Development on a Shoestring

Looks like Google and Facebook will be competing with FriendFeed

2008-06-27T05:53:35Z

FaceBook has been slowly updating the Mini-feed displayed on a user’s profile page to look more and more like a FriendFeed-esq lifestreaming application, by allowing you to include actions from other sites, and now allowing comments on the items.

Triston McIntyre has a good post on the details and possible implications of these changes on Profy, especially as to why FriendFeed probably doesn’t have to worry too much about this:

In execution, I seriously doubt Friendfeed has anything to worry about. Though Facebook does have a friends feed on each user’s homepage, and individual mini-feeds on every user’s profile, Facebook’s feeds are structured very differently than FriendFeed. Where on FriendFeed, the feed is pretty much the focus, mini-feeds on Facebook are largely overlooked, except perhaps by those jealous lovers and "interested" others (oh, come on, everyone has them.right?).

Facebook is essentially Social 101 for those looking to get connected to friends. Platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter, at least at this point in time, are just a higher level of social media. Adoption of both platforms is increasing, but I don’t think that FriendFeed needs to worry about losing its user base to Facebook-happy comment heads. Sleep easy, FriendFeed, and enjoy the flattery by imitation.

However, Google Operating System has a post today outlining the features in the new beta of the iGoogle homepage. The new iGoogle will have a lot more ’social’ features in in, including a gtalk chat & gmail directly on the page, but the thing that I noticed was the ‘Updates’ box on the right. This seems to be a feed of all the things you’re doing on Google’s products. The box there has a number of items on it: shared items from Google Reader, photos from Picassa, shared themes for iGoogle, shared gadgets and status from Gtalk. There’s also the ability to add free text (and presumably links) in a box above the list. There doesn’t seem to be any non-google content in there, but I can’t believe that it would be possible to do that. If it’s not a feature now, you know it will be very soon.

So FriendFeed may have some more competition in the not too distant future.

iTunes now selling Australian TV shows for $2.99 an episode

2008-06-25T07:42:06Z

From the SMH:

Apple iTunes users in Australia can now buy television shows - some of which have long been offered for free elsewhere - for the first time at $2.99 each.

After a protracted tussle with local networks and the studios for rights to distribute episodes to Australians via the internet, Apple has secured deals with the ABC and Nine networks in Australia, as well as Disney, ABC and MTV in the US.

Local shows on offer include Summer Heights High, McLeod’s Daughters, Canal Road and Sea Patrol, while US favourites are also available including Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, The Hills, South Park, Pimp My Ride and Scrubs.

Single episodes cost $2.99 but unlike overseas there are no discounts for buying full seasons. In the US, where TV shows have been available through iTunes since 2005, individual episodes cost $US1.99.

‘bout time. Hopefully this is the beginning of some better online entertainment content for Australia

ReadBurner adds FeedDemon clippings feeds, suddenly becomes awesome!

2008-06-24T04:13:21Z

Nick Bradbury announced today that shared news aggregator site ReadBurner has added Newsgator (ie FeedDemon) shared items feeds to their site. This means that us FeedDemon users can join all the cool Google Reader kids over there.

Along with including NewsGator feeds, they’ve added NewsGator as a tab up the top of their site along with Google Reader & Netvibes so you can read your feeds without leaving the ReadBurner site. While that’s not a huge feature to me (FeedDemon FTW!) I’m sure it would be handy if you used the Newsgator web interface.

Here’s the instructions from Nick on how you add you Newsgator clipping feed:

Here’s how it’s done:

If you haven’t done so already, share one of your clippings folders as an RSS feed (this screencast explains how this is done in FeedDemon).

Copy the URL of the shared clippings feed to the clipboard (in FeedDemon, you can do this by clicking the “Copy” link from the clippings properties).

Browse to http://www.readburner.com/

Go to the "Add Feed" option on the right hand side of the ReadBurner menu bar, then select “NewsGator Clippings” and enter the URL of your clipping feed.

Also, as Nick mentioned, FeedDemon allows you to share web pages as well as feed items. Just drag the url into your clippings folder & it will get added (Just the title, the content of the page won’t be added).

This is great, and a great boost for Newsgator & FeedDemon as they get more visibility in the RSS reader market place. Remember kids, FeedDemon, along with the syncing ability of Newsgator is free! You need to download it now.

Update: Here’s my clippings folder on ReadBurner. ~~It’s just showing up as ‘Link Blog’ despite me putting in my alias. Oh well, I’d prefer to have my name there, but at least it’s working!~~ Drew from ReadBurner responded to my issue & has already fixed it, thanks Drew! (see comments below)

Don’t forget, Firefox 3 Download Day 2008 is today

2008-06-16T23:24:36Z

. Of course it’s on US Pacific time, so it doesn’t start until 5PM Australian EST. So don’t forget to get Firefox & be part of the world record.

