Tweeps Around reaches Tokyo

Spotted via Twitter: looking at Shiodome over #layar browser with Tweeps Around in Tokyo. Nice to see this in international context just hours after the launch!

More info about Layar and Tweeps Around in my previous blog post.

If you’re on a mobile browser and have Layar installed: click here for Tweeps Around in Layar.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Layar Wants More Layers, Opens Augmented Reality Platform To Developers (techcrunch.com)
• GoWeb3D Launches Mobile Augmented Reality Content on Layar, Announces New Mobile AR Products (prweb.com)
• Twitter augmented reality search: Tweetmondo and Layar team up (venturebeat.com)
• Layar.eu – The First Augmented Reality Browser (killerstartups.com)
• Want to augment the reality? Layar adds API to their service! (thenextweb.com)
• Augmented reality browser Layar expands worldwide, eyes iPhone (venturebeat.com)
• Layar Augmented Reality Now World Wide on Android, iPhone is Next (readwriteweb.com)

Popularity: 2%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

What the trend

Update: yes, there are more such services now, I just discovered tagdef.com which does more or less the same. And is much less complete as of late Aug. 2009. Their complementary twitter account is @newtagdefs.

Since Twitter search officially launched, Twitter trends have become an essential part to keep up with the service. These trends are shown on every search page.

Many trends are marked by the often cryptic hash tags (e.g. #www2009 stood for the WWW conference, 2009 edition.

But also regular terms emerge in the trends if people are using them often enough, for example names like Susan Boyle become real Twiter trends this way.

In many cases, looking at the trends will give you a quick impression what is hot right now in the world. But sometimes terms and hash tags are not obvious at first glance, if at all.

A new service, whatthetrend.com, has been launched to solve this problem. The site shows the latest trend terms, along with a small user-editable explanation what the trend is about. This looks a lot like the awkwardly named technorati experiment WTF (intended to be a funny acronym for where’s the fire).

Clicking on such a trend displays related tweets, news and photos, very neat.

Of course, whatthetrend comes with its own @whatthetrend twitter account which announces new trends and invites followers to explain them. And you can also use wttrend.com to save on your 140 chars limit.

I really like this service!

Some more random observations around Twitter trends

Timezones

The local timezone of an event is often very relevant for something to become a trend. Right now, #hksummit is trending (Apple event in Hong Kong, at local time somewhere afternoon). With Twitter becoming more and more popular, geographic restriction on search/trends might become useful for disambiguation and better signal to noise ratio when following local events.

Spam

Spammers are starting to abuse the popular tweet terms and post tweets with just these terms, together with their spammy links.

There is one twitter account (which I won’t mention here to avoid free publicity) which does just that: take all trend terms, convert them in a Amazon search query with affiliate code and post a tweet, many times per hour.

This was first discovered by the @paggr folks during #www2009. They are now trying to keep the spam out of their system, yet another arms race against spam has started.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Keeps On Growing – Especially in Australia (readwriteweb.com)
• So Who Are The Twitter A-Listers? (mediabullseye.com)
• Twitalyzer – Made Me Smile (dorai.wordpress.com)
• The Twuffies and the Twusties (techcrunchit.com)
• Twitalyzer.com – Measure Your Twitter Impact (killerstartups.com)
• the spambots on twitter are completely out of control (wilwheaton.typepad.com)

Popularity: 13%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Instead of blogging about one of the subjects I had in mind, I use this space for just one thing: linking to the essay by Scott Berkun: How to be a free thinker.

Just read it, think it over and be silent for a moment. Likely I’m wrong (read the essay) but I’m impressed!

Popularity: 13%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

It has been more than a year now since I got involved with Twones as one of the founding partners. Time to reveal a bit of what we have been cooking and what it may mean for music lovers and producers, mostly from a technical perspective.

Twones is all about your music timeline, that is, tracking the music you listen to and being able to re-use this data in all ways imaginable.
The service itself focuses on the social aspect of music, by allowing you to share your music listening with the world and follow in real time what your friends are listening to.

From a technical perspective, the basis is being able to determine the metadata of the music you’re listening to, both online (websites) as well as offline (local music players like itunes, winamp, windows media…). This metadata is then sent to Twones and made available again in various formats. The music timeline on the web site is currently the most visible representation. But eventually you will be able to export your timeline again, through a dedicated API, in order to build your own mashups or just be able to archive it.

Modelling
When looking at the music timeline, Twones is much like a funnel, gathering music events from many places, processing them to make them available again in many contexts and applications.

The good thing about the internet is still the enormous amount of solutions and open standards which are being developed and improved to suit real needs. So it is no surprise that an informal standard for representation of music playlists already exists for a couple of years: XSPF. This is an XML based format, open for extension with multiple alternative music sources in mind.

Twones extends XSPF by adding a timestamp for the playback event, so the list has both meaning as a music timeline and as playlist for future playback.

With this in place, the Twones funnel can be seen as a data acquisition component (which runs in your web browser), followed by a metadata normalizer and resolver, followed by a XSPF export facility. It is on top of these XSPF streams that many, many services can and will be built, allowing to re-use your music attention in ways we can not even imagine right now.

To be continued…

Popularity: 14%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Update Feb 10: Google is listening to their critical users and takes their responsibility serious, it appears!

Today I discovered that they did not only restore the “always use https” setting in gmail, but there is now a global switch on the Apps for your domain settings page as well. Ironically, the associated help page still tells you that this is a “premier edition only feature “.

Now that is a big improvement, thank you Google!

Apps for your domain: DomainSettings: always use SSL

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 18%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

Just like with the downturn around year 2001, many formerly free web apps start charging for their services, and sometimes quite significant amounts. For instance, the first payed tier of Getsatisfaction costs now $49 per month, still significant for a start-up. Not to criticize GSFN, we love the service as we use it for Twones, but this is clearly becoming a trend.

In times of economic downturn it is either getting paid or getting bust.

More surprising is a silent change in the options for Google Apps when you sign up for a new account (new domain).

A year ago, the free product allowed you to add 100 users (or emails), now 50.

And the webmail product was almost like the free gmail product. Specifically, you should specify that connections always use SSL (secure https rather than standard http). This is now gone, you have to pay $50,- per user per year now to use secure connections.

This surprises me, considered that there are urgent reports warning that you should use the https option for gmail, which attracts more and more black hat hackers due to its high popularity.

Oh, and $50 is a bit much of a price tag for members of my family who just want to check their email every so often…

Update: a bit of googling learns that I’m not the only one who noticed…

• Your Google Docs May Be Open to Hijacking
• Google Puts The Squeeze On Free Apps
• The End of Free? (hey, even the same title)

Popularity: 18%

Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post