January, 2009


29
Jan 09

Anatomy of a Twitter message

RT @scobleizer: having lunch with @jasoncalacanis @TechCrunch and @ev at http://tinyurl.com/2fqbe http://twitpic.com/18ne5 #lunch #lifestream

– dramatization of an actual twitter message

The simplicity of twitter is often mentioned as the key factor of its success.

Slate magazine (April 2007):

Twitter is the newest assault on your attention span. Once you’ve signed in, the Twitter site immediately prompts you with a question in bold type: “What are you doing?” Below, there’s a blinking cursor and a blank white space where you have 140 characters with which to answer. That’s basically it.

<

p style=”clear: both”>But 2.5 years after its inception, is that still “basically it”? We now have @replies, #hashtags, tinyurls, twitpics, RT retweeting and other protocols that we fit into those 140 characters that pollute messages.

Creating something new by taking things away is an interesting idea, but if its users start to re-add all the features that were intentionally left out by encoding it into the messages, does it really work?



29
Jan 09

Imagine… reading your newspaper on your home computer!



29
Jan 09

Background processing coming to Google AppEngine

google-app-engineIt looks like Google is already some code with the Google AppEngine SDK that expose its future background processing support:

I just spotted this in the latest SDK release
so it looks like cron (among other things) is
just around the corner:

$ ls -la google/appengine/cron/
total 272
drwxr-xr-x  12 samj  admin    408 17 Jan 12:18 .
drwxr-xr-x  11 samj  admin    374 17 Jan 12:18 ..
-r--r--r--   1 samj  admin  27359 15 Jan 03:16 GrocLexer.py
-rw-r--r--   1 samj  admin  25813 17 Jan 12:18 GrocLexer.pyc
-r--r--r--   1 samj  admin  21071 15 Jan 03:16 GrocParser.py
-rw-r--r--   1 samj  admin  18377 17 Jan 12:18 GrocParser.pyc
-r-xr-xr-x   1 samj  admin    646 15 Jan 03:16 __init__.py
-rw-r--r--   1 samj  admin    313 17 Jan 12:18 __init__.pyc
-r-xr-xr-x   1 samj  admin   1909 15 Jan 03:16 groc.py
-rw-r--r--   1 samj  admin   3050 17 Jan 12:18 groc.pyc
-r-xr-xr-x   1 samj  admin   7848 15 Jan 03:16
     groctimespecification.py
-rw-r--r--   1 samj  admin  10029 17 Jan 12:18
     groctimespecification.pyc

From the comments in the code, here's what you can expect:

A Groc schedule looks like '1st,2nd monday 9:00', or
'every 20 mins'. This module takes a parsed schedule
(produced by Antlr) and creates objects that
can produce times that match this schedule.

A parsed schedule is one of two types - an Interval,
and a Specific Time. See the class docstrings for more.

I think a lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time.


28
Jan 09

Apple’s iPhone patents and Palm’s Pre

Engadget has a very good in-depth analysis of the patent Apple recently received, which supposedly patents multi-touch (which Palm also implemented on its Pre phone). As it turns out, it’s all not as bad as it seemed initially.

So where’s the “multitouch patent” everyone keeps going on about? Well, we certainly couldn’t find the sort of broad patent that would qualify, and we didn’t find much of anything that would keep anyone from using multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom — in fact, Apple has a better patent position with regard to pinching gestures to cut, copy and paste than it does on pinching to zoom.



28
Jan 09

Breaking News: iPhoto ’09 does cat facial recognition

catfacialrecognition

Yes people, that’s right. The facial recognition feature in iPhoto ’09, recognizes cats.

Why I care, as somebody who’s allergic to cats? Because it’s good news, and that’s the type of news we get too little of these days.


28
Jan 09

Gmail to get offline support

gmaillogoOver the next few days Google will roll out the Gmail offline feature. Using Google Gears, Gmail will continuously keep a cache of e-mail messages stored locally on your computer so that when you go offline, you still get access to it. The video below shows how it works.