Jaiku might just be going somewhere after all

2008-06-14T04:07:21Z

I just received an SMS from the Jaiku bot saying that their SMS service was back up & operational. I’ve sent a post via the SMS bot and it is working, so it would seem that maybe Google hasn’t completely abandoned the service after all. This would be good. I liked Jaiku when it was first launched, it had a few features that I feel Twitter lacks (channels for one, plus native image posting) without over-complicating the service.

I’ve always thought that with GMail, GTalk, Grand Central & Jaiku, Google had the building blocks for a really comprehensive communications platform. Add into that mix Google Apps & Google Docs and you’ve got a solid business system to work from.

Imagine if Google rolled GTalk, Jaiku and Grand Central into a single app/service. It would suddenly become a serious competitor to Skype if they could get the sound quality and pricing right. Skype was supposed to be the communications platform of the future (if you believed the hype), but due to a number of factors, including the acquisition by eBay and the fact they use a proprietary VOIP protocol, it hasn’t happened. GTalk runs on an open VOIP protocol, so you can talk to non-GTalk VOIP clients. If done right that could be one killer app.

Well, now we know who the most important FriendFeed users are

2008-06-12T13:02:54Z

You may think you’re a big user of FriendFeed, you may think you have heaps of followers and everything you submit gets liked & commented on. Sorry, that’s nothing. Google has spoken and the most important FriendFeed members are…

Deepak & Kevin, congratulations. Google says you’re more relevant than the About page, the FAQ or the public feed. That’s pretty impressive!

Additionally, if you go the ‘More results’ page you’ll note that the order goes like this:

Hands up anyone who’s surprised to see Robert at number 4? Anyone, anyone?

New beta for the FriendFeed Comments plugin

2008-06-12T03:50:33Z

For anyone who’s game, and especially for anyone who’s been having problems with the FriendFeed Comments plugin, I’ve just checked in a new beta release that you can download. It’s not available through the WordPress auto-updater yet because it’s not been tested sufficiently. So if you’d like to help out you can grab it here: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/friendfeed-comments.1.6.0beta.zip

There aren’t any major visible changes. There’s a couple of tidy up changes eg. I removed some inline styles that I should have moved into the default stylesheet, but the major changes are behind the scenes. Some people were having issues with the plugin not retrieving the information correctly and it seemed to be an issue for people with a large number of posts & comments. So this new version now stores the data in a custom table on your WordPress database. This should make things much more efficient and hopefully less error-prone.

If you do install the new update you must deactivate & re-activate the plugin, then go to the settings page & click ‘Save Changes’ before it will work. If you don’t the table won’t be created and it won’t work.

If you can help out with the beta testing it would be much appreciated.

We have a launch date for Firefox 3 (plus an extra RC)

2008-06-12T03:00:44Z

From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 - the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today. Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.

Showing trackbacks with Disqus

2008-06-12T02:12:46Z

Currently one of the limitations of using the otherwise great comments service Disqus is that it doesn’t allow you to display trackbacks/pingbacks. Apparently this will be fixed in a future release of the Disqus WordPress plugin, but for now it’s not working.

The trackbacks you receive are still stored locally in your database, despite them not being displayed, so you can access them. However there isn’t a built-in way to access just the list of trackbacks. Trackbacks are stored as comments in the wp_comments table and are identified by a comment_type of either ‘trackback‘ or ‘pingback‘. (For our purposes here, there’s no real difference between the two. For more info on what the actual difference is, see this page) So, if you wanted to you could write up a bit of PHP that pulled all the trackbacks out of the database & displayed them on your blog, but for a lot of people this is a bit much.

If you look on this page (the FriendFeed Comments Plugin page), you can see a list of the trackbacks that page has received. It’s a very simple list, I’m not displaying the text snippet that usually comes with trackbacks, but that’s just personal preference. If you’d like to be able to display your trackbacks without having to worry about writing code yourself I’ve got a really simple plugin that lets you do this here. The plugin adds 2 functions, get_approved_trackbacks & trackbacks_template. get_approved_trackbacks takes the post id as an argument and returns a list of the trackbacks that have been approved (moderated) for that post. trackbacks_template is essentially an additional template tag to be used in the same way as comments_template() is used on the single.php template file.

So for example, if you wanted to display the trackbacks before the comments, download & install the plugin. Then open up the single.php template file for your site & find the line <?php comments_template(); ?>. Stick <?php trackbacks_template(); ?> on the line above it. This will display the trackbacks as an unordered list inside a div with the id "trackbackslist" with a h3 heading "Trackbacks" above the list. However if you’d like to style it differently, it will also look for a template file called trackbacks.php in your template folder. If it finds that it will use that to render the trackbacks. This is what I’m doing here so as to not display the trackback text. By default the plugin will display that too.

