I've always been just a bit short sighted. Not serious but just enough to need glasses for driving and watching TV. Now I'm getting old enough to get a little presbyopia. So the range between distance and short sight gets narrower and narrower. Eventually you can't read close up, but can't see far away either. Welcome to bifocals. But I'm still a good few years away from that yet.

But what was really disturbing is that some time in the last 6 weeks, my right eye has decided to go wrong. I had the eye test and there's nothing basically wrong except that I've suddenly developed some astigmatism in one eye. So that's a new lens for each of my pair of glasses when they're only 5 months old. But what's worse is that working at the PC with my glasses on it's now too close to focus on. With glasses off, I'm basically reading with one eye. The solution is the second pair of glasses which I could really do without.

While all this is happening, of course you start to have all the deep fears. What if I can't read any more! What if it's a detached retina! What if I've scratched the lens (cigarette ash burn, perspex flake while working in the garage)! What if it's brain damage, hypertension, diabetes. Oh, right, that's "Man Hyperchondria". We don't go and find out what's actually wrong, we just obsess about what might be wrong.

Still. It's appeared suddenly. Maybe it will fix itself suddenly.

An application that let's use your FB Identity as an OpenID.

Here's a clue for Social Network Designers. Stop using "Friend" and switch to "Following" and "Followed By". Then you won't be tempted to overload Friend to control who can see what parts of a profile. And you won't have to annoy your members with endless "XXX says they are your friend, please confirm" messages.

If you use Following and Followed By, then the act of linking to a contact is entirely driven by the person who wants to follow you. So there's no need for a confirmation.

I'm beginning to think this was the single biggest innovation in Twitter.

Oooh, Errr. Upload your music collection (what all 100Gb?) to Anywhere.FM and then play it back mixed in with some Last.Fm style friends and neighbours. Uses Amazon's S3 storage. There's some deep copyright questions there.

The new Maps API ads layer: Released and ready for you to try - Google Maps API | Google Groups : Currently, the feature only shows ads for businesses in US. Apologies to our (many) international developers, who can, however, still implement the ads layer in advance of international ad inventory becoming available.

ARRRRR! Yet Another USA Only Maps Feature.

KTHXBAI !!

When you find yourself turning into a grumpy old man.

This is going to hurt my reputation as a closet anarchist, but I've been browsing a couple of UK Police Blogs. Police Inspector Blog and The Policeman's Blog.

When they're hanging round the local market town on Friday night, or stopping you for speeding and giving you the lecture, the Police seem like some strange version of humanity that was probably bullied as a kid and grew up to be power hungry bullies themselves. And I've never been able to work out why people become policemen. But then you realise what shit they have to go through every day and what shit happens on the edges of society and you realise we couldn't pay them enough if we tried.

The Ambulance blog Random Acts of Reality is a bit of an eye opener as well.

Dave Winer on Twitter : The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.[1]

That means a dead simple API that goes both ways. It's important to have lots of RSS out. It's equally important to have an API that let's you update the service from an external App. That's what separates Twitter from Facebook. It's why Twitterfeed can exist for Twitter but not for Facebook.

Where it gets tricky is when you've got the API, growing user base but not lots of users and not lots of developers working with you. Even if I exactly duplicate the Twitter API or Facebook API on Ecademy, I still won't be able to get the developer ecosystem going until we have 10 times the users. And although it would be trivial, all those Twitter Apps would have to be rebuilt because they all hard code the connection to a specific service. So this hard for me, but what about Linkedin? Let's say LinkedIn do their own Facebook style API. Will they be able to get traction? Will anyone actually code to it?

In the middle of the article, Dave drops another mind bomb. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. Think for a moment. Is a distributed Twitter possible? Where everyone runs their own system to show their latest status update and some aggregation system appears to draw all the content together and provide the following - followed by Social Network functionality?

[1]Dave. You need to see the last blog about routing Facebook to Twitter. It's got RSS. It's got APIs. It's got Open Identity standards. Should be right up your street.

Here's a recipe for routing all your and your friend's Status updates from Facebook to Twitter. See also my post about doing the same with Ecademy and other services.

