However, we write regularly at our company blog, Welcome tot the Future.

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.

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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.

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

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…

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

In my previous post I noticed that Google Apps, free edition, no longer allows you to use SSL as standard connection setting.

gmail: use httpS instead of http

Luckily, the old trick of replacing http by https in the browser’s location bar still appeears to work (verified for Google Apps mail).

Using Firefox and Greasemonkey?

Pick one of these user scripts to automate the process (I haven’t chosen a favorite yet).

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)

Strange, how some popular services just not appear to work when becoming part of a new organization.

We saw this recently with Jaiku coming to a halt after being bought by Google.

Another example is del.icio.us (renamed to delicious.com in an attempt to make it seem less nerdy?). The first years after the acquisition by Yahoo not much happened, the lean and mean interface stayed the way it was and existing users could just go on using it the way it was, with their original account names, using login cookies that didn’t expire in ages. Over time, the web interface started to get a little bloated, still nothing to worry too much about.

More recently, Yahoo decided to “merge accounts” into Yahoo accounts and use their single sign-on technology for authentication. That is where the trouble started.

Over time, Yahoo’s sign-in system has been secured more and more, without doubt a good thing to protect your Yahoo mailbox. But serious overkill for the way users like me want to use del.iciou.us. That is: when I hit an interesting web page, I want to immediately bookmark it (using a bookmarklet), add a few tags (with ajax auto-completion goodness), hit the enter key and be done with that. And now I’m no longer able to use the bookmarklet that way, I always get that pesky Yahoo signin screen.

Now I happen to have quiet a few Yahoo accounts because of all those merged services (upcoming.org, and flickr.com) and I simply can not remember which account was used for what service, let alone what password is the right one. To make matters worse, Yahoo now even refuses to send me a password reset link if I can’t tell them my secondary email address. Geezj, Idon’t know that, I have gazillions of those secondary addresses. I simply have to give up on those locked Yahoo accounts.

What they should have done is the way LinkedIn works: use a persistent auth cookie for basic, read only access and only ask for your password again if you’re about to edit your profile or send a message to another user. This is well aligned with the involvement of the task at hand:

• quick check of a user’s profile works with my persistent stored account details
• editing my profile or actions involving other users ask me to prove that I am who I pretend (based on my password, oh well)

Oh, and if I don’t remember my password, just help me to reset it w/o asking impossible questions.

Back to del.icio.us, what are the alternatives?

Currently I’m experimenting with Twine, which adds many more sharing and collaboration options. An alternative might be faviki.com, which suggests wikipedia topics for tags, creating real semantic meaning for these tags.

Twine’s bookmarklet works nice and clean, while the Faviki bookmarklet needs some work; it occupies too much screen space and the wikipedia lookups (through DBPedia) take too long for a smooth experience.

So, what is your alternative for del.icious? Please let me know in the comments!

For those who don’t know Panoramio yet, it is a clean, nice photo sharing site. Its specialty is that every photo is geographically marked. Select photos appear on Google Earth and the site itself is organized around Google Maps, where every location marks available photos with an icon or a small thumbnail.

The announcement in the blog post does not provide many specific details, but for now not much will change:

For now, our user interface will not change; accounts, urls, features… We will keep working for Panoramio as a team, but this time using Google infrastructure as Panoramio further integrates into Google’s mapping technologies. We will also keep answering e-mails directly as much as possible.

Oh, and by the way, they also have an API – released just earlier this month…

[ratings]

This time, I removed all fancy rewrite stuff, which didn’t play well with some custom rewrite rules. That should be fixed now.

Also, I tested the plugin with the upcoming WordPress v. 2.1 (alpha 3). And it appears to work just fine.

Finally, there were reports about missing wp_head() calls in some WordPress templates. That is a problem, because wp_head is a so called hook that is needed for plugins to insert stuff into the html head section of the blog pages.

I tested all of the top 10 most popular themes from themes.wordpress.net and some more. Ans indeed, theme #6, Japanese Cherry Blossom 1.0 appears to be broken in more than one way: both the wp_head hook and the closing html head tag are missing.

Fixing this is easy; open header.php and find the opening <body> tag. On the line above, insert the following code:

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

So if you have installed the WP-Microsummaries plugin and it is not working, this problem may be the cause. Please let the theme author know, it is an easy fix!

Update: Just after writing this blog, I find out that the wp_head() function call is optional, although authors are encouraged to use it.