Other things to consider are.. Reserve anything with the name of your app included (e.g. twitter don’t allow users to create urls that include “twitter”). Reserve as many urls for authentication methods as possible, I only included a couple here, oauth and openid.

Here’s a published google doc, and a csv file, text, and xls.

As of tomorrow I’ll be focusing the weekly coworking meet on local startups, making a time for them to get together and work in the same space, meet each other, maybe collaborate, or help each other out.

So if you’re a startup, or you’ve got something you want to try and build, come along and say hi.

We meet upstairs at Cafe Delice (map) at 10am every Friday and tend to go on most of the day (but starting early is best!). We’re a small but very welcoming group, with varying levels of experience, and are all at different stages in the lives of our projects.

Signup on Upcoming.org.

There’s also a mailing list for chat between meets, once you’ve been along you’ll get an invite to join that too :)

1. Get Spotify
2. Create a playlist to share
3. Make sure your title includes the #mondayMix hashtag and your Twitter @username
4. Right-click on the playlist and select “Copy HTTP Link” (this is the bit you’re going to share)
5. Share it on Twitter, say something like “check out my #mondayMix, hope it gets you all going! http://is.gd/1Kefj”
6. The best bit – find other people’s #mondayMix’s by searching on Twitter

Here’s my playlist, it’s optimistically summer themed!

Ewan from Mobile Industry Review found me in a corner with a beer at Swedish Beers and got me to talk for about 15 minutes.. most of which was rather sensitive, but this bit got published..

MIR Show – Week 45 – Mobile Operators & Google from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Google isn’t that interested in providing every service itself, as long as it gets to sit between the remaining ones. They will happily let other people do the really hard parts, usually involving hardware. Android is a good example of this, Voice is another, Chrome OS is the next. Everyone else gets to compete, while Google sits in the middle.

It doesn’t even want to build it’s own social network. Why? because there’s the internet. So again it builds tools in-between the parts everyone else has made, tools such as OpenSocial.

Whether or not this turns out to be a good thing?.. Well the future isn’t that far away..

Used with permission, Thanks lomokev!

In Brighton there is a lot of event activity at the end of each year, here’s a list:

• Develop – 14th-16th July 2009
• Beachdown Music Festival – 28th-31st August 2009
• dConstruct – 4th September 2009
• Barcamp Brighton – 5th-6th September 2009 TBC
• Flash on the Beach – 20th-23rd September 2009
• Mix UK – September 2009 TBC
• Amplified (new) – September 2009 TBA
• Head – October 2009 TBC
• Brighton Comedy Fringe – 15th-31st October 2009
• Paramount Comedy Festival – 15th-31st October 2009
• Full Frontal (new) – 20th November 2009
• CINECITY – Novemeber 2009
• DiMAS (web awards) – November 2009 TBC
• Twestival – September 2009? TBC
• Farm Hack Day – 2009? (might have been a one-off last time)

And other regular, smaller events, all year round, such as:

• £5app
• Cafe Scientifique
• Flash Brighton
• Robot Brighton
• Tuttle
• Pecha Kucha

So how about joining them together, informally at first, under one umbrella group of events, a festival of festivals if you will! A month (or 2?) of events and activities, strung together, collaborating on parts, and going beyond the normal boundaries. It’s when fringes blur into each other that things get really interesting.

Ok so the dates are a little far apart for some of those events, but others are so close together that maybe other events will appear in between. We’re way off having a single ticket for everything, but a single banner could be achievable.

I can imagine creating an atmosphere of creativity and learning, mixed with music and relaxation, not to mention the meeting people and spending real time exploring ideas in between events, not being rushed, or leaving town the next day..

So would this be a good idea? Would we risk dilution? or would it raise the profile of the events and the city?

What do you think?

(Oh, and any events I missed that would fit in well?)

UPDATE:
Here’s some more groups that meet regularly.. I’m sure they could organise something during the festival too :)

Brighton Bloggers, Freelancers Farm, Girl Geek Dinners, UX Brighton, Geek Wine Thing, Brighton Flickr, Open Coffee Sussex, Likemind, Skillswap, Sussex Geek Dinners, Brighton Illustrators, Brighton Vine, Freelance Journalists…

What else is going on in art, music, film or literature that the geeks don’t know about? I’ll add to the list. This is also relevant to Amplified09 too, which will be a one day meeting during this period, of all these groups and networks.

