Hmmm twitter is addictive

OK, I have to admit: this twitter thing is addictive!
I really hope this service survives the hype.
I had great fun follwing the iPhone inline waiters today - they are hilarious!

Update: The ever insightfull Duncan Riley of TechCrunch thinks this is a seed of a revolution: Live event streaming.
And I think he's right - that was what I liked about it so much: it was an unfiltered first-person experience - uncoloured by mainstream media reports or by gushing fanreports on Engadget or Gizmodo. And like Scoble points out: getting the iPhone wasn't really the reason to wait inline - it's all the interesting people you meet there, the athmosphere and the networking that you do there (and ofcourse - it's priceless PR) Geef je reactie (1)

Twitter bubble

Appart from looking to twitter as (another) social network thing, this article rephrases my exact thoughts when I twitted around a bit: Who the hell is paying for this and how on earth are they planning to turn this into a profitable service?

For people that don't know Twitter: its a platform to post small messages, that gets forwarded to anyone that chooses to follow you.
This forwarding can be done by IM, RSS, email or .. SMS ... and thats the weird part of it: you can link you mobile number to your twitter account, and then you can use SMS to update your messages, and/or receive the messages of your friends.

So you can type in a messages in a webpage, and all your friends get it as SMS .... for free ...
receiving messages is free (in europe) but sending SMS-messages isn't (anywhere in the world)
At the moment, Twitter is sending out 200.000 SMS messages a day, that's 6 million a month, to mobile networks all over the world, without charging the users anything.
Even the most optimistic estimates point towards a monthly cost of at least 60.000 dollar.

Common sense dictates that something clearly is wrong in this picture: it follows the line of thinking that creating a huge userbase automatically gives value to your company.

Indeed: It looks to me like a bubble that's going to burst.
I hope time will prove me wrong, though :-)

If it survives, it's a brilliant service to keep a group of people posted, for example in projectgroups, or loosly tied organisations.
I'll start some experiments with that ... Geef je reactie (0)

Photosynth

Holy Smackarony!

I saw photosynth for the first time about 2 years back, so it isn't exaclty new.
Then, it was a java application.
Now, the clever people at Microsofts labs have put together a new tech-preview.
Whooohooo!! very very sweet !
I think the wired-people put it quite nicely when they call it "Blade runner evoking".
Indeed: that scene when the cop starts zooming in on a holographic photograph and even starts changing the angle of the view ... maybe it's not that impossible IRL after all :-) Geef je reactie (0)

SmugMug

Dang ... Smugmug is a pretty sweet image-collection service site ...
A bit pricey but certainly waaaaaay ahead of the pack.
In fact ... they have cooler galleries then my own scripts ... Damn - I hate it when that happens :-) Geef je reactie (0)

Geotagging solutions

Ok, after a weekend trip to Germany, it's foto cataloging-time again.
And it would be cool to attach the geographical location to the pictures, often called Geotagging or Geocoding.
While searching for a good solution its seems almost inevitable nowadays to bump into google ...
Yep .. google earth (in fact nothing to do with the google guys, they just bought out Keyhole) still rules!

The keypart is a neath free utility called panorado flyer.
it integrates into the windows shell and grabs the geo-location form Google earth and/or displays your pictures geographically on Google earth or google maps

it works very fast and offcourse using google earth is a joy!


Another cool free utulity is IExif from opanda. a very complete EXIF viewer, intergrates with Internet Explorer and places you pictures on google maps if they contain a GPS location.

a Final note: Flick is evil ...
When you download images from their site (even your own images) the EXIF information is stripped from the image.
WTF???
Is this also the case in the paid accounts?
(I won't find out myself because I certainly won't get a paid account)
Why would you spend time and energy tagging your pictures if you can't get that data out of the system again ? Geef je reactie (0)

Video editing

I did a lot of research in video-editing and conversion software the past days.
The reason was that my all my new mobile gadgets spit out mp4 video nowadays, and my good-old video setup of virtualDub - Multiquence and Premiere pro didn't cut it anymore.

So .. the verdict:
Video conversion: Super
It's freeware but its in the top 10 of most amazing softaware pieces I have ever seen ...

Video editing
Sony Vegas 6
Premiere Pro 2 still is very good, but for mp4 video Vegas 6 seems to do a better job. Also the realtime preview really fast! on overal performance, it runs circles around premiere !

Update 22:56
Hmmm ... this is interesing for my online image library script "blikvanger": pure ASP functions for reading the EXIF data from an image
now I should combine this with some geotagging abilities to place my pics on the map without using flickr or whatever 3th party. Geef je reactie (1)

Gisteren deetie het nog ...