As is suggested all of the features in Gmail will continue working while you’re offline, including search. I wonder, does it cache all of your e-mail locally? That seems like an awful lot of information.

The feature will be available as part of Google Labs (go to Settings > Labs) for users using US or UK English as their language on Gmail. In addition, of course, you need to have Google Gears installed. Google Gears is available as a Firefox, IE and Safari extension and is part of Google Chrome by default.

Update: on the storage issue, on Venture Beat:

Of course, you have to wonder how Google balances Gmail’s promise that you’ll never need to delete an email again with the requirements of offline support, which involves downloading emails to your desktop. In my case, that could take up to 3 gigabytes of my hard drive. But Google says Gmail Offline only downloads some of your emails: “A good chunk of the inbox, all starred messages, ones you’re drafting, recent sent mail, etc.”

27
Jan 09

Fail fabrication fail

On one of my favorite blogs, FAIL Blog failed miserably:

failfabricationfail

The red lines are from the FAIL blog, the blue one is mine. Either the submitter of this fail post really got the real-time web working, or he posted it himself 1 second earlier. FAIL!

(Credit for noticing this goes to my colleague.)


26
Jan 09

Mr. Digg on how to be #2 like him

kevinroseMicheal Arringtong was nice enough to give some room to Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) to share his insights into how to become popular on Twitter (Kevin is currently the #2 most followed person). The highlights:

  1. Let your followers retweet you. Retweeting is copying somebody else’s twitter message on your own twitter stream. Personally I think retweeting is fairly annoying the way it’s done right now. Often you have to pay attention to notice if somebody’s retweeting or has these brilliant thoughts him or herself. Also, as somebody who has been retweeted a few time, retweeters are really good at slightly altering the retweeted message (notice the difference?).
  2. Fill out your bio. Makes sense. Updated mine.
  3. Link it up. i.e. spam your twitter username wherever you can. Mine is zef by the way.
  4. Look at the top twitter users and watch how they tweet. For instance, talk like the #1 on twitter.

And there’s 6 more gems. Thank you Kevin.


25
Jan 09

Speech Writing

Ever since watching The West Wing I’ve been fascinated with speech writers and the process of speech writing. I know, The West Wing is a drama series, it doesn’t show how it actually happens. But fact is that for politicians so much depends on their speeches, but their writing and delivery. When we watched the inauguration of Obama last Tuesday I was ver impressed with his speech. Who wrote it? I wondered, did he write it himself?

jon-favreau-head-speech-w-004

After some Googling I found out that part of the credit goes to the 27 year-old Jon Favreau, who’s currently chief speechwriter to the president of the united states:

In composing the high notes of the speech, Obama has leant on Favreau, whom he discovered almost by chance four years ago when the younger man was working on John Kerry’s failed presidential bid. “Favs” has since studied Obama’s speech patterns and cadences with the intensity of a stalker. He memorised the 2004 speech to the Democratic national convention which first brought Obama into the limelight. He is said to carry Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father, wherever he goes. As a result, last November when Favreau sat down to write the first draft of the inaugural address, he could conjure up his master’s voice as if an accomplished impersonator. That skill had been put to almost daily use in the 18 months of brutal campaigning on the presidential trail. Favreau would be up most nights until 3am, honing the next day’s stump speeches in a caffeine haze of espressos and Red Bull energy drinks, taking breaks to play the video game Rock Band. He coined a phrase for this late-night deadline surfing: “crashing”. He crashed his way through all Obama’s most memorable speeches. He wrote the draft of one that helped to turn Iowa for Obama while closeted in a coffee shop in Des Moines. For the presidential election, he wrote two speeches: one for a victory, one for defeat. When the result came through, he emailed his best friend: “Dude, we won. Oh my God.”

That must be the best job ever.


25
Jan 09

First appearance on Techmeme

Finally, after 24 posts here I’ve been linked from Techmeme, just before Robert Scoble mind you.

techmemezefme

That means that from henceforth I am part of the elite and will therefore become more snotty and arrogant. Just so you know.