Oh good grief!

BBC NEWS | England | Hereford/Worcs | Two cautioned over wi-fi 'theft' : Two cautioned over wi-fi 'theft'
Two people have been cautioned for using people's wi-fi broadband internet connections without permission.

Neighbours in Redditch, Worcestershire, contacted police on Saturday after seeing a man inside a car using a laptop while parked outside a house.

I thought this sort of madness only happened in the USA.

Personally I want to live in a world where everyone leaves their WiFi open and you can find a Linksys Community Network available on any street corner.

Right now I have the house Wifi open with an SSID of [Streetaddrress]-Public. I guess I'd better rethink that. Meanwhile I can see 4 other fully open WiFi routers if I lean out the window a bit.

This from a Twitter developer. Twitterati : On future features: "Lots of people are interested in a groups feature, and that's definitely on our radar". Meanwhile, he also says Twitter shouldn't be seen as a replacement for blogging.

"Twitter works best for those particular ideas that are terse yet expressive, and don't benefit greatly from an in-place thread of replies.

Oh dear.
- Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails and they're having severe problems handling the scaling
- It's hardly surprising scaling is a problem. It's a conversational medium built on static web centralised principles
- It's an aggregation of monologues. Making replies and hence conversation hard to impossible.
- Groups. It's already got grouping in the friends and followers functions. Add groups and you recreate IRC and Skype chats which frankly work much better.
- It's stupidly hard to find people on Twitter. eg. Where is Paul Walsh's Twitter page?

I can't let go of my thinking about building a responsive chat system built around contacts rather than around topics. I'm just finding it really hard to imagine the right architecture for this. After experimenting with Skype Moods, I've also been looking at the Skype App2App API. Now I'm wondering if there's *any* existing architecture that can cope. I'm more and more convinced that it needs to use an existing P2P chat system. Hmmm? Jabber-GTalk?

I'm on the Panel of the Next *Mashup event 24th April See also the blog at Vecosys.

I hope I've got enough opinions. Should I wear my "DRM IS KILLING MUSIC" T-Shirt?

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Note to content owners: DRM doesn't work : Of these contenders, SONY was clearly ruled out because they are a content owner and there's no way the rest of the industry would pay a technology tax to a competitor (much as Nokia's Symbian never gained much traction with the other biggies, because it was too tied to Nokia). Microsoft was a non-starter, because they are too obviously powerful and the music industry could see a hostile takeover coming a mile away. But cute, cuddly Apple wouldn't harm anyone! So iTunes and AAC were roundly and widely embraced, and Apple succeeded in turning the distribution and playing of legal digital music into a virtual monopoly. Apple played a masterful game, and took full advantage of the music industry's fear.

The joyful irony in this of course is Steve Jobs recent call for the music industry to adopt DRM-free distribution, giving Apple the moral high ground. Very, very nicely played indeed!

So how evil are Apple?

Ross Mayfield: says haven't twittered today because it is disturbing that my tweets show up in Google News

Hmmm. I couldn't see Ross in Google news so I checked blogsearch and the plain index and didn't find his twitters.

But there is a problem here. Or is there? For me, I' becoming irritated that my posts in rec.moto.racing are turning up in the main google index. Should I be?

As a confirmed geek I've been happy to jump on each digital lifestyle application that exposes more and more of my life to the web and search engines. Finally I'm getting mildly concerned about the crossovers between my various personae. Is that post from "The CTO", "The Developer", The M/C Racing Obssessive", "The Old Hippy", "The Grumpy Old Man" or perhaps from "The Robot".

I really need to float some ideas I'm mulling over about using some Twitter ideas within Skype. The fundamental is the idea of an IRC channel or Skype Public chat where the participants you see and can talk to are your contact list. So while everybody has access to this default Chat, the people you're posting to are only your contacts. It's like there's one global conversation in a huge crowd, but the only people who can hear you speak are the ones near you.

I think I can build this on the back of Mood but that's not ideal and by overloading the Mood field it will colour the nature of the conversations. I think there are some concerns about privacy and annoyance. And it will create weird conversations where if you are friends with the person talking but not the person replying you'll only see one half of the conversation.

This all comes from an irritation with Twitter that it's broadcast and hopeless for replies. But a fascination with the social part of it where the audience is people who have chosen to follow you or be friends with you.