AAAAARGH
The guys at Microst closed down start.com and redirected everything to live.com.
Darn... Of all the personalised homepage sites, start.com was my favorite one for its on-site full RSS reading abilities.
Offcourse live.com has all that and more, but start.com was elegant,light and fast.
Live.com is also elegant, but heavy and slow.
Funny how one gets attached to their homepage, haha. Geef je reactie (0)

Silverlight

The first time I heard that Microsoft was working on a flash-killer I wen't "Yeah rrrrrrright ...".
This week - Silverlight 1.0 was released at Mix07.
Hmmm ... after looking at the presentations, trying out the demo's and fiddled around with the new Expression studio, I must say ... Impressive !
Clearly there are some features there that outperform flash ...
But will it stick? Probably, but flash won't go away any time soon.
So in the end: yet another choice for webdevelopers, yet another technique to master, yet another field to explore.
You have to give it at microsoft ... they are spreading themselves paperthin by trying to compete in all markets at the same time, but is there another company that can pull this off ?
Other companies have tried to come up with a flash-competitor, I don't even remember the names (What was that Adobe flashlike thing before they bought Macromedia ?), but Microsoft's Silverlight is here to stay: the integration with exixting web and desktop techniques is just too strong to ignore.
If I had to choose between the Flash Actionscript 3 path and the Silverlight .net path ... Maybe I would go with .net (but probably I'll end up doing both)

Busy times! Silverlight released, Flash CS3 released, Dreamweaver CS3 released ...
(and offcourse new version of Photoshop, Illustrator ... but I couldn't care less) Geef je reactie (3)

Mobile gadgery

I switched from a Nokie E70 to a Dopod 838pro this week.
Whoohoo! this is �ber-mobile-gadgery !
Amazing little device. It's not quit as easy to use as he nokia, but on the other hand, maybe thats because it has 5 times as much features and things to explore ... (and the dopod isn't a phone: it's a pocket PC with a mobile phone integrated)
Windows mobile is still a bit buggy, but so is symbian S60.
Offcourse the main plus point is the amount of software available for windows mobile, which is weird ... Symbian S60 is for more used on mobile phones, but somehow, it doesn't has the developers following that windows mobile has ...

One weird thing though .. I'm a huge advocate of touchscreens, but somehow, I find myself using the hardware buttons to navigate most of the time instead of the touchscreen ... maybe because a touchscreen is not so easy to use with one hand, and most of the time, you use the device on the go, one handed, while walking of waiting in line or whatever.
I think that's going to be the biggest drawback of the Apple phone: since that only has 1 hardware button, you must use the touchscreen, and really, in most cases it's just easier and faster to use a hardware button.(these "stupid tiny plastic keyboards" as Steve jobs calls them, still beat the crap out of any touchscreen-keyboard, as any mobile typer will tell you)

Here's a list of must have windows mobile software, all han-cherry-picked by yours truly.

• Pocket player
  Windows Media player is good, but Pocket player is far better ...
  Very good library, fully usable with only the hardware buttons (unlike every other music player I tried, and I think I've tried them all)
  
  
• Core player
  Simply the best video player for mobile devices ... by far.
  Plays anything you throw at it.
  
  
• SPB Pocket Plus
  Enhancements for the today screen and internet explorer, clever battery indicator, ...
  things that should be present in windows mobile, but for some reason aren't.
  
  
• SPB Mobile shell
  gorgeous eye candy for activate-screens, today plugin, photodialer ...
  
  
• Hubdog
  Very good RSS reader and podcast player. (and its free)
  I don't know what Dave Winer is talking about with his "ultimate podcast player"
  It's allready here and it's a pocket PC with Hubdog: over-the-air syncing, enclosure support, both downloading and streaming, smart podcast managing, online feed management, OPML support, ...
  
  
• Sling mobile player
  Watch your Cable TV, or any video device, on your mobile phone.
  You have to see this to believe it: works very good, even on a Cellular UMTS connection.
  (Offcourse you have to get yourself a slingbox sitting at home, connected to your TV-Cable)
  The next time you're in a foreign country, just grab your mobile and whatch your home-tv ...
  

Geef je reactie (0)

I'm easy to work with

Dave Winer has the ability to write down his thoughts in such a way that when you read it you suddenly realise that you feel exactly the same way, only you hadn't realised it before.

From his aticle:
"I like to joke that at one point I could have a developer's conference for RSS in the shower or while I was taking a walk, alone. Suppose the aggregator developers (me) wanted the blogging tool vendors (me) to support a new feature in RSS. I usually found they were easy to work with! Once there were more developers in the space, guess what happened -- nothing! Even the most innocuous proposals were controversial, and once there's controversy that's the end of forward motion."

Geef je reactie (0)

googleeeesh !

I thought the guys at google couldn't build something to surprise me anymore , but that new Google my maps thing: OH MY F****ING GOD !!!! That's gorgeous !
This is by far the best DHTML application I have ever seen !

http://maps.google.com/
Then click on "My Maps"

Insane - this raises the bar several notches for everyone else, including me ! Geef je reactie (0)

4 levels of trains

This morning, my train to Antwerp suddenly went underground.
Hey! It't the first time the new train-tunnel underneath Antwerp is in use.
I arrived at level -2 and had to catch a connection at +1. Impressive, expecially because the entire middle section is open so you can see all the 4 level + the glass/steel roof construction from 1905.
Is there any other place in the world where you can see 4 levels of trains ABOVE one another?
(Offcourse if the guys at Dubai see this ... they're going to build a 10 floor subway station - ranging from 2 tracks under water and 1 track at a 1000 feet in the air ...)

April 5 2007 - A little addition:
it appears that Telenet also upgraded their wireless hotspot coverage to the new levels.
At level -2 I got a whopping full 20 Mbit download speed. I have never seen a wireless connection that fast!
Heck - thats even a bit faster then my cable connection at home !!! Geef je reactie (0)