthusiasm, especially with demos of Super Monkey Ball being shown off, interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, and many other examples being shown alongside it to help underline the potential of the platform.

However, with a little hindsight some people are now seeing flaws with the agreements required for the SDK, and the cut that Apple will get from sales. Alexander Wolfe at informationweek.com outlines some of the anger at Apple’s tight control over the SDK. It was expected already that apps would only be available through iTunes. However Apple are also charging $99 for the full documentation for the SDK (a more rudimentary version is available for free), and then 30% of any revenue on applications sold through the iTunes store (however apps can be distributed through it for free if they themselves are free).

This contrasts sharply with the attitude of other mobile platforms. Symbian and Google Android have no such restrictions, and there certainly is no restricted marketplace for Windows Mobile apps. Apple are very much in contrast to the rest of the market on this. There certainly is a lively developer community for Symbian and Windows Mobile, and Android is starting off well. I don’t think it will be a barrier to entry for the bigger developers, but I think it could affect the smaller dev companies or individuals. I’ve seen some fantastic apps on Symbian that might not have existed if the student developer was being charged for the means of getting full access to the OS.

The iPhone as a platform is clearly very well designed with a lot of potential for both creativity and making hard cash, but I do wonder if shunning the true open source software approach may damage its potential for some real cutting edge development.

Interesting announcement from Nokia of Yamake, a user-generated games tool for the soon-to-be-launched-properly N-Gage platform. Basically, they provide the base for the game, the user can upload images and sounds, and alter text to turn them into their own game. Will have a look into this and investigate, could be a fun tool to play with.

Quietly excited to see the announcement of BarCampOxford. Barcamp is a series of user-generated conferences, where participants provide the content, and help to run and organise it themselves. I can remember reading about the rise of BarCamps a couple of years ago, and I’m very interested to see it in action, get a feel for how it works, and of course participate in it myself. Many more details are on the BarCampOxford page for what they have planned thus far.

EDIT: BarcampOxford has in fact been rescheduled for September 20-21 2008.

Slightly behind on my RSS feeds, I’ve just found out that Nokia have announced the successor to the N95, the imaginatively named N96. It looks nice, they’ve recessed the controls a little, given it a darker sleeker look. Headline features are an expandable 16GB memory and a larger screen (2.8 inches over the N95s 2.6). It is a few millimetres longer, but a couple slimmer. It will use the same battery, so there are a few mutterings on the Nokia and Symbian blogs that it won’t particularly improve the battery life.

Overall it looks like a style improvement, but no massive advantage over the N95 other than memory. Of course there could be some tweaks to the spec before release, but there isn’t going to be a touchscreen or anything really exciting.

I’ve just checked the stats for this blog in my Google Analytics account, and lo and behold, over the past month the number of visitors to graemehunter.co.uk has doubled! This is the biggest jump I’ve ever seen, and it isn’t a one day leap either, a nice steady progression upwards.

I think the main reason has to be the redesign of the blog I did a month ago. The simple tactic was to keep my current Links posts on the front page, by using a WordPress theme that used asides (where a particular category is listed in a separate column in a smaller font). More links on a page, and also it looks more interesting. I have main content in the main column of the blog, then those links (which are posted automatically from my del.icio.us account each night, a summary of everything I’ve bookmarked for the day). Very satisfying to see such a result for a few changes.

An interesting new beta app from Nokia, the Location Tagger uses GPS to add in your precise location to the EXIF data of photos you take on your phone. I’ve tested this out on the N95, and it does work, although within the limitations of the GPS in general (i.e. it can be rather slow to find your position, and it’s not likely to work inside). Nokia are suggesting they will in time add this functionality to their general camera software. The initial suggestion seemed to be that it would add this info as geotags for Flickr, but that doesn’t seem to happen yet. Worth playing about with though, good little app.

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An interesting new beta app from Nokia, the Location Tagger uses GPS to add in your precise location to the EXIF data of photos you take on your phone. I’ve tested this out on the N95, and it does work, although within the limitations of the GPS in general (i.e. it can be rather slow to find your position, and it’s not likely to work inside). Nokia are suggesting they will in time add this functionality to their general camera software. The initial suggestion seemed to be that it would add this info as geotags for Flickr, but that doesn’t seem to happen yet. Worth playing about with though, good little app.

Quick answer: I imported too many feeds into Google Reader

Long answer: Well I found an old OPML file. I think it may have been something that combined a load of my old feeds with what Robert Scoble was reading at the time, so I suspect it was from 2005 or so. I then noticed a couple of others such files, so I thought it might be fun (note to reader: I have an interesting definition of fun on a personal level, please do not try to apply your own or indeed any dictionary definition of the word here) to put them all together, see what was going on, who was still blogging, if I was missing out on any good feeds.

To begin with, I didn’t want to mess up my reading list, so I thought I’d import them all into Bloglines. Approximately 1400 feeds later, Bloglines was not happy. It was taking an age to load, just didn’t seem to be coping. However I could export from it, so I assumed that Google Reader would be able to cope.

And it didn’t. Page errors all over, massive loading times, and something of a pain to undo too. What I found through trial and error was that it was still flaky with about 800 or 900 feeds, and then once you slipped under that number it was fine, just as good as if you only had a couple. So worth noting if you are an obsessive feed reader like myself that if you’re really stacking up the number you read, it may be worth a prune sometime.