Along the way it's produced a question about Skype. What is the hardware/software/architecture limit that means Skype Public chats are limited to 100 participants? And is it possible that a future Skype release could up this number to 1000? And what are the data flows when you post to a large chat. Do your messages go direct, or is there a kind of Chat Supernode layered on top of the Skype Supernodes.

As an interim project seeing a list of most recently changed Moods among your contacts and getting notifications when somebody changes their mood might be fun.

In a press release, Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

Well hoo bloody ray!

Now for the downside and implications.

- $1.29 per song for 256Kbps? So that's $12.90 for an album (ish). What's a CD cost now at Walmart? $10? And let's not forget they're competing with free.

[edited to add]. OK I didn't read all the article. Full albums are $9.99 at 256K and with no DRM.

- So iTunes can support selling alternate prices and non-DRMed tracks side by side with DRMed tracks. So when people reacted to Steve's "DRM is bad" statement by saying that he should sell on-DRM where the artist requested it have a point. And all the Apple Fanboys who used the argument that it was too hard will have to change their (i)tune.

And I'm still sad that AllOfMp3 has effectively gone.

I'll repeat that. let's not forget they're competing with free. What happens when sales *don't* take off. Is that when we start seeing the price go into free fall?

Boing Boing: DRM is Killing Music parody of "Home Taping is Killing Music"
[from: del.icio.us]

Properly Chilled - Downtempo Music & Culture
What it says! So chilled, it's positively Arctic. [from: del.icio.us]

Boing Boing: DRM is Killing Music parody of "Home Taping is Killing Music"
[from: del.icio.us]

InformationWeek | DRM | Opinion: Apple's Copy-Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business | July 26, 2006
Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. [from: del.icio.us]

Music via Google
Another nail in the coffin [from: del.icio.us]

TuneGlue° | Relationship Explorer
Another cool music mapping tool [from: del.icio.us]

Twitter has an awkward UI, it's horribly slow and having terrible scaling problems (The Curse of Success). But it's proving to be a mind bullet that is throwing off a load of ideas.

As I said yesterday, I find it interesting that the UI has produced a set of behaviours. Everybody's looking at Twitter as Micro-Blogging. The displays are all LIFO, latest at the top. People are using it to broadcast their thoughts not to have conversations. The Personal Twitter page encourages this by showing just your posts as if it's a blog.

Now imagine that we actually used it for conversations the way we use IRC or Skype Group Chats. A Personal page of just my posts would make no sense at all. And we'd want to have displays with latest at the bottom scrolling up.

But trying to duplicate IRC using purely web technology is never going to work because you're never going to make it responsive enough. IRC (and IM) is architected for this kind of real time conversation.The web just isn't.

But Twitter has still got a new idea. And the new idea is that you can build a Group Chat Channel from the social networking interaction of saying "This person is my friend" or "I want to follow this person".

So the next question is how to build a Group chat system with that core idea at it's heart. Get rid of the concept of Channel or Club or Yahoogroup and base the grouping purely on people's social networks.

At this point I turn to Skype. A Skype Mood is quite like a Tweet. Skype already broadcasts your mood to all your contacts. We can prototype this by building a tray application or Skype Extra that displays the last N changes in Skype Mood from all your contacts with a simple text box to change yours. We can use Moodgeist to produce the global time line. We'd base the UI on Twitteroo just reversing the display so it's more IRC like. It's a horrible hack on something not designed to do this but it would let us prototype the idea. To do it properly would mean getting Skype to do it inside the application and properly and it's some way off their core competency.

I could do something like this in Ecademy. If I can get the indexed queries right it should scale OK within Ecademy's limited community. Well at least this year anyway. But a web interface isn't responsive enough.

Doing it on a really big scale I think needs some new architectures both at the server and at the client. What we're looking at is some web2-IM hybrid.

See Twitter. It's really pretty horrible but the A-List bloggers are all over it. And it's got me thinking. ;)

There are two actions/questions that are very, very common on the net

- What are my friends doing? This is Few to One and typically relies on aggregating all your friends attention streams into one place. Typical of this are things like Skype Presence, Plazes, MySpace, Facebook, Last.FM, and now Twitter.

