Just heard through Twitter that Twhirl, my (and most everyone’s) favorite Twitter client, has added support for identi.ca in a still unreleased beta version. identi.ca, for those who haven’t heard about it, is a Twitter clone that is based on the Laconica open source microblogging platform, which allows anyone with access to a web server to host their own microblogging platform à la Twitter. Even though the release is still marked as beta, you can get it over here. You must also register your IM address with identi.ca and add the identi.ca user as your IM buddy in order to get XMPP notifications to work.
So what’s the big fuss? Well, XMPP notifications is what a lot of people have been expecting Twitter to deliver more widely for a long time - at the moment, only a select few partners (including Summize, which they bought onyl a few days ago) have access to this feed. Twhirl has had support for XMPP for a while now, but it’s been pretty useless as their main platform does not openly support it. I guess it’s a good test for Twhirl, to get some public use of this function so it’s ready when Twitter opens up.
Are you on identi.ca? Subscribe to me, let’s see how this works!
Sorry about that, I’ve just switched jobs, and as usual it takes a while to fall into the new schedule - so the blog suffers. Should get back to a steady rythm sometime soon.
Polar Rose, a facial recognition based search engine that allows you to find photos of people by their name, is getting ready to enter public beta. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them with my invite (at last, I was subscribed since around November 2006!), and their blog states that they have a “public beta coming up“.
Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in Sweden, where they are based. After their model gets good enough, Polar Rose is then able to automatically recognise who a face belongs to. It is even capable of recognizing all the people in a photo - searching for someone on the website tells you who they’ve been seen with lately (Barack Obama was seen with Rev. Jeremiah Wright much more than with Hillary Clinton, for instance).
Polar Rose seems to work great, but to become efficient it needs a lot of people tagging photos, and right now I don’t see much of an incentive to do that. Yes, I am using the plugin, but then I wil try out just about anything new that I can come across on the ‘net, which is not something you can expect most people to do. The technology itself is great, but right now they need to work on engaging users to build their index. And hey, if you want to get the web celebrities happy about you, then you really should recognize Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble (see the screenshot)
Read it at Andrew Dobrow’s blog: as a protest against Twitter’s continuing availability issues, he sugests people take o while day off Twitter. I’m all for it, definitely. Even if I’m not one of the biggest Twitter users out there, I do really enjoy it - it’s just a pity that I live so far from civilization… And as Andrew himself said it, this is happening precisely because people like Twitter so much, and it’s not just about being ungrateful. And I would add the following sugestion to the discussion: not only spend a day without Twitter, but switch over to Pownce for that day. Pownce actually has better features thatn Twitter while still keeping things very simple. The folks at Twitter might be better motivated to sort out their issues if they become afraid of losing users to the competition. The day is May 21st, next Wednesday, so add that to your GCal, Remember The Milk, or wherever you keep you notes and appointments.
Less than two months after moving to our new home at Webfaction and activating Akismet on the blog (previously I used Spam Karma), Akismet today reports that it has caught an astonishing 1000 comment spams. Considering this count starts on March 19th, and that the blog has very little traffic, this is quite astonishing, isn’t it? According to Google Analytics, I haven’t even had that same number of pageviews ever since I started tracking the blog… Where will this end? And I wonder what it’s like for the very large blogs, how much spam they must surely get. Any of you A-listers reading care to comment ?
[UPDATE] Problogger’s Darren Rowse replied through Twitter, and it’s ridiculous: he’s had 3,911,810 comments blocked so far in one of his blogs!
Just a quick note to those who use Google Desktop for WIndows: it eats up hard drive space like nothing I’ve seen! I ran out of disk space on my system partition yesterday while running a large video convertion task, and after some searching I found the culprit - Google Desktop creates an entirely different index for each user in your machine. I use my laptop in different customer’s networks (and different AD domains), so I have about five user accounts in my machine. Each index was taking up about 2 GB. In my 30 GB system partition, you can see how that will quickly show up… So a word of warning, if it feels like you should have more disk space than you do, check out your Google Desktop index at C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop.
Saw this one over at FriendFeed Watch: the first desktop client for FriendFeed was released! I was looking forward to this, as FriendFeed is such a nice and well implemented idea that justs begs to become a permanent resident of my system tray, rather than having to keep a browser tab permanently open to check on it. The client is called bTittleTattle (yea, don’t ask), and it was made by the guys at Sobees. It is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation so, unfortunately, Windows only forever :( Check out the video below to see what it looks like.
I basically didn’t like it at all, and that seems to be the same opinion over at FriendFeedWatch. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the rumoured Air client get released. Its future website still shows a “Under construction” page.
[UPDATE]: Less than twelve hours after my post, there is a new version out. In this new version, I found three different themes, which I must say I did not see in the original version, so I’m not sure if they were already there or not. And now, we can get rid if the bee! With a different theme, the app becomes much more usable, the only important thing still missing is minimize to tray. Take a look at the grey theme in the screenshot. And François, thanks for your attention
Loïc has just told Seesmic users that a new user interface is up at http://api.seesmic.com/home. Just tried it out, and it is looking very nice. It is much lighter than the current interface (both visually and in terms of performance), and while it is not quite finished yet (Loïc said this himself in his post), I think it is a step in the right direction. The current interface is a little dark and heavy in my opinion, and until the SeesmicAir client (the link seems to be broken right now) gets recording capabilities, it’s the only way to be constantly interacting with the service - so it should be as light as possible.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, Seesmic is a new web app, like Twitter only for video, and trust me, it is really cool. You can see my little Seesmic widget on the sidebar to the right. It has caught my attention not only because it really is a cool service, but also by the way its founder Loïc Le Meur is running the business. The whole process has been extremely open and participative, in a way that I had not seen before. I am now as much a fan of the company as I am of the service it offers. It’s currently in closed beta, but you can get an invite relatively easily through InviteShare. Check it out!
This one is for the people who often ask me, when I embark on another “for pleasure” project, “when are you going to do something that makes some money?”. Well, how about this for an example: Marco Kaiser, a german developer, had his own little personal project called Twhirl. Twhirl is a Twitter client written for Adobe’s AIR - I use it, and it’s the best Twitter client there is. Who knows what motivated him to do it, he was probably a Twitter user frustrated by the state of current desktop clients, so the guy goes ou there and makes his own. He probably had a couple of friends who told him “why waste your time on this when you could use these hours to take up another freelance customer”, or “go do something profitable”, or anything along those lines. Today we hear that Marco has sold Twhirl to web startup Seesmic. Not only has Marco’s past hobby suddendly become very profitable, he now has something of a name among startup circles, plus a new job working full time on Twhirl’s development, paid for by Seesmic. It’s fairly safe to say his life has changed a bit.
This fits right in to something I’m reading right now, and which has completely fascinated me - Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. To keep it short, the book is all about how we are greatly affected by completely unexpected and unpredictable events (the Black Swans). So Marco Kaiser was just hit by a black swan - there he was, happily coding away at his hobby project, when one day he gets offered a nice amount of cash and a job because of his previously unprofitable time-sink. It’s just like the book’s analogy to a turkey that gets continuously very well fed for one thousand days, making it feel very good about life in general, until it gets slaughtered to be served for dinner. So, never throw away an idea so lightly, you never know when a black swan might be coming your way - and keep spending all the time you like in your worthless, non-profitable hobbies
To finish off: readers who have read the book might say that I am falling for confirmation bias, that is, I am using one single success story to justify my point, ignoring the millions of failures out there. Not quite true - all I am saying is that if you enjoy it, keep doing it, and you might just find a black swan around the corner. If you don’t find it, but enjoy yourself in the process, then all is well.
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