September 2008
Nokia Pilots: Handedness
Nokia Pilots Client Portal, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Wow. Handedness in a profile form is a first for me, although I think Ambithumbstrous should be an option.
This appears in the sign-up form at Nokia Pilots, where we can participate in steering the design direction for Nokia. A survey there revealed that I am a ‘Technology Leader’ sort of beast. Amazing! They...
Last Minute Announcements: Orange Spotlight and...
There is just too much going down these days (and I am not just referring to the stock market). A few last minute announcements:
This afternoon, I am collaborating with Mark Plakias and Pascale Diaine in an Orange Spotlight event at Plug & Play in Sunnyvale:
[from Orange Spotlight: Collective Action at Plug & Play (Tuesday September 30, 2008) - Upcoming]
Tuesday September 30,...
Jason Calacanis And Thomas Friedman On A Brand New...
Jason Calacanis is a survivor, and offers up some tough love for entrepreneurs who are shell shocked by the financial events of the last few weeks, on top of the chilling in start-up funding that has been worsening for some months now. He starts with a pronouncement:
[from Calacanis: Collapsing Economy Will Kill 50%-80% Of Startups]
It’s my believe that the economic downturn will be...
Phweet: VOIP Via Twitter
My old pal Stuart Henshall showed me a new app he has developed called Phweet. Phweet tees up a VOIP call between you and other users of Twitter.
Here’s the Tweet I got from Stuart inviting me to Phweet:
Phweet Tweet, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
And once we connected:
Phweet - Public Alpha, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
We had a nice chat — about Phweet —...
Planning My Talk For Defrag: Lifestreaming From...
Titles for talk often undergo a subtle shifting of meaning, over time. Then I first discussed speaking at Defrag with Eric Norlin back in May, I proposed a tentative title: “Flow: The Still Point Of The Turning World?”. Somehow, after just a few months of acceleration in the coming-to-a-streaming-app-near-you web marketplace, my talk had become “Is the flow just too much?...
links for 2008-09-25
Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate(tags: automattic intensedebate conversation+aggregation)
Drew Olanoff and Strands
I started using Strands, a new ‘lifestreaming” application — at least new to me — and keeping it open on my desktop just to see if it is going to infect my DNA:
Strands - Dashboard : Index, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I interviewed Drew Olanoff, part of the Strands team, the other day at Blogworld Expo.
More to follow on Strands once I have become...
Yahoo AOL Talks
I guess I can confess that I am baffled by Yahoo, a company that only a few years ago had such promise and was buying up what I would have bet was a critical mass of social tools companies — Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog, etc. — but was unable to herd the cats up the beach. Really smart innovators — Jeff Bonforte, Eric Marcoullier, Joshua Schachter, Stewart Butterfield,...
Another Small Step/Giant Leap...
guest post by David Cushman
Just came across SocialMention (via Mashable). Looks like what you’d get if summize (twitter search) came busting out of its one-network silo and went trawling the internet (which, is what summize has been promising for some little time now).
As such, a useful finger in the air for sentiment.
But let’s not forget, that’s all it is.
Listening...
links for 2008-09-23
WebWorkerDaily » Archive Would You Go Back to Fulltime Office Work? « Celine Roque does a good job summarizing various threads about the negatives of telework that leads a lot back to cubeland. (tags: telework)
apophenia: I will be joining Microsoft Research in January danah boyd will be joining Microsoft Research in Boston starting in January. (tags: danah+boyd microsoft+research)
...
Who do you follow?
guest post by David Cushman
Stowe has a phrase. It’s one of my favourites:
“I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections.”
Who is the ‘greatest’ one among any network? We’d like to think it’s any and all of us - a moveable feast in an adhoc group-forming world.
From occasion to occasion a different one among us is raised...
