nonsmokingarea.com

time for a quick holiday-posting… just found this post on the official Last.fm-blog on their arrangements for load-monitoring… I love the gauge for displaying the website’s response time

don’t get me wrong, it’s great that twhirl added support for identi.ca in their latest release pushed out tonight. at least it will make me use identi.ca more often. however twhirl missed an important point. which is: identi.ca ain’t a Twitter-clone, it’s a distributed Twitter-clone! so it just doesn’t make sense you can’t add any other laconica-servers than identi.ca to the twhirl client (I’ve made this amateurish mockup below, to make my point ). but still, kudos to Marco Kaiser & seesmic, I’m pretty sure this will get ironed out rather soon…

update: having identi.ca in twhirl for few hours makes it so clear, that this should be an open, interoperable service…after a while you just forget weither you’re using Twitter or identi.ca…

few days ago, I’ve received an automated e-mail by Virel.org - a microformat-aware search-engine/web-crawler based in Germany. obviously they indexed the hCard embedded on this blog, cool! currently they seem to restrict their service to personal data (hCard) and events (hCalendar), which brings me to the point: is there actually a service out there making use of hAudio, the microformat for annotating audio-data? I think I remember that Yahoo had something up their sleeves, but haven’t seen any implementation yet… (the reason I’m asking: I’ve been adding hAudio to an earlier project, and am wondering if I should consider adding hAudio to it’s successor, or strip it out) what about other microformat-aware search engines?

anyway, here’s how my indexed hCard is presented by Virel:

just watched the first episode of ‘The Social Web TV’ (discovered via Marc Canter, People Aggregator). hosted by David Recordon (sixapar), John McCrea & Joseph Smarr (both Plaxo), the show decodes the tech-lingo/buzzwords on current concepts of interoperability among social web-apps. the first episode features the ongoing facebook<>google-embargo, gnip, identi.ca etc. nice one!

the net is buzzing on identi.ca, a twitter-esque microblogging-service launched by Evan Prodromou a few days ago. as of today, identi.ca lacks many key-features Twitter has (SMS-gateway, API) or used to have (track). but criticizing identi.ca’s need to catch up is missing the point, as it’s not competing with Twitter on the level of features (yet), but rather on the underlying principles of message-transportation: identi.ca is based on laconi.ca, an opensource implementation of the OpenMicroBlogging-spec, which basically means - everbody can install his very own instance of laconi.ca/identi.ca on their own servers! the OpenMicroBlogging-spec is the glue that sticks those independent instances of laconi.ca together, enabling subscriptions (aka following) & postings across various systems. in a nutshull, a distributed network of laconi.ca’s promises independence from the fail-whale…

how does this work out for the user? lets assume you’re using microblogging-platform A and want to follow someone at platform B. you find that someone’s profile on platform B and click “subscribe”. remember, you have no account on B, so you’re now asked to enter your user-ID from platform A, which contains the URL of A plus your username, something like http://platform-a.com/username.

Read the rest of this entry »

fbCal is a godsend for those who tend to forget birthdays (like me) and rarely log into Facebook anymore (like me) [even when I did, I never really noticed the upcoming birthdays on the homepage anyway]. fbCal (a Facebook-app) generates RSS-/iCalendar-feeds for your friends’ birthdays & your upcoming events on FB, which you then can pipe into Google Calendar, iCal etc. but don’t cry if you still forget your best friends birthday, maybe he/she hasn’t made this data available to you on FB at all…

…must be posterous! to start blogging, follow these steps:

1. sign-up at posterous.com
2. e-mail your first post to post@posterous.com

that’s it, really! after receiving your first e-mail, posterous sets up your blog at an auto-generated URL like michael-go12qr.posterous.com. ok, if you’re not into these kind of URLs, there’s one last step:

      3. visit your new blog & change the URL to something more human readable.

just hat a great time toying around with PicLens, a browser-extension that displays image-streams in a semi-3D environment. controlling the image-stream is easy: use the scrollbar to swift through pictures quickly and smoothly, zoom using the mouse-wheel.

PicLens is available for Firefox, IE, Safari, works fullscreen, and basically supports any website offering RSS-feeds with enclosures (f.e. flickr, photobucket, smugmug). There’s also support for YouTube and Amazon.

sorry for the recent lack of updates on this blog folks… just too much workload…

anyway, just stumbled over these interesing Twitter-client usage-stats at Neoformix…in a nutshell: web-usage is dominating much more than I’ve thought it would…

Tripwolf is the latest project launched by austrian incubator i5invest (others include email charity, Papermint and 123people), and this time it’s all about social travel meets wiki. Tripwolf scores with a very polished design, smart features against social-fatigue (i.e. importing your social graph from Facebook) and a very ajax-ified user-interface. the printed PDF-travel-guides might seem a bit oldschool but are definitely a great idea. other features like the Dopplr-like “My Trips” (just guessing…) are still to come.

If you’re eager to try it out, Tripwolf kindly provided me with 50 invites - and be sure to visit the only place in the world I’ld easily qualify for as a “trip-guru”