Disqus - Latest Comments for alan Jones

Re: Maybe Flickr should have a Twitter? (Scripting News)

alan Jones — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:39:56 -0000

Yes, absolutely agree that Twitter needs to scale and add payloads. Also absolutely agree that Flickr is on the edge of having its lunch stolen in mobile. But really, in a takeover-offer-paralysed Yahoo!, where are you going to get the dev resources?

For me, the one thing I like most about Twixtr that I don't get elsewhere (inc. Twittergram) that you don't mention is geotagging. Twixtr seems to do a pretty fair job of guesstimating my location with each image i upload from my iPhone. That's very handy. I don't usually bother geotagging my pics cos I don't have a way to do it while shooting on my camera or my cameraphone, and usually can't be bothered when it comes to uploading them to Flickr.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

alan Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:22:36 -0000

There are some problems with Twitter as a news delivery system.

Unlike a typical newspaper CMS platform, there's no undo and no delete with Twitter - try to edit an incorrect assertion, try to retract an opinion and you'll find you can't.

You can publish a follow-up post, but between Twitter users' attention flitting from one stream to another and Twitter's frequent downtimes, there's a good chance your follow-up post won't be seen, especially at times of high usage.

Unless you change the default preference, all the content you publish on Twitter is republished as a public RSS feed, indexable by search engines and republishable by anyone with an RSS widget. Plan on tweaking that series of twitterings into a pro story later and selling it to a magazine? Good luck: the magazine already has it if they really want it.

You retain the copyright to the content you publish on Twitter, but you have to delete your Twitter profile - and all the associated content with that profile - to remove just one message. Big decision to make after you've built up a following of thousands of users.

If you were to publish something incorrect, and needed to retract it to avoid legal action, you'd have to hope the entity taking the action was satisfied with a follow-up retraction post, since the only way to remove your post from Google would be to delete your entire Twitter account and content, and lose all the hard work and time you'd put into building a following. Not a great choice to make for an up-and-coming news blogger.

Here's my recent post about how Twitter really needs to lift its game on privacy and content management soon.

Re: Twitter as news delivery system

alan Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:39:56 -0000

...here's a fun game: restrict a Google search to the public Twitter stream and then search on a phrase such as "so horny"... bet the Twitter users in question didn't think about this before they were so open about it!

Re: Twitter’s struggles harm more than just the users

alan Jones — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:42:19 -0000

Nobody in the social messaging space likes to see such a prominent player take such a big hit in reliability and reputation. We're looking forward to reporting a 100% uptime result for www.bluepulse.com through the weekend.

Oh, don't forget Super Tuesday is next week.

Meanwhile, best wishes to the Twitter team - hope you get it all sorted out soon.

Re: Launching Products, MyBlogLog style

alan Jones — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:08:16 -0000

Some of my best work experiences ever have been in those last few bug-squishing hours. Isn't it an incredible feeling? Like being part of an orchestra with no conductor where everything just happens, or part of a complex basketball play where you can't even see the guys you're passing to.

I started capturing IM transcripts of moments like these a few years ago and have a bit of an archive going. Have always wondered if there was value I could mine from them, like a book, a lecture or a blog post.

But so far, when I let others read them, if the reader wasn't there at the time, it doesn't seem to matter how much pre-story explanation I give, the magic isn't apparent.

However, the people who were involved in the transcript are taken right back to that moment and enjoy it immensely.

So lately I've been wondering if there's something in the idea of a web service that 'plays' IM transcripts, using the time/date stamps for timing with some play/skip/replay controls. Let people who were original participants annotate it with their reflections on it with hindsight. Maybe add soundtrack and editing controls.

Anyway, probably only a tiny, niche audience of fellow web development people who'd be interested in it, but I'd love to be able to do it.

Re: US Is Where It's At For Mobile Social Networks?

alan Jones — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:58:11 -0000

Good round up Dianne, though there's one more company to include.

As previously reported in Moconews, Australian mobile social messaging startup Bluepulse received $6 million in funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners in 2007. In August 2007 the company relocated from Australia to offices in San Mateo, CA that were previously occupied by YouTube.

Later in 2007, Bluepulse CEO Ben Keighran was chosen as a finalist in the BusinessWeek magazine America's Best Young Entrepreneurs of 2007 awards. In January 2008, Bluepulse was chosen as an AlwaysOn OnMedia Top 100 award winner.

http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-bluepulse-get...

Re: Nokia And Facebook Working On Mobile Deal; Could Involve Investment

alan Jones — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:19:14 -0000

Daisy, it could be bigger for Facebook because FB's core market is still college students, and Blackberries are more of a corporate handset. Nokia's big in US college campuses, but probably not as big as Motorola and SonyEricsson though.

If Nokia has a stake in Facebook then there is considerably more incentive to give them better placement on the handset deck than FB currently enjoys on Blackberry.

But Nokia's other agenda may be to use FB to promote the use of new apps that are only compatible with their newest, high-end handsets. That could be bad for FB because that would be a smaller still slice of the US college market.

All speculation, of course. Let's see if a deal eventuates and if so, what they disclose about the terms.