#“Comic Sans Will Get You Thrown Off Twitter”
I just used the Twitter API to get my recent Tweets. I took one of those tweets and rendered it in Comic Sans:
From now on, this breaks Twitter’s Guidelines, Requirements. I know you don’t care, but remember, the next time you Tweet, they own it, not you.
#“First Hands-On with littleBits. Yes I’m grinning a lot.”
The lovely lovely people in Sugru sent me a littleBits kit and a great book yesterday. I have been intrigued by littleBits since I saw discovered it via the Adafruit site a while back. Soon afterwards they raised bunch of money and I was pleased to see Ireland’s own PCH involved in the production.
If you are not familiar with littleBits, it’s a beautifully simple way of learning about electronics using parts which just snap together using magnets.
I’ve had a little play with it and it’s great fun. However I won’t give any detailed impressions until I let some of my younger kids at it. I want to see what they think. The opinions of a 44 y/o who did Electronic Engineering in college are less relevant!
In the meantime, here’s a few pictures of the Starter Kit.
#“This week on Twitter. (Every week on Twitter)”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
#“Why I’ve pledged money to @AppDotNet and why you should too”
There have been lots of concerns about the future of Twitter recently. App.netwas recently announced as a pay-for alternative to Twitter with a powerful API, no ads and a deep commitment to not constantly change the rules on users and developers to suit an ever-changing business plan.
I always find it funny how people believe that the thing they are using now will never be replaced; from smoke to horses to telegrams to Friendster to Twitter. Creative and commercial destruction is inevitable and is often a good thing.
For $50, I think it is worth a try. Even as anhonourablefailure, if it shakes things up just a little or gets 10 more teams to try the same thing, then it’s really a success. Also, if it doesn’t succeed, you don’t pay your money. The Alpha site which is built on their APIs is surprisingly great. Exactly like early Twitter with lots of chat and banter and not a snake-oil salesman in sight.
They are trying to raise $500k on Kickstarter by Aug 13th and at the current rate of progress, they will not meet that target. I’ve already pledged the Developer Level $100 and have been using the “Proof of Concept” site, which they build in 2-3 weeks, for the past few days.
The lack of support on Kickstarter tells its own story. Not enough people see the problem. Possibly too busy reading about Justin Bieber. But give it time. I think the App.net guys should have waited for a crisis moment. The ideal time in the future will be when Twitter breaks API access for Tweetdeck AIR (and you know that’s coming eventually). Then you’ll really see the shit hit the fan with Power Users.
This blogpost has actually been swirling around in my head for months. I have been having deep issues with the direction of Twitter for a long time now and find myself genuinely worried about it.
I joined Twitter in February 2007. Apart from the 100 day war with Jaiku, I’ve been a fanatic ever since, through good and bad. I have come to believe that Twitter is the most important advance in information dissemination since RSS, and possibly since the internet itself. Several year ago, Steve Gillmor nailed it when he said Twitter is the new dial-tone.
But here’s the thing about dial-tones. When you pick up the phone in Bandon Oregon, your local phone company provides that tone and let’s you talk to me in Bandon Ireland when I pick up the phone on an Eircom line.
A few more examples to bang you over the head with the point:
Shipping:
SMS:
Rail (gauge nerds, please desist from commenting :-) ):
Email:
What they all share is an agreed standard that enables products and bits to be moved from place to place irrespective of the sender, receiver or shipper. They are robust, multi-vendor solutions, not, as Anil Dash would suggest, some hippie utopian open protocol.
And now we come to the problem. Twitter is, and should be, the phone company. A solid staid infrastructure business. Unfortunately, Twitter wants to be the E! Channel, because their VCs think (rightly) there is more money to be made telling us what Kim Kardashian is doing right now.
To use as crass an example as I can think of: It’s like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin and deciding that he should focus on the lucrative blue cheese market.
And you know what, that’s fine. Their site, their apps, their advertisers, their rules, their eventual Bebo-ification, MySpace-ification.
I’m not going to prattle on about how Twitter has treated developers over the years. Building your entire business on someone else’s API can only go one way, very very badly. I’ll simply show you the email I got from them this week. The tone of that email tells you everything you need to know about the current mindset in Twitter towards third party developers. In summary, they screwed up but spend most of the email warning us not to screw up in the future. Or else.
Fred Wilson has a good post on free ad-supported businesses and equates Twitter to TV and magazine companies in this regard. He is clearly one of those who favours the E! direction of Twitter. But infrastructure companies don’t rely on ads. Imagine having ads in the middle of your phone calls (wait, some bozos tried that didn’t they?).
We pay for services that are important to us. Phone, internet, gym, monitored alarm, SMS. So why not realtime information?
Real-time messaging is too important to leave it to one company to screw up on their terms. Just as many early innovators were not the ones who properly exploited their innovations, it is time for others to build alternatives (plural) to Twitter.