Obviously this is an advanced option, and only for those familiar with HTML & PHP. For those people, the plugin provides a variable called $trackbacks which is an array of comment objects. The code that I’ve used to display the trackbacks by default is contained in a file called ‘trackbacks.php’ in the plugin folder, which you can copy into your template folder to use as a starting point for styling your own list.

Hopefully Disqus will sort out what it’s going to do with trackbacks, according to Daniel from Disqus it’s coming soon. I’m pretty happy with their service, they’ve been really responsive to any support requests and they’ve had pretty solid uptime. The lack of trackbacks isn’t really a big deal to me, but I do like to show who’s discussing my posts. As usual please leave comments / bug reports on the plugin’s page.

The new iPhone really shows what annoys me about Apple

2008-06-10T09:45:15Z

One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet. The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked. The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install. The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry. The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too. A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now. It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem. Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off. I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call - when I first got it to test it out - but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point. The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities. Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there. It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS. It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out. It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

But this isn’t the most annoying thing. The most annoying feature omission in my opinion is that the new iPhone still can’t copy and paste text! Are you kidding me? This is insane. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without doing this at some point on my computer, and it’s something I wish my normal phone could do, copying names from inside SMS messages would be really handy (my Motorola phone does allow you to copy phone numbers out of messages, which is quite handy). The official reason apparently is that they don’t want to over complicate the UI, but seriously, how hard would it be for the phone to allow you to drag over text to highlight it and when you release have it auto-copy to a clipboard. It could then, for example, do paste on a double-tap into a text-editable area.

Obviously this is just an example I’ve pulled off the top of my head, it would need some thought about how to integrate it into the actual UI, but it could be done. What annoys me is this: Apple wants you to do things the Apple way. You can transfer data between apps on the iPhone. It automatically picks up phone numbers and email addresses and allows you to interact with them. Clicking on an image brings up a menu to do things to that image. This is all good an intuitive, but it’s structured. Structured how Apple wants you to use the phone. Cut/Copy/Paste is more free-form. It would mean people are doing things their own way, and there would be the chance of users getting confused. And this seems to be Apples overriding concern. It treats users like children who don’t know what they’re doing. You can imagine the conversation at Apple HQ:

Copy & Paste? No we couldn’t possibly allow the customer to do that, they might make a mistake!

So? It would also allow people to do things you hadn’t imagined people could do. What happened to think different? Did that just mean think like Apple? I mentioned something similar in an earlier post on a completely different topic, but I think it’s relevant here:

Don’t unnecessarily constrain your users. Sure if there are real technical or financial reasons why something can’t be done, don’t do it. But if you’re building a service or a product that people can use, especially if it involves communication or some form of social interaction, then expect that it will be used for more than what you intended it for. It’s a good thing really. Because if people don’t stretch the boundaries of your service, it probably doesn’t mean you’ve built exactly what people need. It probably means that you’ve built something that people don’t want to use.

Now, people are going to want to use the iPhone. I want to use the iPhone, it looks amazing and the built in GPS + web browsing + Exchange syncing make it really attractive. I just wish Apple was a bit less patronising towards it’s customers.

Update: Here’s some other people breaking out of the Apple Reality Distortion Field:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes - iPhone 3G - Apple’s reality distortion field redefines the phrase “half the price”

Here’s the deal. An 8GB iPhone 3G costs $199. Sounds good so far. However, AT&T has added an extra $10 a month to the unlimited 3G monthly fees compared to EDGE, so over the 24 month period of the contract, that sets you back an extra $240.

$199 + $240 = $439

That’s a $40 increase compared to the price of the current iPhone.
Charles Cooper - So the press has become Steve Jobs’ willing tool? What else is new?

I guess it’s a case of keeping up with the Joneses, though the risk is that we’ve all inadvertently become fan boys. Let’s face the truth: Apple gets a enormous amount of free publicity because we’ve all bought into the idea that it’s special. I suppose kudos are in order to Apple’s corporate media planners on a job well done.
David M. Ewalt - The iPhone’s Biggest (And Dumbest) Flaw

But here’s my problem: why in the name of Woz has Apple not added mobile messaging (MMS)? Few non-iPhone users realize that it has a major missing feature; it can’t send or receive photos like it would a text message. You know, that feature on every other phone on the planet where you can snap a pic with your camera phone and then beam it off to a friend? I can buy a $20 burner in a convenience store that’s able to use MMS. So why can’t a $200 state-of-the-art superphone handle it?