One of the social network sites I’ve been using the longest is last.fm.
(If you know what last.fm is, bear with me teaching you to suck eggs for a few paragraphs… it gets more interesting – honest!)
The idea of last.fm is that a background service captures (or “scrobbles“) the music that I listen to on my computer at home, on the mp3 player that I use in the car, and on my laptop in the office.
The data is made available to me through a rich API, which means I’m free to play with it, as well as take advantage of the creations of others, such as the wonderful visualisations generated by lastgraph
I can see what my friends listen to, which is interesting, as well as being a good way to come across new music
last.fm use this detailed history of my music-listening tastes to make automated recommendations of other music that I might like
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I like last.fm. I find it useful and interesting, and want the same for all the media that I consume – not just music.
I went looking for an equivalent for the books that I read in August 2008, and started using goodreads.
But what about the television that I watch? Could I create a last.fm-style scrobbler to capture what I watch on television? And then try and come up with a few examples of how I could share and visualise the data?
This question is where I started at Christmas… and after a few evenings of hacking some Python together, I’ve come up with:
This week, the UK government published their response to the consultation that ran over the summer. Basically, they asked how smart metering should be implemented in the UK, offered some proposals, and invited anyone to tell them what they think.
In case I hadn’t already convinced people that I was a geek, I read through the Government response paper. It basically reiterates the proposals that were outlined before the summer, summarises the responses that they received, and states the decisions that they have reached as a result.
Is it really very geeky that I found this interesting?
I wanted to highlight a few bits in particular…
… mandate a roll out of electricity and gas smart meters to all homes in Great Britain with the aim of completing the roll out by the end 2020 …
In case you missed all the press about this in the past week, the plan is still that we’re all getting smart meters, and it’ll happen in the next ten years.
Solent Youth Action started life as a youth volunteering project at One Community (then Eastleigh Community Services). With only a couple of staff in the early days, we didn’t need a lot of space.
As we’ve grown, we’ve managed to rent a couple of extra offices in One Community, which helped us stay there for a little longer. But as we’ve continued to grow, and as more staff joined the team, we’ve run out of room and had to start looking for our own space.
This week finally brought completion – we finally signed the lease for what will be our new main offices.
This time… working out the electricity used (and the cost) of doing… well, something in particular.
We already have live graphs (Switch something on and watch the graph shoot up. Switch it off and watch the line drop.)
And we’ve already got graphs with hourly, daily, or monthly totals.
But if I boil a kettle, how do I know how much that cost?
The live graph shows you the shape of the usage curve for a particular appliance.
What I wanted was to be able to start the live graph running, switch something on, then after it’s finished, go back to the live graph, see the bump in the graph for when I did that, and measure the area under it – giving me my total energy usage for that time.
A quick bit of Python-tinkering later, and here we go…
Click-and-drag to highlight a span of the graph, and the Python script calculates the area (more-or-less) under that part of the curve, using this to calculate how much energy I used during this time.
A bunch of social networking updates arrived tonight for the Xbox 360. There has been talk of twitter integration in the Xbox 360 since E3 last summer. And after all the wait… I was a little disappointed.
Because it isn’t integration.
It’s a simple stand-alone twitter client app, that you can run on the Xbox. It joins the main menu becoming something else you can run, instead of play a game or media.
That’s not integration.
If they’d added the ability to receive replies/mentions and direct messages through the Xbox messaging platform while you’re in a game (as it does already with MSN Messenger messages)… that would be integrated.
If they’d built it in to Xbox’s Achievements system, so that when you complete an achievement it offered the chance to let your followers know what you’ve achieved… say by popping up a text box prefilled with a message and a link to more info about the game you’re playing… that would be integrated.
If they’d added the ability to capture a screenshot of what you’re doing, upload it to twitpic (or some similar service) and tweet to show your followers something cool… that would be integrated.
If they’d added the chance to see compare your twitter friends list with your Xbox friends list, and add any that aren’t on both… that would be integrated.
If they’d included a twitterfone-type service to let you tweet without typing, just by talking into the Xbox headset… that would be integrated.
I’m not saying that any of these are good ideas (they’re just the first few things off the top of my head), but the point is that this sort of thing would make twitter feel like it has been integrated into the “Xbox Experience“.
They are all apps which provide users with updates to their phone when some information changes. The information in question is different. But they’re all ways for users to get information that they are interested in, while they are on the move.
Having a dedicated hard-coded app for each type of data is great for information that a large number of people are interested in.
For example, there are enough people who are interested in the weather that it’s worth having an app dedicated to it.
But what if you want updates for information that isn’t so widely needed? What about niche interests?
We’re all different. There is going to be something that you’re interested in that not everyone else is. Or at least a particular set of interests that noone else exactly shares.
People’s needs and interests are almost infinitely varied, so we can’t come up with enough applications to meet everyone’s unique needs. Particularly for more esoteric topics, which are too long tail to each justify a specific mobile app.
For these situations, we need something generic that individual users can customise.
This was an idea I played with on the last IBM HackDay. I managed to get a proof-of-concept working on the day, but not had the chance to share it before now.
What I tried to create was:
a generic mobile application – something that can display an arbitrary number of bits of information
a browser extension approach – some way that a user can pick any bit of any webpage, adding it to their list of information that will be pushed to their mobile
I’ve recorded a video of it running. (Difficult to see without full-screen – sorry!)
To summarise, the steps involved are:
User visits a webpage at their computer
User highlights a portion of the page, and uses a Firefox extension to register this with my notifications server
The notifications server informs the mobile app of the new topic of interest
The notifications server continues to monitor the webpage
When the highlighted portion of the webpage changes, the updated contents are pushed to the phone
One of the themes at openMIC this week was augmented reality, and a topic that came up a couple of times was Layar.
Layar is a mobile app for Android and iPhone that lets you display location-based information overlaid on a real-time camera view.
For example, the screen normally shows a viewfinder-like view from your mobile’s camera.
Search for “coffee” and a bunch of markers appear on the view, showing you where the nearest coffee shops are.
As you move the phone around, the markers follow the approximate location of the places they are showing you.
That’s assuming you want to search ‘Google Local’, but that’s not the only option. Location data is provided through “layars”, and there are layars available for location-tagged Wikipedia articles, Flickr photos, brightkite users, and more.
The interesting thing talked about at openMIC was the Layar API which lets anyone create a new Layar with their own information.
So I decided to spend a quiet Friday afternoon in the office creating a Layar for around Hursley.
This means a phone with the Layar browser installed can browse and search for points of interest around the site.
It was really very easy, so I’ll quickly outline the steps involved.
I’ve had the Palm Pre for nearly a week now, so I thought that it was worth a quick post!
If you want to save yourself reading the rest of the post, I can summarise it for you here: the Pre is an awesome, pocket-sized piece of loveliness.
I love it.
I should probably qualify this, though – I am a longtime Palm fan… having previously bought a Palm Pilot, Palm IIIx, Sony Clie UX50 (which ran Palm OS), Palm Treo 650, Palm Treo 750 and Palm Treo Pro.
And if they hadn’t killed the Foleo before launch, I was gonna get that, too.
I was always going to want the Pre. But it really has met my expectations. It’s the device I wanted them to produce so I could justify my Palm devotion to the naysayers who were only recently predicting Palm’s demise.
There are already a ton of Pre reviews out there, so I probably shouldn’t duplicate too much of what has already been said. But there are so many things to highlight…
