yamahito

Well, it wasn’t working last night, but it tells me it has worked today.

Facebook, finding new ways to make its walled garden more appealing, rather than breaking down those walls, has allowed people to import syndicated feeds into their notes (that is, import their blogs).

I decided to use the feed on my livejournal blog rather than yamahito.net - the difference being that each post cross-posted to the livejournal blog includes a link back here in the article itself. I might change my mind on that one, though: livejournal only seems to put chronologically recent blog posts on its RSS feed, so there’s none of my past posts. Maybe y’all should be grateful.
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It was only a few days ago that I was bemoaning facebook’s closed off attitude: no syndication was my biggest gripe. So now there’s some good news (and some bad:)

They’ve added some RSS, but it’s still not enough. Don’t get me wrong: I applaude the improvement. So far I’ve found RSS feeds for my friends’ status updates and my notifications. That’s great: it means I can switch off email notifications, which have been cluttering my inbox.

I’d really like to be able to syndicate my mini-feed and my news feed. I mean, they’re even called feeds, facebook: come on, finish the job

A week after the iPhone is launched in the states, there is a rumour of an ‘inferior’ clone on its way from china

No, not really, it’s a spoof article. But it raises a couple of interesting objections.

Being involved in a VOIP company, of course, the ones that strike home for me are the lack of voip integration for the phone’s 802.11x connection and the tight control of 3rd party software cripple the phone’s potential somewhat.

I still want one, though.

Google’s driving direction system’s latest tweak is AMAZING.

Go to google maps. Get some directions. Click on a point on your route and start dragging around.

Now tell me that isn’t something you’ve wanted on any route finding package in existence. Tell me that’s not perfect User Interface design. Google, baby, you’re so good I find myself just not caring about all that data mining.

less than a month after Microsoft announced Silverlight, an open source linux variant, Moonlight has been announced.

Miguel de Icaza, part of the team who wrote Mono (the linux framework equivalent of .net) announced it earlier on his blog.

I think this is a good thing for Microsoft. Not only will it give market penetration, it will force them to keep a good pace with features and implementation. Whether they see it the same way, I don’t know

I’ve been looking at changing how I view RSS. Instead, I’ve found a way to integrate my web presence.

At the moment, I use my IM client to also read my RSS feeds. With friends’ blogs, news sites (topical and technical), technical interest groups and forums, there’s quite a few posts bubbling under, and it slows the IM client down a lot. Plus it’s a bit of a pain synchronising feeds at home and at work (OPML files would make it a little easier).

At the same time, there are things I haven’t yet started using RSS for: sites like flickr (and if they ever add syndication, facebook) take up too much of my time to go and read individually.

So, having noticed that iGoogle (google homepages was a better name) would give me better access to some of these features plus my under-used google calender, I decided that perhaps I should have another go at configuring it. Naturally, that let me to google reader.

I’m a fan of gmail, so I can see the interface for skim-reading posts very advantageous, but it doesn’t end there: by aggregating and sharing threads I can collate my activity across those various sites into a single handy feed.
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OpenID is an open decentralized framework for identity management. In other words, it’s a scheme for a single sign on username and password that any website can use.

It’s an interesting idea. I like the idea of it, the thought of having a single definitive presence online. However, I can think of many more reservations:

Security is an obvious one. The most secure safe system in the world is still potentially useless if the human being at one end is willing to share their credentials (e.g. their password) willy nilly. I’ve seen too many office workers who stick their system password to their monitor on a post-it note, let alone the hoards who seem content to swap their passwords for chocolate. And even IT Professionals aren’t immune from being tricked into giving their passwords. In fact, according to some beer-mat statistics, they might even be worse. If one password is all you need to access many resources, the potential damage when/if that password is compromised is that much higher.

Privacy is another issue. If log-ins are unique on a per-site basis, it’s harder for a profiler to collect information from multiple sources and tie them to an individual. If you know that individual has the same identity on multiple sites, collecting that information becomes trivial. Privacy is a funny one, though, because that ability to link data across different contexts is potentially a powerfully useful one in terms of user enablement.

There are pragmatic issues to consider as well: in order for such a system to be a success, it has to be popular and widely implemented. This requires some big companies to overlook significant corporate advantages in having their own authentication data. It might be somewhat naive to hope this will happen without some considerable advantages to reward them for doing so.

I’m sure commenters can think of several others; despite that all, though, I’m still cautiously liking the idea: I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool cursed with cynicism.

I’m sure it wasn’t long ago that a ‘mash-up’ was a seamless mix of two existing songs, but these days it seems to be taking on a different meaning in web design.

The name of the game, it seems, is taking elements from all those wonderful web-sites we belong to now, and mixing them together in some sort of portal/web-application.

Hmm… my latest flickr pictures and blog entries together with facebook information on a home page I’ve been meaning to write… Could be good, if it’s done right.

Honestly, I don’t know if it’s a useless fad or the next stage of web evolution. But Microsoft has jumped onto the bandwagon with Popfly.

Lots of people see me as some sort of ‘Mac geek’ (despite the fact that 95% of all my computing happens on a windows PC (for the moment)). Others are struck by my linux advocacy for servers. The truth is I don’t feel I’m particularly anti-Microsoft or pro-apple/linux. All of the current OS options out there grind my gears at some point or another, and all I want is to get the best of all possible worlds. But I do have some ‘automatic reservations’ about products from any software house based on previous experience, so I’m going to list a couple of MS-centric ones:

Microsoft have traditionally followed very closed-source development philosophies. When I say that, I’m not talking about the fact that their software is closed source, or that they charge too much for it: I really don’t think that they’re doing anything there that isn’t their right to do. The problem is that it extends to proprietary file formats and communication protocols and the like. And MS aren’t alone in this: real player, AOL Instant messanger, the list goes on.

One of the reasons I like how apple and google have changed in the last decade is that they will embrace open standards, even though their software is closed source. It means it’s easier to move data around different platforms, different clients… and rather than losing business, it seems to increase their market share. I think that this attitude will prove to be more successful in the long run.

So I’m a little cautious about popfly from MS - and also a little surprised, in a good way. I’m hoping that it will be a little gleam of Microsoft’s past glories - not a big invention, but a piece of useful innovation.

You may notice a new link to my flickr page

I’ve been meaning to put a selection of my better pictures on Flickr for a while: the photodump is just that, a dumping ground, diamonds and slag all together. Ian (Tindale aka Rods Tiger) has been using it for a while, and I’m impressed with the level of a lot of the photography on there.

So I’ve been having a little play, and my good impressions extend to the interface of flickr itself. I’ve even created a little “Drive By Shooting” group that any flickr users can pop their photos in once it takes off

I was looking at Lifehacker today (might have to add it to the ol’ RSS list) and found a great way to add all the old emails from outlook/thunderbird to my gmail.

I’ve been using gmail for almost three years now, and it completely changed how I deal with email within a day of using it. I had given up organising my inbox (a situation I find myself in in work) with gmail that doesn’t happen, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.

Only problem now is that I’m going to use up half my quota in one fell swoop…