Michael Arrington of the popular tech blog TechCrunch just twittered the following:
I’m now using the techcrunch toolbar to post to twitter. awesome http://www.techcrunch.com/t…
However anyone familiar with Twitter will know that each tweet, when listed on the Twitter site, will also tell you the source; the piece of software used to post it. In the case of Mike’s tweet, Twitter informs us that he used a service called BeTwittered, not the TechCrunch toolbar.
I know, I know! Powncified hasn’t been working for some time now. In fact it’s been out of action for over two weeks. My excuse is that with the JavaOne trip and the big push for the upcoming Altio 5.2 release I’ve been too busy to get things sorted. My excuse for not putting up a post to explain this and acknowledge the issue doesn’t exist. I don’t have one. Sorry.
A while back David asked me which service I preferred for aggregating my social feeds, FriendFeed or Socialthing. Both services aim to provide different ways to manage, consume and post to the different streams of information we receive and push to and from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, RSS et al. every day. At the time I stated a preference for FriendFeed but I figured that might change as Socialthing supported new feeds and services. And it has. The addition of Pownce was quite key and it has become such a useful tool to me that I now run it in its own Prism window rather than a tab in Firefox, Google Reader being the only other web application sharing that honour.
As promised here is another Altio demo that Dan and I built for the forthcoming Altio Graph Control. Like our previous Last.fm demo it diagrams users relationships within a social graph but this one uses a much wider dataset, the Google Social Graph. Given a url to a social network profile or a blog site it will attempt to find other profiles or sites on the web that belong to the same person. It will then find all the “friends” of that person according to the profiles it found. The initial user and all their friends will be diagrammed with lines drawn to indicate friendship between then. The graph can then be expanded by loading the friends for any user already on the graph.
A couple of weeks ago I Pownced about a Firefox extension for GMail called Xoopit. The premise is it scans your inbox for any links to media such as images and videos and collates them all at the top of the GMail inbox page. This means you can easily browse any media that your contacts have linked or attached in the emails they have sent you. This includes links to popular media sites such as Flickr and Youtube.
Would anyone like to help me beta test Findme, my new Firefox extension? It uses Google’s Social Graph API to find other pages that belong to the same person as the page you’re currently viewing. For example from this blog’s main page it will provide you with a URL to my Pownce profile, my Myspace profile, my Last.fm profile etc. I was thinking of naming the extension “StalkMe” as it is possible to start at one profile on one social network and find most, if not all, of their web presence. StalkMe is a little bit creepy however I’d be willing to hear suggestions.
It pains me to say it but Billy Bragg, a fantastic artist, performer and songwriter who has enjoyed a long successful career, never failing to maintain an air of credibility and integrity throughout, sounds somewhat out of touch in his recent opinion piece for the New York Times today. On the back of Bebo’s sale to AOL for £420m Billy complains that the artists that helped boost the popularity and success of such social network sites by contributing their music deserve some kind of a cut.
A video entitled Outside In from the Geometry Center popped up on Digg today explaining how it is possible to turn a sphere inside out without cutting or creasing it (given that it is infinitely elastic and can intersect itself). Despite the predictable Digg troll “Is there really a point to this?” and “Wait, what?” comments the video caught my interest, mainly because of how gently and clearly it explained a complicated but fascinating mathematical process. Continue reading
Here‘s a little Altio app I built with a couple of guys from work (I work at Altio) that uses the new Graph custom control and the data feeds from the music website Last.fm to map connections between Last.fm users and their friends based on the music they listen to. If you give it your Last.fm username (or try mine if you don’t have one : HeyChinaski) it will load you and all the artists you’ve listened to in the last week in to a diagram. It will then load each of your friends and show which of them has been listening to the same artists this week.
I’ve known about this for sometime, but Ariel just announced on the Pownce blog that they have chosen the Pownce+SXSW site I announced yesterday as the one they’ll be promoting at SXSW this weekend.