Things you'll need:-
- An Open ID
- An RSS feed for just your Facebook status updates. Go to your profile, click on minifeed, see All. Click on Status Stories. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- An RSS feed for your friends' Facebook status updates. Friends - Status updates from the drop down at the top of the page. There's a Subscription link bottom right.
- A dummy Twitter account. Create a new Twitter account and follow it from your main account.

1. Route your Facebook updates so when you post it also posts to Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your main Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time you post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will create a Tweet from you on Twitter with a link back to your profile on Facebook.

2. Route your Friends' Facebook updates so when they set their status on Facebook, you can read it in Twitter.
- Login with your OpenID into Twitterfeed.
- Create a new entry. Put in your dummy Twitter account ID and Password and the RSS for your friends' status updates.
- Update 30 minutes, Include title only, Include Item link, Prefix each Tweet with FB.

Now each time any of your friend's post a status update on Facebook, within 30 minutes it will appear in your Twitter Friend's timeline with a link back to their profile on Facebook.

You can use the same basic technique for any service that has one or both RSS feeds. It works better with services that include the name of the poster in the title. So Facebook, Plazes, Jaiku but not Pownce.

AFAIK, Twitter is the only service with an API for updating a status externally and a 3rd party RSS to post service. Which means Twitter ends up as the best aggregator for all your services. So the next question is which service you should use as your main update. I'm finding myself doing most of my updates on Twitter with occasional updates on Facebook and Ecademy to keep my profile on those services fresh.

twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter - post RSS to twitter automatically
[from: del.icio.us]

TwitterWhere
makes it easy to post your location to Twitter [from: del.icio.us]

I missed the announcement but Google have widened the number of countries where there Geocoder works.

Developer Knowledge Base - : The Maps API Geocoder can currently geocode addresses in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, and the United States.

That's better but still not perfect. It shouldn't be too hard for them to expand this for town+country to the whole world.

It's irritating that so much geographical information is copyright. The thing holding this up is Google (and the others) having to arrange licensing agreements with multiple organisations in multiple countries.

I heard that Plaxo are doing something with openID. So I thought I would check it out. They didn't like my password, and wanted me to turn on web access in the Outlook Toolbar. So much later I seem to have an account and web access. I'm wandering round setting things up and importing my linkedin contacts when a message comes on the screen.

We've sent birthday requests to all your contacts.

Oh, bugger.

I really, really, really didn't ask them to do that.

Bastards.

And frankly there are so many dead ends, inconsistencies and bugs in the system that I won't be going back. As far as I'm concerned Plaxo may still be a useful utility but it's still the same old spam system we know and hate.

Just gone live with Twitterwhere. It tries to make it easy to post your location to Twitter so it gets picked up by Twittervision.

I mainly used it as a project to learn about OpenID. It uses OpenID for authentication with zero sign up.

In the process I discovered that Twittervision now has personal pages. eg http://twittervision.com/jbond that use the same format and name as your Twitter page.

One thing I think is missing is a map page that shows where all your contacts are currently located. Like this one on Ecademy.

While talking about this on Skype chats, I realized that
- I've given up on Jaiku because its RSS doesn't contain the poster's name in the title.
- I've given up on Pownce because of the lack of RSS
- I've given up on Plazes because it never seems to work and the UI always confuses me. How do I create a new Plaze?

The Moving to Facebook issue continues to drive high emotions. Here's the problem:-

Facebook is a Black Hole. It has huge gravity. It sucks everything into it. Nothing escapes.

I saw a Skype Mood: Lets hope MS buys Facebook so we can all leave.

Oh and Paul, in the comments I tossed in some grenades. They were misunderstood, so I posted an explanation. The explanation was misunderstood by some but others got it. Does posting a blog that repeats the misunderstood criticism of the original grenades add anything? Yes, comparing Facebook with AOL is ridiculous. Except that both systems were/are popular and both systems were/are closed silos. And yes, a Facebook page and a Blog serve different functions. One is closed, private, and largely only visible to friends, while the other is personal publishing to the world. So, yes, that's an idea for Facebook. Introduce a section that is about personal publishing to the world. And the reason for tossing that grenade in is to make the point that Facebook is "closed, private, and largely only visible to friends".