For a microsecond I thought one alternative might be Google+ until I realised it was just Buzz without an API and with better SEO. Way back I also thought identi.ca might be a strong contender. Nope. And Facebook’s search results can be 3 hours old, so that’s a complete waste of time.
Another horrible thought I had on my holidays was that the ideal companies to build a distributed, multi-vendor, standards-based, realtime messaging system were the mobile phone carriers. Of course, they’d charge you $1 per Tweet and it’d end up as useful and interoperable as MMS. So let’s quietly put that to one side. (Sidenote: I’ve always been surprised Vodafone or similar didn’t build a simple pure SMS-based Twitter clone. All theinfrastructureis there.)
And then we have theannouncementof App.net. $50 a year for no ads, a great open published API with a strong focus on a federated system and a belief that we can do better.
If I’ve made you sufficiently concerned and you want in on something new and genuinely fun, you can pledge your $50 here.
You can find me over there as APP@conor
(A big thanks to T@McMoop aka APP@Osh, for his edits on this)
#“Google cancels Listen. I’m cancelling all non-core products by large corporations”
We launched Google Listen through Google Labs in August 2009, to give people a way to discover and listen to podcasts. However, with Google Play, people now have access to a wider variety of podcast apps, so weve discontinued Listen.
I never thought Listen was very good but this cancellation is why more and more I avoid Google’s non-core products. They are turning into Yahoo like this. I’m tired of putting effort into products by these large corporations, that only stand a tiny chance of being maintained.
From now on I’m sticking with products by tiny companies whose very survival depends on that product. So that’s Doggcatcher or BeyondPod for podcasts.
It’s another step in moving away from generic one-size-fits-all mass-production and towards custom products that are optimal for you.
#“Don’t throw out that standalone phone battery charger”
An old hack I had forgotten about.
There is nothing more annoying about phones than upgrading them and finding that your battery is a different size and won’t fit in your old charger, even tho the contacts line up. OK, there is one thing more annoying - owning a phone that doesn’t let you take the battery out (cough iPhone).
So rather than put the old HTC Desire charger in the bin, I went at it with a Stanley knife and some Sugru. Pretty it ain’t, but my HTC Sensation battery now fits perfectly.
#“littleBits looks perfect for younger kids to experiment. Anyone using?”
I might be able to wean my youngest off Barbie with these cool littleBits. She’s bloody obsessed with dolls and she didn’t get the obsession from us!
What is littleBits? from littleBits on Vimeo.
#“Your teens going mental in all this Irish rain? Send them over to Maker Camp now”
Maker Camp, sponsored by MAKE magazine, is a virtual summer camp for teens, with a focus on creating, building, and discovering. We'll be making 30 awesome projects in 30 days on Google+. Maker Camp is free and open to all, and runs from July 16th through August 24th.
A genuinely great use of Google+.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiX8cmZVmgM
Today rocket guru Rick Schertle is teaching how to make two different kinds of rockets. Head on over to G+ at 8PM Ireland/UK for the kick-off from the New York Hall of Science.
Some more info on Google’s blog. And they’ve even put a link on the homepage of google.com!
I’m already badgering our bored eldest to get involved. We actually got the magazine that a lot of the projects are based on, a few weeks back.
UPDATE: Yup, the youngfella is interested. If nothing else, he now has a Google+ account. Of course the way I told him about it was to send him a PM on Facebook.
UPDATE 2: Alex Leonard correctly pointed out a terrible oversight in the original version of this post. I somehow managed to mention Google+ without complaining about the lack of a Write API. Come on Google, hurry up. Fixed :-)
UPDATE 3: Fair comment from our 13 y/o - he was surprised by the low-quality of the video. He assumed, given the companies involved, that it’d be at least 720p. Very hard to make things out at 480p. Hopefully video quality of upcoming days will improve as they won’t be doing off-site.
#“Pit of Despair Projects”
I have a bunch of blogposts bouncing around in my head which I’ll hopefully start writing on my holliers, from Friday. Stuff around the tactile nature of hardware, Makers, having a Masters in Electronics I never really used, low volume production, crowd-sourcing solutions to problems instead of relying on guv’ment, moving production back to the first world, education, Kickstarter, doing vs learning etc etc etc.
There are a ton of companies supplying the Maker market and electronics people in general. Two of my favourite are Sparkfun and Adafruit. I just watched this video by the CEO of Sparkfun and I like them even more now. He has concerns about every project going into Kickstarter and why other models may be moreappropriatein many cases.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGShXu7jJUc
He has a blogpost which digs even deeper into the Pit of Despair Projects.
#“Well that’s my Christmas present sorted - Sonic Screwdriver Universal Remote Control”
Kinda speaks for itself really. OK, it doesn’t actually speak, but you know what I mean.
