David John Mead

LinkedIn applications are here

A while ago a group of us were chatting about LinkedIn and how it still didn’t offer a lot of the social network doo-dads that others sites, such as Facebook, does. Since then there has been a slow procession of functionality creeping into my Profile.

First there was Answers, which let you post, & reply to, questions from other users.  Then, after a redesign, came Groups and the ability to update your status.

Now LinkedIn has introduced Applications.  This lets you embed applications along the same lines as Facebook.  They are business-oriented; SlideShare, Company Buzz, and Huddle to name a few.

I’ve added SlideShare but I’m getting a lot of server errors when viewing which I’m hoping is down to volume at the moment.

It’ll be interesting how far they go along this route and truly become a “Facebook for business”.

Technorati tags: linkedin, applications, facebook, slideshare

The connectedness strikes again…

So I’m catching up on my RSS feeds and I saw that Jon Hicks posted about one of my favorite bands, Stars of the Lid.  They are releasing a film (not until 2010 mind you) of what looks like a series of live performances, similar to Sigur Ros’s excellent Heima.

Stars of the Lid . teaser 1 from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Now the people that made this also had some footage of dancers, shot on the amazing new red camera (which I just read about in Wired). When I took a look at that, I recognized the background as W6th in Cleveland, just outside my old employer, Optiem.

MorrisonDance pt.l from ZF-Films on Vimeo.

Never take for granted how people will find you on the internet. Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to add some Dead Texan and SOTL to a favtape of mine.

Nice touches at Huffduffer…

Catching up on my early morning tweets I saw one from Jeremy Keith about the launch of a new site, Huffduffer.

Its an interesting premise. Build your own RSS feed of sounds that you’ve find whilst traversing the Internet. You can then podcast your finds and subscribe to others.

Not so much as of a social network, more a network of social sounds. I could see @disquiet and @warrenellis making interesting use of this.

One nice touch of the design was the sign-up form.

I like the way its laid out, working like I’m filling it in on paper rather than just a series of HTML form fields. The choice of fonts for the filled in information is nice too.

One other thing I noticed. From the minimal information I gave at sign-up, virtually all of my other Internet places showed up in my profile. There is at least one that is not mine, but someone I worked with who took over my work blog, which could explain it.

Jeremy has said that By its nature, this will never be a popular, mass-market site. But, as is the case with most things built to scratch a particular itch, which is sometimes the best thing.

For the coders out there it shows what you can do with some PHP, HTML5 and microformats.

Geolocation creeps ever onwards

Today marked Sprint’s WIMAX coverage of Baltimore. Though service has been reported as being a bit spotty (about 70%), when you are in a zone the results are fantastic! Mario Armstrong on NPR reported using his laptop and running a TV show as well as NPR shows and some other apps without loss as he was driven around.

Add to this the news that Mozilla is looking to have geolocation in Firefox 3.1 and you have some new interest in the whole internet of things and ambient findability. You can try Geode from Mozilla Labs and start seeing what’s around you.

Is this the end of Twitter as we know it?

As a reader of Simon Willison’s blog, I came across this tool that he created with Natalie Downe – Tweetersation.

Now this tool lets you combine peoples conversations on Twitter in one time line.  Pretty cool.  So I can now just enter a few peoples names or id’s and I can see the whole conversation I caught the tail end of.

How does this fit with the title? Well, more and more I’m seeing Twitter being absorbed into or used by other tools/applications.  Most Web2.0 social sites let you post to or display from Twitter.  Other people are building tools to show the mood, locale, to search and monitor, and general pull or push whatever they can through the API.

So is that what Titter should resolve itself to be – Just an API to hang communication on?  Maybe that could be it’s business model.  How many people are actually logging in to the Twitter website as opposed to using it through something like HelloTxt or their phone, Snitter, Flock or Twhirl.

As netizens shift from shiny object to shiny object I believe Twitter will still be there.  I just don’t think we’ll be as aware of it’s presence as we are now.  It’ll just be that thing we use to communicate.

Technorati tags: twitter, api, future