I think I probably need this.

A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site

blognation UK technology » Blog Archive » Discover Blog Posts Via Facebook With Blog Friends

I thought I'd play with this. Installed it and noticed this as the first post in the application.

"And because facebook only allows us to update profile boxes sequentially, with each update taking 2 seconds, updates may take up to 24 hours. Think of us as a wise and empathic tortoise. ; )"

FB Applications have a serious problem here. Because FB caches everything the app produces, you have to jump through hoops as an App developer to make it quasi real time.

Is Skype, IM+Voice or Voice+IM? IMHO, It's the best IM with great Voice functionality. But they're source of income is all on the Telephony side of the fence.

It doesn't really matter which way round it is. And yes, Skype phones are clearly on the Telephony side of the fence, but increasingly they make quite good portable chat clients as well. The only important bit from my position as a user is that Skype continue to innovate on the IM side as well as matching the other IM systems feature for feature. Because I use Skype for IM *far* more than the Voice part.

I think what's really happening now is that IM, VoIP are being dragged together as sectors with Skype already in the middle. The Voice/Video options in the other IM systems are pretty poor but they've been forced to add them. This leaves people like Gaim, Trillian, Adium out in the cold until they can work out how to do Voice interop with multiple closed systems. And it appears to be hard because even on the open specification side, only Gizmo have managed it and LibJingle hasn't come to anything. It makes Voice/Video interop important. Meanwhile the pure VoIP offerings are limited without IM+Presence. Which consigns them to corporate Telecom departments and telephony cost management. That's a huge market, but it's a very different market.

Perhaps this is just another skirmish in the old, old, battle between Bell Heads and Bit Heads.

» Microsoft To Buy Facebook For $6 Billion? » InsideMicrosoft - part of the Blog News Channel

I think Nathan is spot on. MS Should buy Facebook. Then we can all desert it for the next greatest thing.

There's a truth here that MSN, Google, Yahoo, AOL should all wake up to. They've all built some amazing technology to customise the classic "My Pages". Portals monetizing sticky eyeballs by bringing the net to one place and then trying to keep people there. They should invert this and use the same technology to create "Me Pages". Monetising short term temporary visitors to read all about me and everything I do on the net. It's only a very short step from there to a FaceBook, MySpace competitor. And that's mainly about management of friends and followers. That is an N SQUARED problem (N Factorial?) so not trivial. But they all have the resources to solve it.

I guess that's the realisation that there's really *nothing in Facebook*. The one thing Facebook has is huge numbers of users. But so do the Portals. They should build it, not buy it. But that takes balls. And it takes imagination to see that they don't need a "Social Network System". They need to add "Social Network Function" into what they've already got.

I can accept FB being unfinished and in perpetual beta. I can't accept how closed it is. So I'm all for MS buying it, forcing us to use Passport to access it and then so screwing around with it that we all leave.

Mashup request: Skype and del.icio.us (seikatsu)

A request for a system that watched for URLs in your chats and then auto-posted them to del.icio.us.

Perhaps I could add this to void.bot.

This is all good stuff for the Skype Mashup competition.

1.) Copy Skype to the flash drive:
1.1) Copy c:\Program Files\Skype (only the Phone subdir is needed, but it has to be inside the Skype Directory on the flash. e.g. x:\Skype\Phone)

2.) Make a folder called Data on the flash drive inside the Phone subdir (x:\Skype\Phone\Data)

3.) Copy your Skype data:
3.1) You can find your Skype profile data in c:\documents and settings\Application Data\Skype. From here you need to copy that folder which has the same name as your skype user to x:\Skype\Phone\Data you made.
3.2) (optional) I also copied the shared.xml on to my flash drive as well, but this is usually generated by itself.

4.) Now create a batch file in the root.
echo off
start ".\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe /removable /dbpath:.\Data\"
exit

5.) Make sure no Skype is running and run the batch file to make Skype start from flash drive.