UPDATE 2:
Two other music festivals to add to Beachdown are Loop and The Great Escape, I don’t think they’ll move from the summer, but maybe they could all collaborate on a weekend in September? :)

So here’s the email you get now:

• It’s HTML
• The user’s avatar is included. Sometimes this could be broken if the user changes their avatar, because the avatar URL would also have changed, but it’s hardcoded into the email at the previous URL. (unless they’ve solved the drifting avatar url problem with a consistent endpoint?)
• You’re shown the number of followers/friends/tweets of that user. But the followers/friends are separated by the tweets (updates) which is initially confusing and not easy to scan to compare the ratio.
• The FROM part of the email is now just noreply@twitter.com. This used to include the email address you have on your twitter account, which meant filtering your email based on which Twitter account these were sent to was easy. This is now in the REPLY-TO field in the email instead, can you filter on that? Or you can filter based on the TO field AND the FROM field as a combination, yeah that might do it. (Has anyone made a nice GMail filter for this yet?)
• Your username has been removed from the body of the email. Which means you can’t instantly see which account this person is following following (if you have multiple accounts).
• Showing more info in the email might be an attempt to reduce traffic on Twitter.com, but I can’t believe that would have a significant impact on their costs.
• I’m guessing the grey box in the email is supposed to contain the bio? I haven’t had one yet that does. Bug?
• The emails are sent as multi-part, which means the text version of old is still there for text-only email clients. Good!
• It would be great to see the most recent couple of tweets from that user. It’s usually easy to see if they’re spam just from that.
• Better still, show which friends/followers you share. Then I might gather the context, or the network we share.
• Or maybe the last few @replies to that person. This might show the level of engagement from other users, further indicating whether they’re spam.

Isn’t it fun making rushed judgements about the small things Twitter do? :) Anything I missed?

UPDATE: Twitter just made a small change to DM (direct message) emails, the FROM field no-longer has the real name of the person the message is from. It used to say “Josh Russell via Twitter”. Again, this was good for scanning visually and filtering on. It now just says “Twitter”.

Strangely they *have* included your email address as part of the FROM address, contrary to what it used to be which was noreply@twitter.com… The opposite to the change they just made on the emails I describe above. It would be nice to have some consistency on small details like this.

We were the first URL shortener to *not* create random strings for short URLS, instead allowing the user to create something memorable. This is good for a lot of reasons, something I’ll cover in another post.

They look like this http://icanhaz.com/josh instead of this http://tinyurl.com/yvarg9 (both resolve to my blog).

We’ve had 30,000 URLS created, and together they’ve been clicked on nearly 2,000,000 times.

So because things have been going great, and you’ve been poking us on every social network there is about features you’d like to see, we spent some time adding the most useful stuff…

User Accounts

Now you can save your URLS on your account. This lets you get some stats and edit the redirect in the future.

An API (vers.0.1)

Dave built the API to compliment the user accounts, for now it’s limited but does the core things you’ll need, here’s the docs. The simplest thing this lets us do is to allow third party apps to let their users create URLs on I CAN HAZ dot COM in their user accounts. This is obviously a good thing!

(app developers: If you’re building an app that allows people to create short URLs using I CAN HAZ dot COM, you can let users give you their API key rather than their passwords.. help us keep our users secure by not encouraging them to share their login details!)

A Shorter URL

We registered a shorter URL, icnhz.com, which can be used in place of icanhaz.com in any url you’ve created. And of course used as the URL in URLs created using the API.

Fan Wiki

We also started a fan wiki, which I guess I’m announcing here :) If you’ve done something with the API, or just something cool with I CAN HAZ dot COM, feel free to add it there. Remy has done a great bookmarklet, I’m sure it’ll be up there soon!

Reliability..

.. is something we need to work on. This is already being highlighted as an issue for all URL shortening services, and is something we’d like do make sure doesn’t become an issue for us. Essentially, if we’re down for any reason then all the URLs that redirect through us won’t work, or resolve anywhere. There is a *lot* of discussion about how to limit this as an issue, but something we can do right away is make our platform more robust, and move onto better servers.

Sponsorship

To help us get to a more robust state we’re going to start displaying sponsors on the homepage. This will be for a limited period, and a one-time-only opportunity! We’d love to promote other small projects and startups rather than anything else. If you’d like to get involved and become a sponsor, send me your name and email address in the form below and I’ll get back to you (rss readers, click here). We’ll be using Pistach.io to do this, keeping it all in the family :)

(there’s a couple of easter eggs too, see if you can find them!)

Me too.

