Simon Hammond Blog

I’ve been harbouring nagging doubts of late about referring to myself as an ‘early adopter’ of web goodies.  Reflecting on it the other day, I realised the full extent of my delusion.

home.html

I abused the computer science web server in 94 or 95 with multicoloured buttons and blinking text.   Along with my geeky friends I could see a future in which everyone had their own home page on Geocities.

Then Myspace came along and Facebook chased it up.  I was late for both.

e-mail

It was an introduction to Hotmail from a non-geeky friend in 1998 that weaned me off university e-mail accounts and onto webmail.  I later shelled out a couple of quid on eBay for a Gmail invite wanting to beat the inevitable rush.

Hotmail still trumps Gmail for numbers although ‘Facebook mail’ may ultimately bypass both.

web 2.0

From the Summer of 2004 I was tagging my photos in Flickr and bookmarks in del.icio.us.  Both were giving me stuff of real quality and motivating me to contribute.

I got the Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and paid off their paying users in 2003.  Five years later and most hardcore ‘bloggers’ are using Wordpress (without switching to ‘pressers’).

Before Twitter had sprouted it vowels, I’d registered as the 3018th user.  A couple of years — and SXSW events — later and I am now able to follow a selection of the local digerati.  But most of my geeky friends are declining to tweet, or even blog.

Facebook is a one-stop shop mail, photos, videos, status, sharing are all made supremely simple whilst actually being technically sophisticated.  Yet my adoption of it is only marginal at best.

my point

If I search for “welcome to” in the subject line of my inbox I get 130 hits.  I’m a serial tinkerer.  An inveterate fiddler.  A compulsive invite-requester.  But I’m clearly not an early adopter.  Rather than being further down the road I’m actually off the beaten track. Instead of being ‘ahead of the curve’ I’m actually zipping off it at random tangents.

There’s a small swarm of us in Brum who wouldn’t be without Flickr, Gmail, Delicious, Wordpress, Twitter et al.  We all get fantastic value out of these tools which connect, organise and inspire us to create.

Now, I don’t expect ordinary users to join us later on.  And I don’t find that a problem.  We adopt these apps whilst Facebook apps are adopting everyone else.  We are motivated differently.

So what does this mean for the ’social web’?

Tags: self-referential, social software, web 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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I’ve clearly got too much time on my hands: the front page has had yet another sweep.

I’m fighting a geeky inclination to pile on the info and paste in every widget I can lay my hands on. I’d like to say that this is just about being open but too much me-and-mine and it starts to reek of egotism. Such stuff is rampant on Facebook but I’m hoping to make this site less introspective.

But then what’s the point of having myname.com? First and foremost, the site is a point of contact and a placeholder. On top of that, I’m not sure.

Do visitors visit my site for a snapshot of everything related to me a la Facebook? Or should it merely a dry listing or the web services I use? This hardly seems necessary when I use the same username for almost everything. Of course, it’s easy to merge this all together with something like Yahoo Pipes but who wants every damn thing? Stalkers?

Much better to let people discover and connect where they hang out. I would say it’s not so much about privacy as context. I can bear the thought that someone might see I’ve just listened to some cheesy 80s tracks but it doesn’t need to be on my front page.

I’ve put recent links, clippings and reads on the front page as well in mind of the kind of conversations which go:

Have the heard anything about the next generation iPod with touch screen?

I heard the next generation will have fingerprint recognition that locks the device to a single user.

That’s insane, impossible and immoral. Where did you read such implausible crap?

Check my delicious stream, username sixball

Your WHAT?

Go to my webpage.

Tags: self-referential by si
3 Comments »

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

— Henry David Thoreau

My stuff on the web is leaking and duplicating all over the shop. My Last.fm is embedded in my Facebook profile. My Flickr photostream is a contributory to my steaming tumblr along with random, recycled tidbits. Recent bookmarks and clippings are gathered on my homepage — along with Flickr photos.

It’s a mess.

It’s also a hot Friday afternoon so I’m ready to rationalise this schizophrenic web identity. Looking over the feeds, blogs and profile pages I can see some trends.

Facebook for Friends Only
My Facebook profile would like to be my e-mail, blog, photo, gallery, shared links, etc. But it’s not public. It’s at least restricted to Facebook members from my ‘networks’ (meaningless West Midlands currently) and much of it is only accessible to arbitrary acquaintances, aka ‘friends’. I don’t have complete control over what I can put in or how it’s displayed. But it does have that magical social graph which I will now ride purely for social larks.

SimonHammond.com for Anything Public
Anything that might as well be public will be as embedded widgets on the simonhammond.com hub. This will show recent Flickr photos, Reader clippings, Del.icio.us links, LibraryThing books and my latest Bodtracker status. Along with Facebook, this will also link to public side-blogs and the Tumblr.

Tumblr for Random Tidbits
The Tumblr will no longer mash together all my outpourings but will be given over entirely to those random, recycled tidbits with maybe the odd quote thrown in. If you were getting everything through the tumblr feed before then you’ll have to subscribe individually now (or badger me into producing a merged feed with Yahoo pipes).

Tags: self-referential, unfiled, web by si
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