Simon Hammond Blog

Lively’s a virtual chat room that you can embed in web pages, mine below:

Kind of lite version of Second Life from Google which requires a simple download and a Google account. I’m guessing this is a strategic attempt for Google to stick a virtual rocket under their social networking effort. Coming to Orkut and Facebook soon, perhaps?

If someone had told me about this I can imagine I’d be sceptical; the bells and whistles of MSN turn me right off. But whilst there’s plenty to be said for a text-only chatroom, the strangeness of disembodied words stands out when you’ve got a chance to.. just be present.

Pros and cons, then. The urge to customise stuff to match your style is irresistible. But it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of Second Life and it regularly crashes out. Sometimes the crash handler itself crashes, causing a cascade of apologetic alerts. Also, it’s only on Windows. It allowed PicasaWeb photo album feeds to be displayed in picture frame but that was buggy and it off right now. You can similarly have virtual TVs looping YouTube clips but that gets annoying very quickly. Public rooms devoted to sex seem to be irrepressible currently.

Still, I like the general idea and implementation and I think I could be a great place for certain small communities to just hang out. Just wish they’d done some testing on it first.

Tags: review by si
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I heard about Plurk via Bounder on Twitter just a while ago and dutifully checked it out. First impression was it’s Twitter-onna-timeline. Further play sparked this strange, warm, fuzzy feeling that I initially put down to attitude.

Plurk has attitude and attitude counts.

It counts because it’s so easy to knock up a status logger (heck, I even rolled one myself). Whereas I never took to the minimal asthetics of the Twitter bird, the headless quadraped of Plurk (a dog?) somehow does it for me. The blog is spiky, witty, philosophical, informative and also cuts to the bone. I give you:

Don’t get us wrong, we love to eat our own dogfood, but we put real effort to ensure that our dogfood tastes good to all breeds of dogs around the world, and not just some small band of cliquish poodles who gather for crumpets every afternoon while sipping on their macchiatos and waxing philosophical on things that don’t matter.

Feature-wise, the timeline may be kind of a gimmick which I can’t see being easily reproduced on a mobile (where all the action is). Plurk also features karma in an incentive to drive recommendation and can embed video and pics from third-parties like Flickr and YouTube. Oh yeah, and threaded comments. No more hacky tracking @s.

The most significant feature for me is ‘cliques’, although I’d call them ‘circles’. With a clique you define an audience, allowing you to separate you personal from your professional from your whatever without all that messing about with separate profiles. Trying to work out the appropriateness of an update for a particular diverse context like Facebook gives me headaches. If Plurk could similarly let me target my cross-posting to sevices like Twitter and Facebook then I would be utterly, utterly sold. If a whole bunch of other people feel the same, is Plurker going to hit the same scaling issues as Twitter? I think not and here’s why:

Twitter’s scaling problem is not the Interweb’s problem.

We don’t need a monolithic status logging any more than we need a universal webmail provider or blogging platform. Users should be able to pick the one that suits their style and receive updates from the others, probably via some kind of pinging mechanism between services. Beta bloggers are likely to continue to hang out on Twitter. College kids will update their status on Facebook. The niches of different crowds will be met with myriad different services yet to emerge, all with a different take yet all working with each other.

It’s just starting to get interesting.

join me on Plurk

Tags: review, social software, web by si
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I’ve been doing this thing for a while now where I take rough notes with my mobile camera.  Whiteboards, opening hours and witty notices are prime targets for my 5 megapixel N80.  I thought this was advanced but geeky.  I now realise I was a bumbling amateur.  Have the information doesn’t mean I get easily find it.

This changed when I got to try Evernote this morning.  It feels a bit like Picasa for notes, enabling you to enter in a stream of tagged notes which can also be sorted into notebooks.  The kicker is that it can search images for likely matches of search terms and it’s extremely reliable, even for low quality mobile pics and handwriting.

This makes it a (slightly clunky) photographic memory and threatens the loose scraps of paper littering my workspace. I don’t have to file my notes; Evernote will throw up likely matches as I type into the search box.

Check the video below to see it in action:

I hooked it up to ShoZu which can automatically mail photos to Evernote in the background straight after taking them (flat-rate data plan essential).   Snap, forget and search.

I have 20 invites if you want to give it a spin.

Tags: review by si
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I love Google Reader for managing and reading my feeds but public sharing leaves something to be desired. I use the share button because it’s right there and I know I’ll be able to find it later. But Google Clippings is kinda clunky. It truncates titles. It indents. Consequently, I could make it almost, but not quite, fit it with the rest of my front page.

I was hoping that latest extension to Reader might address this but it turns out to be a poor imitation of Tumblr, probably trying to ape Facebook sharing with three spoonfuls of cuteness.  The shared items page at the unsnappy http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12953360243211055664 comes in four flavours: ‘Default’, ‘Ice -cream’, ‘Ninjas’ or ‘Sea’. Its saving grace is that it includes an RSS feed.

Enter Yahoo! Pipes, herein referred to simply as Pipes.  I had another peep at Pipes the other day. It’s a seriously fun construction set for a web geek originally based on mashing up RSS feeds but has now expanded out a little more from the stereotypical superfeed usage.

The useful new feature of interest is serialized PHP output renderer. This means I can suck data through Pipes, process and filter it, then pull it into my own page and present it how I like, i.e. I can fix the problem of Google’s clunky presentation of shared items.

That’s my shared items displayed how I like on my site.

Right now, I’m just displaying headlines but I can see myself knocking up simonhammond.com/shared for my Reader-shared stuff at my very next recreational coding break.

Tags: hacking, review, self-referential by si
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