Well, I’ve never let it get so far that I’ve actually been scammed, because I’m able to read quickly when it’s happening. That is because I’m so familiar with it. Which means, for me at least, that it happens too much.

I hold eBay responsible for this.

In this post I’m going to list a few things I think they can do, and try to explain why it’s their fault.

The most recent scam was on this item (220367080109, 220362598452), and, if I remember correctly, this was one of those attempts when the successful bidder (if you can call them that) paid well over the odds (alarm bell no. 1), even paying me more of a shipping fee than I requested (alarm bell no. 2).

They then messaged me through eBay to tell me that actually they wanted the item delivered to a different address (alarm bell no. 3), and that the money was in escrow at PayPal (alarm bell no. 4) and that the money would be released when I emailed them a shipping number (alarm bell no. 5).

Now in a normal eBay transaction there should be no alarm bells at all. Well maybe no.1 is acceptable as a nice surprise or a bidder that was feeling generous (which would be silly, wouldn’t it.).

I responded very frankly saying something like, “fuck off” or “I hate you”, and then attempted to inform eBay of what had happened to try to prevent getting charged the fees for this sale.

(Now I do understand that they’re under no obligation to not charge me for this. They, after all, are not the ones who tried to scam me.)

The process of informing them of an attempted scam is not simple. In fact, there is no option in the process to identify a scam as the reason for an issue. Only options like, “no payment” or “user is no-longer a member of eBay”.

This is already getting complicated, isn’t it.

It’s complicated more if you re-list that item on eBay, because that actually means the item hasn’t been sold yet, and therefore I can’t have been scammed on it now could I!?! Thus the process isn’t available. If I’ve got that wrong, I’m sorry, but that’s because it’s so damn complicated.

A complicated system can be an advantage to people who are willing to invest the time to work out where it can be gamed. There’s a saying in law that comes to mind: the difference between the letter of the law, and the intent of the law. Which basically means, just because something isn’t technically illegal, that doesn’t mean it’s not, or that it wasn’t intended to be covered by a law.

I believe that eBay uses this to their advantage. They appear to have a system in place to account for bad behaviour, but actually that system is so complex that bad behaviour still happens because it’s such hard work for a user who’s been taken advantage of, to do anything about it. At the most that means a user has unwittingly sent an item that they’ll never see the money for.. and at the least that means eBay will make it’s fees regardless, because users can’t work out how to make sure they’re not charged.

To me, that appears to be by design. eBay, that is not a good way to run a business. Profiteering through obscurity may have worked in the past, even recently, but it won’t stand for long.

Here’s some things eBay should do:

Community
There isn’t one currently, and actually, the idea that there should be one isn’t correct. There should be many. I should have community in Ebay. This would encourage peer based review and accountability.

Less anonymity
I have no idea who people are, what they’ve done, where they are, who are their friends, or what they’re like. A simple profile page would make a step in the right direction. Let’s add some personality to eBay!

Better rating and historic analysis
This one is tough, largely because of the of demographic of typical eBay users. I’m not saying they’re identical to YouTube commenters, but they’re in the same league.

Look to services like GetSatisfaction and it’s mood smileys:

or Facebook “like” links on everything:

..or lastFM for tuning ones musical interests.. all provide ambient methods of conveying an emotion about and action or object. This small granular data will all add up and provide some user information that can be visualised and contextualised.

Create a beneficial reason to not keep creating new accounts
Give value back for a long active history, like lower fees, more visibility, or some other bribe. This would have many benefits, the main one being that it would then be easier to identify users who have been around a while, who’ve built up a history and reputation. Users would spot noobs or spammers easier.

Better templating for the selling of items
Create some familiarity for users that help them to see quickly the important parts of an item’s auction page, and thus make judgments easier. There’s a lot of noise on eBay, making items easier to scan visually will speed up browsing and highlight points of note better. This is actually done pretty well by third party services, such as iPhone clients.

Sometimes (in fact I would argue, most times) limiting what a user can do can actually make the experience better, it allows a user to focus on what’s important to them. Most users don’t want to be fussed with writing html for their item page, and in fact, the ability to do that is one of the tools scammers use to sell items such as the packaging of a macbook for as much as the macbook itself. eBay is almost encouraging this to happen currently.

Longer auctions
This would reduce the number of auctions that have a flurry of bids in the last few minutes, helping a seller to manage the sale and research the bidders. It would also stabilise pricing and allow for trends to be analysed realistically.

