I’m a big fan of John Maeda, his Envisioning Information is an inspiration for anyone who has ever scratched their head and looked sideways at tables of data and thought ‘There’s got to be an easier way for people to understand this’. This delightful and amusing little presentation from TED is worth spending 16 minutes of your life on. I never realised that he’s a such an entertaining speaker.
I’ve been using Vista for the last 6 months. This wasn’t really my choice but was kind of forced on me through various issues around licensing and costs. It’s a bit like being forced to use a fork to drink soup when you asked for a spoon. I’m also one of these evil people who use Parallels to run alternative operating systems on my Mac (there is palpable disgust on the faces of Mac fans who catch a glimpse of Windows running on my Mac). But no matter. I don’t like Vista, not one bit but it allows me to use things that aren’t available to the Mac OS. Read More »
Had a lovely evening with Danny Somekh at The Hospital Club. I’m not one for members clubs but this one is pretty lush and is very much geared around the creative and new media industries. We successfully managed to gatecrash the MySpace application developer platform launch party which was going on downstairs. It was after the main speakers had finished so we didn’t catch any of the presentation. But we did get to have a quick play around with the platform itself on some laptops at the back of the room. It has a neat little console that allows you to check the code you’ve just written in real time. You have access to the usual stuff such as friends list and messaging and the like and it seems to be a fairly standard ECMA Script language.
Most of the people there were application developers who’ve already developed apps for Facebook and have ported their work over to MySpace using the OpenSocial API. Looking around the event there were a lot of people who oddly very much looked like Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace. Five years ago an event like this would be held in a function room of a city pub and the vast majority of people would be obese hairy men swilling real ale. These days they are held in exclusive members clubs filled with young chaps with Tony & Guy hair cuts, drinking trendy Czech beer (in bottles!) with a handful of attractive young girls hanging off every jocular word. The real question is, are geeks getting hipper or are hipsters getting geekier?
Apparently it would be quite useful for normal people to be able to tell computers to do things with words instead of clicking on things. Surely they are wrong.
MySpace announced the first stage of their application development offering yesterday. Although it’s a while behind Facebook it seems like as long as the most important applications such as Slide and RockYou are covered, it shouldn’t take too long to develop the same 4,500 directory. MySpace was one of the first on board with Google’s OpenSocial initiative and hopefully MySpace’s support will be one of the main drivers of the new initiative.
In essence, what this means is that soon we will be able to build Facebook style apps on MySpace as well as Facebook.
Thanks Daryl.
Microsoft is to purchase Yahoo! for $44.6 billion in cash and stock. In terms of searches, Google will still be king with 63.06% of all US searches against MSN and Yahoo!’s combined volume of 31.75%. But it’s not all about search. As pointed out by Hitwise, Yahoo! has an enormous amount of successful web properties, including Flickr, Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, most of which are higher in terms of visits than Google’s properties have, according to Hitwise.
In a brainstorm recently we were talking about what can be possible with Facebook apps. Of couse, every agency under the sun is considering building Facebook apps but I was thinking about how it’s fairly annoying that if you build such an app, say for example a turn-based game, that you can’t stick that on your blog or your web site or wherever else you might want to stick it. Well, those spunky individuals at Facebook have gone and done it again. They’ve made a JavaScript library that allows you to do just that very thing.
Although this is helpful, it’s a real shame that they haven’t decided to take up OpenSocial yet.
When you first visit, they actually recommend on the home page you upgrade your data package if you haven’t done already, which is nice. The first video you can I saw was ‘The Internet Party’, which I had a look at on The Computer Internet earlier this week, very amusing. Clicking on the link brings up your Real Player (if you’ve got one installed, which is pretty likely if you’ve got a camera phone that takes videos) and not Flash Lite, as I was expecting. I was shocked, it streamed really quickly and it… actually… worked.
Incredible stunt in Tokyo Bay for a The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. It looks like a clip is projected onto fine spray of water with water fountains causing splashes around it. Film looks like great fun.
A million thankyooos Richard. O. G. Milloy.