- Hey Look At This! Telling your friends about what you've found, what you've done or what you think. One To Few. Examples are Digg!, Twitter, Blogs, del.icio.us, Stumble, Skype, Flickr, Last.FM

There's some clear overlap here which results in Few to Few community. I find it interesting the way that most communities are set up with the COMMUNITY as an object around a topic and then people join them. Twitter has reversed this with it's friends and followers to create overlapping communities on the fly. But in the process they've lost the feeling of belonging and it's too damn hard to see where the boundaries are or to add to an existing conversation and maintain it over time. The best description I've come up with is that Twitter is 10,000 Alpha Geeks standing on soap boxes and howling into the wind. But there's no sense that anyone is listening!

The parallel with IRC is actually prompted by Skype. Skype public chats have re-invented IRC with some improvements but some downside mainly about scaling. Twitter feels as lightweight as IRC with the same message type of short bursts of text. But since there's no there, there, you can't maintain the conversation.

Writing web based systems to handle very large quantities of short bursts of text is very hard. Server based Shoutboxes and Chat systems typically don't work very well and don't scale very well. IRC was architected from the ground up to handle scaling. Skype handles scaling by using P2P and limiting the size of any one chat. Twitter is clearly having trouble scaling as it's wilting at the moment.

Somewhere in here is my continuing frustration with the state of Few To Few systems. I really, really like the idea of instant chat forums created on the fly from people defining their own groupings of friends and followers. I'm deeply disappointed that Twitter doesn't contain more to foster longer term conversations.

I'm bored with 2007. Isn't it 2008 yet?

I'm bored with this decade. Isn't it 2010[1] yet?

I'm bored with this Millenium. Isn't it 3000 yet?

[1]Can't wait for 2012 when the novelty curve goes vertical and the Timewave 0 Singularity.

Here's a challenge. How do you find the most popular (or any) UK Based blogs that cover technology, Web2, and startups?

I'm not really sure how to start.

Answers on a postcard to julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond

Totally awesome piece by Marc on thoughts brought on by showing an Indian round California.

Marc's Voice » Blog Archive » Incredible Cultural differences and the global divide

I have to be careful how I think and talk about this. So I'll just toss in two thoughts.

1) Travel broadens the mind. And sometimes in the process it broadens other people's as well.

2) Some times you have to work at seeing the good in both your culture and other people's. Being ironic and negative about both your culture and other people's is the easy option.

We had a hardware problem early this morning and again this afternoon around 4 to 5pm that meant that the Ecademy site was running very slowly. We're temporarily sorted this out and are currently investigating the cause to prevent it happening again.

Although this coincided with the new functions and changes going live, it was not actually related.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why do we find it so hard to build an insanely great Few To Few communication system? Conversations within a group of like minded people is fundamental to what it means to be human. From the 3-25 people eating together to the couple of hundred people worldwide that share an interest in some obscure form of motorcycle to the local golf club, small groups of people getting together to socialize is very very common.

The geek world has tried all these:-
- Mailing lists
- IRC
- Usenet
- Skype Public chats
- Web Forums (phpBB etc)
- Tribes, Orkut Groups, Ecademy Clubs

And for various reasons, they've all failed, been discarded or at least haven't reached their potential. Often this is due to poisonous people (The Fuckwad problem) or it's because the technology is too hard (IRC) or too unstandardised (email client threading).

But then we get a whole series of technologies that are supposed to be better and are promoted as if they provide a real alternative. So we have:-
- Blogging - Actually a monologue, One to Few.
- Blog Comments - One to Few and impossible to track across the blogosphere.
- Twitter - Another monologue, One To Many. With almost no feedback and response.

So here's Danah Boyd talking about Twitter. I'm reading between the lines but Danah seems to be complaining that there's no back channel and Twitter is broadcast only. "The techno-geek users keep telling me that it’s a conversation. ... But i don’t think that either are typically conversations. More often, they are individuals standing on their soap boxes who enjoy people responding to them and may wander around to others soap boxes looking for interesting bits of data."

I've thought about and actually written the code to Tweet, whenever I get a new entry in the RSS feeds from last.fm (what am I listening to), my blog (what have I just said), Librarything (what have I started reading), Amazon Wishlist (What do I want), Flickr (What have I just posted). But I've decided not to enable it. Not because I want to be secret, but because I don't want to pollute the Twitter stream with hundreds of posts per day.

Meanwhile, we still need a better Few-To-Few conversation medium.