How to track your brand on the social web
Twitter has undergone a small facelift as announced in the official blog, here. I seldom go to the website, so I might never have noticed, but 140Char’s comments sparked my interest:
[From Cosmetic Changes To Twitter…]
So far, I’m experiencing the ‘Supermarket Effect’, which is demonstrated when your local supermarket moves everything around - and even if it actually makes...
links for 2008-09-22
The Pervasiveness of Streams <blockquote>What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type. While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time. Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to...
links for 2008-09-21
textually.org: Apple recalling iPhone 3G power adapters <blockquote>No injuries have been reported, but Apple is warning users of those power adapters to stop using them immediately until they obtain a redesigned adapter. Check the bottom of your adapter: if there’s a green dot, you’ve got the redesigned one and don’t need to do anything. If there’s no dot,...
links for 2008-09-20
Ethan Kaplan On Yammer “We used Yammer for about two minutes, got bored and went back to using Skype.” (tags: yammer ethan+kaplan)
140Char » Cosmetic changes to Twitter…. “So far, I’m experiencing the ‘Supermarket Effect’, which is demonstrated when your local supermarket moves everything around - and even if it actually makes shopping quicker, you still complain for...
Tribal Etiquette
guest post by Matt Balara
This week I was a bit surprised to watch myself react extremely suspiciously to a company I would’ve welcomed with open arms a few years ago. And all due to social tools and their effect on how I communicate and think.
It started when I got a mail to tell me that @transfergroup was following me on Twitter. So I went through the routine: open their page, check ...
Cisco To Buy Jabber
Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Jabber, Inc. for an undisclosed amount. This is just the most recent of a series of acquisitions — Webex being the largest, and PostPath the most recent — where Cisco has clearly demonstrated it’s desire to contend with Microsoft for the large and growing market for enterprise collaboration.
I was unable to attend GigaOm’s...
links for 2008-09-19
Kevin Kelly on The Whole Earth Catalog as Blog Precursor “This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.” (tags: kevin+kelly whole+earth+catalog blogging)
FriendFeed Dials Down the Noise With Duplicate Detection - ReadWriteWeb I might have to...
What I Am Up To At BlogWorld Expo
Following Louis Gray’s lead, I thought I’d note down the various things I am involved in at BlogWorld Expo.
Friday:
1:00PM - 1:30PM Exhibitor Meeting b5media Blogger Summit: Advisory Board Q&A (b55) 229
Renee Blodgett Stowe Boyd Hugh McLeod Robert Scoble Doc Searls
Saturday:
11:00AM - 12:00PM Executive Twitter: Building the Connections that Drive Traffic (S203) ...
links for 2008-09-18
Wired Gadget Labs Makes MSI Wind Into A Hackintosh This is what I want, but on an even smaller netbook; something with like an 8” screen. And I want to hear that the Wifi works. (tags: hackintosh gadget+lab wired mac+os+x msi+wind howto)
Apple to Sony & Nintendo: Let the Games Begin - GigaOM Thord Daniel Hedengren thinks Apple is not ready to battle for the handheld games market....
Fred Wilson Is Dreaming
Whether or not people want to be the seat next to the big, fat, sweaty guy talking on his phone (or VOIP via headset) on the LA to NYC flight, we certainly want to be able to take a critically important business or family call 30,000 feet over Kansas City, and who cares if the people around us on the plane don’t like it?
Fred Wilson is expressing the ‘doubt in advance of...
Tools I Use
I was asked — in preparation for an upcoming interview — to describe the software that I use regularly, so I thought it might a good post here.
Blogging: Typepad and Tumblr
I have used nearly every platform out there, but I still have a mass of blogs — /Message, /Ground, and /Mind — on Typepad. I started /Message in early 2006, but I had been using Typepad for a long...
danah boyd on Facebook Ethnic Cleansing
Packrat is a new Facebook game where people add friends to be able to play more effectively. As reported by Mike Arrington, Facebook is saying that adding friends in this way breaks the user terms of service, and they have started to delete peoples’ accounts who are doing it most aggressively
[from Facebook Isn’t A Social Network. And Stop Trying to Make New Friends There]
[…]
...
Dopplr Raises A Second Angel Round
Dopplr has announced raising an additional round of financing to help fuel growth in the social travel service. It’s an undisclosed amount, and all from angels:
Dopplr Blog.
The new investors include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and...
links for 2008-09-17
Predicting Enterprise 2.0 Adoption I disagree with the notion that Enterprise 2.0 is about groups not the individual. On the contrary: Web 2.0 is based on the person and personal relationships in networks, not group membership. (tags: socialtext “enterprise 2.0” “social tools”)
Porn Falls As Young Men Turn To Social Networks
Apparently, the social impulse is trumping porn, according to web researcher Bill Tancer:
[from Social networking websites more popular than porn, says study - Telegraph]
[…]
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” he said.
