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Two Links Lurk

Two Links Lurk, originally uploaded by david.

Old flickr pictures are really fun.

Dennis Crowley on Foursquare

We think of check-ins as you check-in at Yankee Stadium or you check-in at dinner. But then people use it to check-in to traffic, to check-in to the back of a cab. The playground is a good example. It's not a use case we anticipated. Parents uses it to meet up with other parents with kids. I think that's perfect. Use it whatever way you want.

via radar.oreilly.com

Letting people make mischief or share experiences that aren't anchored to "place" is the cornerstone of why Foursquare is successful. With the explosion of blogs, facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts, Friendster's war against the "fakesters" (I was friends with the iPod and the F Train) seems like a turning point in the history of social networks.

Big Time Textuality

textually.org has been on fire recently. If you like cell phones & mobile technology, be prepared to lose your afternoon! Some highlights: San Jose art museum to offer guided tours over cell phones, library reminders over sms, man's corpse phones home (as his coffin was being lowered into the ground!), sms boom leads to digit damage (3.8 million people now complain of text-related injuries every year!), Prague hospital announces death by SMS, and mcomic makes it easy for independent comics to distribute their work over SMS.

The New Rules

Lifeblog post
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

• Please do not flickr the artworks
• Please do not sms the artworks
• Please do not Powerbook the artworks
• Please do not Hot Coffee the artworks

How I want SMS to work

Charlie's post Gmail on the move? Almost. inspired me to comment how I think messaging on the phone should work. I left this as a comment, and "too late," I realized it should be a post.

This isn't starry eyed "the crazy future of SMS," rather it's a few enhancements that I think could be made to SMS and Lifeblog soon on the Nokia phones that are shipping right now.

I used Gmail's pop option on my 6630* and it worked very well. It only downloaded new messages, it was always fast, and I never had trouble sending. However, I am still not sure I *want* email on my phone(s). I'd rather have better text messaging integrated with Lifeblog.

• SMS syncs w/ Outlook/Mail.app via Lifeblog
• iChat like view of many quick SMS back and forth (Treo has this, no?)
• Sort by sender!
• Flag messages (Lifeblog has this now, kind of, if you mark a message as a favorite)
• Let me classify my SMS by what it really is. Right now in my inbox I have all of these kinds of messages:
• address/phone numbers I send to myself as a note
• 46645/GOOGL requests (again, usually an address)
• chats / conversations
• web service results (nagios and dodgeball)

One thing Lifeblog handles very well (close to perfectly) - any note, movie, image or sound can be a blog post, and the verification message has a clear purpose and is easy to forward on as a message (Okay, I'll get starry eyed for a second - imagine a mobile Forwardtrack.) All of this assumes people will start using lifeblog as their primary messaging app, and that lifeblog will be getting mac support and remain backwards compatible, which I know is a tall order.

* Before it bit the dust! See some final pictures: Meg and morning glories, Meg and I running (waddling?) in the this weekend's 4 miler and Adriana and I's front "yard" container garden. I'll miss that phone.

Stop Text Bullying

Stop Text Bully:

Mobile phones are great – you can stay in touch with your mates, chat to new friends, and have fun with cool ringtones, photos and video clips. But text bullies can use mobiles to get at you any time.

This is a totally different problem than spam, obviously, but I wonder if some of the same social trust technology and whitelisting software built to stop spam can also help to stop bullies. I also wonder what, if any, off-line bullying organizations they're working with.

The Future of Open Mobile Technology

Great hack: GPS on a Nokia 6630 using Google Maps. If that's not a hack built to get on Boing Boing, I don't know what is. [ed: it's already on boing boing].

We're barely reaching the point where phones have the hardware to run relatively processor intensive applications, the network is fast enough to download images faster than you can scroll through them and (most importantly), the phone vendors open up their APIs so developers can innovate. In this case enabler is Python for Series 60 and the python libraries made available by "rancid bacon." [ed: If they ever invent a time machine, I'm going to go back to 1995 and say that sentence to somebody: "In this case, the enabler is ... Python libraries made available by rancid bacon."]

I wrote my first few lines of python this weekend, and it wasn't altogether unpleasant. Somedays I'm afraid Perl has taken me as far as it is going to, and that I need to adapt. Not that I don't have a ton to learn, just that it's hard to motivate myself to sharpen an existing skill compared with the excitement of something totally new.

[ed: is it self-indulgent to say that the future of open mobile technology involves "rancid bacon" and "python"? [ed: hello jason]]

Movie Gadget Friday

Movie Gadget Friday: The Cursed Video Tape from the Ring.

You can actually make your own cursed tape, although first you’ll have to develop nensha, the ability to psychically project images of misery onto tape, or I guess, the format of your choice. No doubt we’ll see cursed DVD and cursed TiVo hard drives in the new movie, and if we’re really lucky, cursed Game Boy cartridges

Look out player haters (*looks in mirror*) - Engadget has gotten good! Who knew? I loved The Ring. Since I was little, I've always had a deep-seated fear of infinity - I used to have nightmares about huge piles of "objects" that had to be moved or sorted. Perhaps this is why I've always been driven towards computers as a hobby.

A new game on FlickR

The Door and the Orange Guy
Originally uploaded by david.

We're pretty sure we know what this is, but we're not 100% sure. And so I've created a new tag on flickR "Name This Plant." Hopefully it catches on.

MobileWhack

MobileWhack is the 3650 hacks site I've wanted to do myself, but haven't had the time for. One less item on the todo list (thanks Rael!) Two highlights - unlocking your Nokia and MobileRSS.net. I have some perl code that allows you to duplicate the MobileRSS service pretty trivially, which I'll publish soon.