Item alerts / saved seaches
Let eBay do the browsing for me, and allow me to tune what I’m interested in. eBay will also learn more about a user based on this. Yes this can be gamed too, but it might encourage more competition as well.

Restrictions on who can bid
This is almost already in place, but what about limiting who can bid to two degrees of separation away based on your friends network. Again, social accountability.

Allow me to communicate with eBay
Put a phone number on the website, and make it easy to find. Seriously. There is still nothing like actually being able to talk, with sounds coming out of your mouth, to convey an issue, and to resolve a problem.

Take some ownership
Good customer service is about helping a customer. When I finally got a response to my communications about the problems I was having, I was basically told to click on a link and fill out a form. The person who wrote that email, if it was actually a person, is in a position to fix my problem right there and then. But instead they moved the responsibility on to me. Frankly, my time is worth more than the fees I’ll recover, thus eBay profits, and I will be less inclined to use eBay again.

In conclusion…

eBay doesn’t make me comfortable. It doesn’t make me want to give them money, rather, I resent it. Currently I advise caution to people that ask me about eBay.. but every user should be an ambassador, expressing their amazing experiences and smooth interactions.

The reality of what eBay sells on TV is prying on the ignorance of the masses. But it should be accounting for that, and helping them to get something good out of it, rather than coming away feeling confused, abused, and alienated.

Brian and I started showing the others in the room the QR Code project we had been working on, and so started a few hours of browsing the internet, discovering things and showing each other cool stuff we’d found, or saved earlier.

Yeah maybe we did also just watch a view videos, or geek over various map mashups, but we all came away with a feeling that the format worked really well, even though it hadn’t been planned.

The guys upstairs finishing their project came down and joined us, and so we wrapped up and went to the pub. We all learned something, shared something, and felt just a bit inspired.

So I’ve decided to organise a similar session.. 27th March from 5pm, at the Skiff, sign up here. There is no agenda, and no pressure to show anything, just come and hang out and see where the browsing and conversation takes us.. I’ll also add a wiki page for each of these meets, where we can list all the things we browsed and add some notes.

Sign up here.

We’ve very kindly got a small sponsorship for beer and projector hire, which has covered half the cost. If you want to chuck in a fiver (or more!) that’d be appreciated, there’s nothing like beer karma for geeks :) Click here to make a donation. Thx! And hope to see you there.

P.s. Tuttle coworking is meeting weekly, upstairs at the Sanctuary (map), at 10am on Fridays. All are welcome, go signup on Upcoming here.

P.p.s. Almost forgot to thank the guys at the Skiff for letting us use the room! Thanks :)

Those of you that know me, know that I have strong feelings about this, and if you didn’t know that, you know me well enough to know that I would do :)

I’m going to lay this out simply, with no opinion, and let you come to your own conclusions.

iTunes will now let you encode at “iTunes Plus quality” – great.
I have several hundred CDs- all paid for.
I encoded them, with iTunes, in 2001 – it took *ages*.
They’re encoded at 128kbs – not the best, you can hear the clipping.
Can I convert them to “iTunes Plus Quality”? – well no. How do I prove I own them?
What’s the fucking point? – totally.

I bought that shit. The first time around. And excuse my language, but I’m just having my face rubbed in it. Well look, it’s two thousand and fucking nine, this should be a non-issue.

I paid for the content, not the file.

Let me repeat that with emotional emphasis.. and this should drive home several things.

I *paid* for the *content*.

I really want to reward creativity. That means paying artists for their awesome music, and their time spent sharing it with me.

There is nothing in place to reward *me* for paying them. This may sound stupid.. but this is a huge issue. You (record labels/industry at large) have this all wrong. We are not criminals, but you’re encouraging me to steal from you by not letting me have the things I’ve already paid for.

So.. fuck you. Fuck your business models. I hope you just go away.

Artists… we love you (on the whole). Love us back by enabling us to *pay* for your content.

And don’t think that you TV and film producers and distributers are any fucking different. There’s a reason I openly admit to downloading Battlestar Galactica. It’s because I *really* like it! But it’s aired a week later in the UK, which is basically inviting me to download it on a Saturday morning from the US (including Sci-Fi channel overlays, I don’t care if they’re there.. just like I don’t care if there are messages about the Oscars on films I download.). I like it that fucking much, a few days matters!

We want your content. Your content is good.

But enable us to reward your creatives appropriately. Seriously.

You’re not helping your industries, which we like, by clawing on to the behaviour that, let’s face it, fucked you into the position you’re in now.