A decade ago, porn-related searches accounted for 20 per cent of all internet searches made, he noted....
Don't Cross The Streams: Try to imagine all life...
Sunday, I will be sitting in with a group of smart edglings at Blogworld, discussing various aspects of the rapidly changing webosphere. I think that the group will include Brian Solis, Louis Gray, Tedd Corman, and yours truly, and we are talking aout 11am or 12:15pm MT, to be determined.
Brian stirred things up by emailing us about the panel, which I don’t think is in the online...
6 tags
Twitter will make us the Borg. Resistance is...
Clive Thompson has done a magisterial job in his exploration into the belly of streaming (or flow) applications, focusing on the mouthfeel of Twitter and Facebook, and doing what I would have thought was impossible: getting across the value of this foreign, hivemind experience to a hypothetical Everyman:
[from Brave New World of Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson]
[…]
Social ...
Mogulus and Ustream.tv: I Am A TV Station
It’s actually kind of paradoxical that I am experimenting with technologies that will allow me to broadcast shows on the web, since I hardly watch television. The the exploding culture of web video is a different beast, and I love the immediacy of video interviews. So, starting a few weeks ago I began fooling around with various applications to learn what is possible.
After some...
Talking Business - Stuck in Google’s Doghouse -...
Link: Talking Business - Stuck in Google’s Doghouse - NYTimes.com.
The problem with monopolists, of course, is that they just can’t help acting like monopolists, even supposedly benign monopolists like Google and even when they are not consciously trying to rub out the competition. They are always right and everybody else is wrong. They have disdain for their own customers, knowing those...
Social Tools For Parents
The NY Times did a piece today on the wave of kid-oriented social apps, which, actually are for the parents:
[from It’s Social Networking for Babies - Twitter From the Cradle - NYTimes.com by Camille Sweeney]
Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, ...
Return To Web Conferencing: DimDim
I am trying to decrease my travel, and in so doing, I have reanimated my personal interest in using web conferencing solutions. So, I ran around the web in the last week, sniifing out solutions that work with my Mac.
The monsters in this space are Webex (too expensive), LiveMeeting (too expensive), and GoToMeeting (way too expensive). I wanted something with video and shared desktop ...
SurroundSend
I got an invitation today via a new Evite-ish service called Pingg. I liked the looks of the invitation, so I clicked through to learn about it it a little, and discovered that the service includes something called SurroundSend, so that users can easily notify others about Pingg events via Facebook, Twitter and other social network apps:
SurroundSend - pingg.com, originally uploaded by...
Yammer Tops TechCrunch50
I was not surprised to hear that Yammer won the top prize at TechCrunch50. I singled them out in my Twittering at the conference as one of the companies with a clear business proposition.
Obliquely, this is also confirmation of the basic concept of work streaming that I have been advocating for a long long time, and is the basis of Workstreamer. The idea that work activities — like...
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Stowe Boyd and The Messengers: It's Not A Band
Stowe Boyd and The Messengers the name of my business, which is me as front man, and a shifting cast of occasional others.
The name comes from a strange occurrence. Back in 2006, I think, I received a request through some web-based event service, and it turned out to be that a co-ed wanted me to come to Albany NY, to play at her college. Apparently she thought I was a band. Since my blog was...
Mooplr
My pal and contributor here at /Message, Matt Balara, is sporting some new stickers on his mac, courtesy of the nice folks at Dopplr, who cooked them up for the recent dConstruct conference. They show various cities in the colors that Dopplr uses:
Matt Balara’s MacBook, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
I was bummed that I couldn’t get some, but read at the Dopplr blog that...
Hot Spam
guest post by Matt Balara
It appears my theory posted back in July wasn’t so misguided after all. This from “Turning Up The Heat on Spam” from the Twitter blog:
Suspending a spam account only works after it’s already caused some damage. We have enhanced our admin tools to more accurately factor your feedback for a more timely diagnosis. When you block a spam account,...
Announcing /Aviso
I have been remiss in making some key announcements in recent days.
/Aviso, a new video show co-produced by The /Messengers and FW Studios, has gone live. Alison McNeill of FW Studios is my cohost. We plan a monthly show, and we will be shooting most of it live starting with the next show.
