I did a bandwidth test the other day with the iPhone SpeedTest tool. I wanted to compare the speed using (standard) GPRS, using 3G and my own Wifi. The results were all a power of ten apart:
iPhone on Proximus GPRS: 35 kbps (download & upload)
iPhone on Proximus 3G: 350 kbps (download & upload)
iPhone via Wifi: 3500 kbps (download – upload is +- 300 kbps)
The real reason is that I wanted to see how fast I would wear out my Proximus data plan (200MB per month). The answer: with GPRS I would need more than 12 hours of continuous downloading, with 3G I could do it in less than 2 hours. So GPRS is pretty safe, it’s also easier on your battery, but you have to live with slow, pre-1996 modem-like performance. The latency – the time it takes to get your first byte after requesting a URL - is easily 10 to 50 seconds. Not milliseconds, seconds!
As a side note: do not take a time-based data subscription, certainly not with the iPhone. My first post-iPhone Proximus invoice was 800,- euro, which is more than the price of my iPhone! When I contacted them about that, they immediately offered to reimburse it and advised me to switch to a size-based plan. I guess I was not the first one …
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I was using my iPhone to read my Twitter feed (Twitterrific) and Facebook and when comparing the two, I liked one thing about Facebook that Twitter/Twitterific does not have: when some one posts a URL, you get a preview icon and a short text. This way you can have a rough idea of what the link is about, and whether or not you’re interested to click it. In Twitter it is even worse, since the service uses URL shorteners (bitly, …) so that you don’t even have the original URL to guess what the link is about, like e.g. youtube.com/watch?… => it’s a video!
So imagine that there is a service that accepts a URL as input and comes back with
a destination URL (the actual URL you end up on)
a summary text (short text) about this page
a preview (small image) of this page
So for a YouTube video, it comes back with a video screenshot and the video comments, for a blog post that includes a video/image, it comes back with a thumbnail for that and the start of the blog post text.
Most importantly, for shortened URLs, it comes back with a preview of the ‘real’, original URL.
A Twitter client like Twitterific, Tweetie, Tweetdeck, … could use this service every time it encounters a (shortened) URL in a tweet, and add the thumbnail next to it, and maybe the summary text as a mouse-over window.
Coming up with the metadata
Creating a summary text: either based on the web page itself, the META description, if it’s a blog, the first X words of the RSS item in its feed that points to this page.
Creating a preview thumbnail: for YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo: a video screenshot, for Flickr, Picasaweb: an image thumbnail, for Wikipedia: an image that is used in the article or just the Wikipedia favicon, for a corporate site: the web site thumbnail as created by e.g. thumbalizr.
Extend it with even more metadata
This might be an interesting service to run for Google: they could add some indicator of importance or trustworthiness (Pagerank, incoming links), or warn for shady URLs.
I was downloading a free iPhone app at noon, and I thought: some of these applications have no good alternative in the browser world. Imagine everyone could start using/buying the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch applications right in their browser. You give your Apple ID, you purchase an app like ColorSplash and off you go. Some of the multi-touch interface would be hard to emulate, but still. It would have to be an Apple application that does it: like e.g. iTunes. It’s got your Apple ID anyway. Why not run a virtual iPod Touch in there?
The advantages:
some applications for iPhone/iPod just have no worthy counterpart in the ‘normal’ world.
an application would run immediately on Apple MacOSX as well as Windows XP/Vista/7
the iPhone developers wouldn’t be looking anymore at a potential audience of some X million iPhone owners, but at all iTunes owners.
Research analyst Sam Bhavnani, of the market research firm Current Analysis, says that iTunes has 200 million users. Research analyst Shaw Wu, of the market research firm American Technology Research, gives a figure of 100 million. Oddly, Apple itself gives a much lower number: 10 million. Google Answers
Just the other day I was reminded of the existence of Wordle (via the Music Zeitgeist project). Wordle makes an esthetically pleasing word cloud of any assembled text you throw at it. “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Ithought: let’s see what that gives with movie scripts. So I made a tool that will read a .SRT subtitle file and return just the pure text. I can then copy/paste that text into Wordle.
