Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

Thumbprint - one of our fledgling services being developed with Blink - was used yesterday to communicate with the person stood on top of a plinth in Trafalgar Square. Thumbprint allows people to read and write about their world [well, currently only in certain cities and least]. As part of the SW11 Literary Festival, any content added to ‘Plinth’ was picked up by Lorinda on the plinth and then written on a whiteboard for the world to see, in a kind of lo-fi one to many broadcast system! Watch how it went at http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Lorinda

One of the most prominent utilities that we now take for granted on the web [and to a lesser extent on mobile] is that of URL Shorteners. These services create a short url that redirect a user to the original destination whenever visited, sometimes with additional services inbetween such as collecting traffic statistics. The first well known service was tinyurl.com, but there are a range of other choices now including bit.ly and is.gd. Unfortunately tr.im - one of the relatively prominent services recently - has just announced that is to discontinue it’s service, and this has raised some debate about a potential over-reliance on URL Shorteners and indeed the risks of relying on web startup services on the whole. E-consultancy have a good summary of the debate - What’s bad for tr.im is good for bit.ly, recognising amongst other things that Bit.ly’s relationship with Twitter as it’s default URL Shortener has allowed Bit.ly to become the market leader and potentially the safest bet for the future.

From a user experience perspective there are also growing concerns that using URL shortening is a poor approach anyway. For example, Webmonkey suggested in April that, at the very least, one of the problems with shortened URLs is that you have no idea where they go. Additionally, as in the case of tr.im, if a URL shortening service closes down then [soon after] so all their links, because the cost of the bandwidth in redirecting all those URLs is one of the major overheads for such services. In an age of web semantics, better url schemas and a stronger focus on user experience, it does seem that the future for URL shorteners isn’t completely safe.

I’ve been suffering a little lately from the information overload swell that occasionally comes upon us all. Hence, blogging, tweeting, FBing, etc has all taken a back seat whilst I reorganise. In doing so I thought I might share a couple of handy Twitter tools I used in the process. ReFollow is an excellent system for managing your Twitter account - allowing for really obvious features such as “show me people that follow me but that I’m not following”. It also allows you to see who’s following any twitter username and instantly follow all of them too… handy for immediately following all of your competitors, a fair number of whom will probably respond by following you and hence giving you a dialogue with your competitors customers! TweetLater is a set of power tools all of it’s own, overlapping in some ways with ReFollow but also adding functionality such as timed Tweets. Some of this functionality is available in various Twitter clients but both the above services added at least some features that helped me get my Twitlife back on track!

The Guardian’s recent availability of most it’s data via API was a pretty big announcement and is in itself an excellent demonstration of a on a large media entity embracing future platforms. Even better, in a matter of weeks it seems that the examples and tools to help you get up and running have been vastly developed and the Guardian Data Store is now an amazing resource even just to browse or to get tips from, let alone to actually use their data.

There’s been a fair bit of fuss recently about the launch of a new Facebook feature which by all accounts is a standard part of pretty much every other well known web service [Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, etc]. From tomorrow [June 12th] Facebook will be allowing users to create usernames, and hence a more friendly url to their page. For instance, where a facebook page used to be accessed at facebook.com/profile.php?id=xxxxx it will now be accessible at facebook.com/username. This is clearly of high value to the increasing number of businesses and marketeers using Facebook as a primary communication channel, and is also a much nicer method for those of us used to one identity online. Recognising the issues of squatting and trademarking by introducing such a feature after launch, Facebook have also taken steps to add trade mark protection, further acknowledging the growing value of Facebook as a commercial tool.

Before anyone cries “Mashups are sooo 2008″, check out the Mashable post listing five Flickr/Twitter mashups - all of which are highly enjoyable. If nothing else, it demonstrates what can be achieved with such a mass of accurately tagged/keyworded content - Flickr in the form of an engaged and committed tagging community and Twitter by merit of Tweets being so short that they can mostly be used as a bunch of keywords. Using this model, Flittr adds visual detail to tweets by taking the last tweet from a user and adding a mosaic of 16 Flickr pictures, usually with very apt results.

Finally, a music service that feels like it’s actually geared towards online usage rather than merely trying to shoehorn an offline model into a web-shaped box. I’ve only been using Spotify a few days and I’m already convinced that it’s way better than Napster [my existing music subscription service]. Spotify has got quite a bit of ground to make up but news that it is to launch a new API this week shows what a serious challenger it will very quickly become.

Though not a surprise,  Twitter has now revealed that it plans to add paid-for services sooner than expected. It is almost certain that the services will be in the form of a premium account targetted at businesses.

We’ve been following the progress of the relaunched Skittles site with interest to see if they’d be sticking with their relatively brave approach to creating a web experience relying almost exclusively on utilising the big destination sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc. The site itself doesn’t offer much that’s new except for the blatant approach to exposing the underlying web properties and a quite nifty [though also not new] use of a floating Flash ‘controller’ to keep it all together. Wonder how long this will last and/or if other brands will follow suit.

This Econsultancy article about how Amazon made $2.7bn with one small tweak offers an excellent insight and short analysis of the value of constantly fine-tuning user experience to make the best of your content. This is particularly pertinent to user generated content which can vary hugely in it’s quality and value to other users. The article also demonstrates that content requirements change over time. In this case, as the number of comments grow they initially become useful but then after a certain amount it becomes difficult for a user to know which ones are valuable. Other similar scenarios may be to promote proven “respected” reviewers over others or to recognise that some products change over time too and therefore the respective reviews may have differing value.

Nothing is sacred these days. Not that Wikipedia should ever be considered sacred by any means but it’s bad news when the Conservative party leader David Cameron apologises over Wikipedia change because of a deliberate change just to win an argument.

OK, quite possibly my finest ever “sandwich short of a picnic” moment but I’ve just realised how easy it is to schedule future posts in Wordpress. If sometimes, like me, you blog in bursts and then save some of your posts as drafts to publish at a later date, but then inevitably keep forgetting to go back to the drafts folder, then scheduled posts are for you. Or of course if you’re in the habit of writing posts such as press releases that have a specific release date. That would be a far more obvious example! Anyway, just write the post as usual but change the publish date to a future one and, in Wordpress 2.7+ at least, the ‘Publish. button will miraculously change to read ‘Schedule’ and your post will not be shown until the specified time. I’m sure I’m pretty much the last person ever to cotton on to this but I find it very useful.

It will be interesting to observe whether O2’s forthcoming venture to run a branded version of Bebo is a success. Apparently an earlier trial saw traffic grow by 60% so whereas on the one hand one might assume that any brand - particularly mobile operators and ISPs - would be viewed cynically by “the yoof” as trying to own their social network, it may be a sign that the mobile operators are finally gaining acceptance as credible providers and partners in such web services as opposed to merely becoming back-end enablers. Or it may just be that the tariff is good.

Cool enough to get Marvel comics attention. Not even fully in post until 20th January and already Barack is being saved by Spidey.

Robert Scoble, well known technology blogger and commentator, suggested nine ways Twitter could make money. And it turns out of course that, with Twitter being one of the biggest albeit tech-focussed successes of 2008, a lot of other people had some ideas too.

Last week saw around 1500 job losses in the Yahoo offices. Valleywag investigates what this could mean for the future of favoured photo-community Flickr.

An often cited future role for mobile continues to near reality as Nokia have been demonstrating their plans to position the mobile at the centre of home automation, controlling heating, security and other appliances.

Discussion is underway regarding how the future of the NHS will utilise new technologies not only in treatments but also in how the service is accessed. Consultation by email, SMS and video might all play a role, as well as virtual hospital environments instead of physical buildings.