You can watch it over there in the right sidebar, or up on Mogulus at www.mogulus/aviso, which is the ...
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Twitter Stream: Day One, TechCrunch 50
I was pretty talky yesterday at TechCrunch50.
[via twitter.com/stoweboyd TC50 internet is down. Ha! 09:06 AM September 08, 2008 from twhirl At #tc50 in the press section 09:06 AM September 08, 2008 from twhirl @sarahcuda is getting way more hugs than me. I don’t think I can keep sitting next to her. #tc50 09:09 AM September 08, 2008 from twhirl in reply to sarahcuda Just met...
Connecting at dConstruct
guest post by Matt Balara
I just got back from my first dConstruct, a yearly conference in Brighton, focussed this year on designing the social web. With speakers such as Steven Johnson, Joshua Porter, the Matts Biddulph & Jones and others, it was as interesting and informative as expected, but I’m not going to write a fat summary here since so many others have already done so admirably...
Office 2.0 Recap
I agree with Sam Lawrence, that Ofiice 2.0 fell far short of expectations:
[from Go Big Always - Will the “2.0 Conferences” survive? by Sam Lawrence}
I hate to say it but overall last week’s Office 2.0 Conference was a miss.
Poor Ismael only gives himself 6 weeks from start to finish to plan and execute the whole thing (and he doesn’t do this gig full time). The guy is brilliant and...
Lunch over IP: LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty
Link: Lunch over IP: LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty.
To see the future, look at the present. We interviewed a group of “elite nomads”, the bleeding edge of global travelling users. Here some of the findings:
* Data-roaming costs stifle demand; people downgrade to pure voice; they carry several prepaid SIM cards. Reliable Internet connection is like a shade under a palmtree...
3 tags
School of Everything Boing Boinged
Cory Doctorow likes School of Everything, which just launched:
[from School of Everything: eBay for knowledge - Boing Boing]
Last night, I attended the launch of School of Everything, a new web service that acts as a kind of eBay for people who have something to teach.
[…]
this is the kind of thing I mean when I give lectures about “profiting from the information economy.”...
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Omnigoogle
Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The Omnigoogle.
But while Google has an odd business model, it’s not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal...
Umair Haque And Nick Carr On Google Chrome
Link: How to Chrome Your Industry - Umair Haque.
Chrome is a shared resource that ensures the sustainable growth of a larger ecosystem. There are two key words in that sentence. The first is shared. Google is investing in a shared resource because it has the potential to expand the pie dramatically for all, and so Google stands to benefit more than by hoarding it. The second is sustainable...
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You
I guess Clive Thompson had a different title in mind when he started working on the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy piece, since my Firefox shows I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You as the document title:
I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Maybe it was an editor feeling a bit snarky?
Lunch over IP: LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty
Link: Lunch over IP: LiftAsia08: Tending towards beauty.
To see the future, look at the present. We interviewed a group of “elite nomads”, the bleeding edge of global travelling users. Here some of the findings:
* Data-roaming costs stifle demand; people downgrade to pure voice; they carry several prepaid SIM cards. Reliable Internet connection is like a shade under a palmtree...
Snackr: An RSS News Ticker
I used an RSS bot for years, integrated with AIM and Gtalk, called Feedcrier. Alas, I could never get it to do exactly what I wanted, but it was close.
In a nutshell, I wanted to load in a gazillion RSS feeds, and have new posts pop up whenever they were published. I have always hated the RSS reader model of consuming posts like so many Pez candies. However, I have started to gravitate...
The Gleam Of Chrome
Chris Messina has said some of the things I have been muttering this week, since the Chrome announcement by Google, including the manifestoness of Scott McCloud’s comic book about the new browser:
[from Google Chrome and the future of browsers]
Scott McCloud’s drawings aren’t just a useful pictorial explanation of what to expect in Chrome; it’s practically a declaration of...
Europe To Cap Roaming Fees
Looks like the EU is going to finally address the mess that is European cell phone roaming:
[from Europe Weighs Caps on Roaming Fees for Text Messages - NYTimes.com by Kevin O’Brien]
The European Union’s telecommunications minister will propose price controls that would substantially reduce the roaming fees that individuals are charged to send text messages and limits that could...