Try to guess which movies these are (click on the image to see a high-res version):
#1
#2
#3
And for #4 and #5 I’m gonna give a hint: it’s science fiction! #4
So I decided to let Facebook check my Gmail contact list to see if I had missed some contacts (people using aliases, etc …). After carefully selecting a couple of FB friends to invite (a buddy from the army, …), I clicked ‘Select’ and then ‘OK’ on the next screen that I supposed was a ‘Confirm’ window. I didn’t even read what was written on it. Some minutes later I saw emails starting to come in on different email aliases I had created in all my years of Internet activity. Apparently I allowed Facebook to send email messages to all Gmail contacts with email addresses that were not yet ‘known’ in Facebook. I have about 1500 addresses in my Gmail, let’s say some 500 already have a FB profile: so I just allowed Facebook to send out 1000 ‘unsollicited commercial emails’ or *spam* on my behalf. There is no way for me to know how many emails went out, nor to whom. I feel strongly embarrased, since I have been a strong opponent of spam for years, and since I have no idea who I have bothered with this bulk mail.
A company like Facebook probably has a whole team concentrated on user experience and workflow streamlining, so I can only assume that this strategy is by design. They probably have to keep the monthly exponential growth numbers so they use every opportunity to collect new email addresses. This is plain wrong. The default should be ‘opt in‘, not ‘opt out‘ (that is, select those you want to invite instead of unselect those you don’t wanto to invite).
So dear Christopher Cox and/or Chamath Palihapitiya at Facebook, while you will probably say that ‘but it is clearly written on the page that they’re about to send an invitation to (in my case, 1000??) contacts‘, you know that you are wrong on this one. You’re spamming. Big time, like real jerks. Since you’re probably not going to do anything about it, Google: any ideas?
Seth Godin came up with a visualisation of ‘means of communication’: bandwidth vs sync(chronicity). He took a number of ‘old’ (postal mail, radio) and ‘new’ (blogs, Youtube and -of course- Twitter) technologies and ranked them on a 2D graph according to ‘quality’ (density or bandwidth) and ’sync’ (speed of reaction).
Although it is an interesting way of visualizing things, and I consider Seth a very bright and creative guy, I am bothered by the fact that the graph is neither clear, correct nor complete.
Let’s Get Lost (1988) is a American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber.
I saw Let’s Get Lost in Leuven, I guess around 1990. Chet Baker has been a weak spot for me ever since, because I now knew how much suffering was hiding behind that vulnerable voice. I tried to find a DVD of it but apart from a VHS tape (I don’t have a player) I couldn’t find anything. Then the other day I found the whole movie, split in 13 parts, on Youtube:
Een tijdje geleden merkte ik dat krantenkoppen.be verdwenen was. Ik gebruikte die site regelmatig om een overzicht te krijgen van wat er in de kranten beweegde bewoog die dag, “wat ik gelezen zou moeten hebben”. Na enkele weken dacht ik: nou dan maak ik hem gewoon zelf, maar beter. Dus ik begon te experimenteren met het importeren van RSS feeds en het opvangen van het klikken op artikels zodat ik “populaire artikels” kon tonen. De eerste versie was nogal traag dus ik stak er op verschillende niveaus ‘caching‘ in, en de uiteindelijk goed werkende versie staat nu online:
Ik heb mijn inspiratie getrokken uit zowel krantenkoppen.be als popurls.com . Je ziet een korte inhoud van het artikel als je over de link gaat met je muis (’mouse-over‘) zodat je beter kan beslissen of je het artikel wil lezen of niet. Er is een splitsing op topics: zowel inhoudelijk (binnenland/buitenland/economie/…) als geografisch (per provincie), en per categorie wordt er een top 50 bijgehouden, alsook een globale top 50. Hoe meer mensen de site gebruiken als nieuwsoverzicht en doorklikken naar artikles, hoe waardevoller de Populaire Artikels in Belgie – belgie.popnuuz.com/pop link wordt.
De bronnen zijn, naast de kranten, ook de tijdschriftten (Knack/Trends) en enkele websites (Clint, Brusselblogt/Gentblogt). De URL laat vermoeden dat er ook een franstalige versie kan komen, en dat is dan ook correct. Ik ben nu nog bezig met het verzamelen van de juiste RSS feeds daarvoor.
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I did a bandwidth test the other day with the iPhone SpeedTest tool. I wanted to compare the speed using (standard) GPRS, using 3G and my own Wifi. The results were all a power of ten apart:
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