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.

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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

#5

Wordle is really cool!

The answers:

1. Casablanca
2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
3. Lucia y el sexo
4. Star Wars III
5. Star Trek

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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?

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=46004a5733eee4f0&hl=en

http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=266

http://www.smartmobs.com/2007/09/02/facebook-friending-spam/

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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.

NOT CLEAR

• I have the impression that the horizontal axis of synchronous/asynchronous in the graph is a fuzzy concept. What is it actually? The average time between the creating of the message and the reception thereof? Or between the sending and the receving of a response? Radio is totally synchronous in its transmission but is very one-to-many: you can’t easily react nor are you expected to. I would like an axis with a unit of measure. Is it expressed in time (seconds/hours/days)? Wouldn’t a measure of one-to-one vs one-to-many be a more appropriate axis?
• Also the bandwidth axis is not clearly defined. Is it something like Kbps/Mbps for 1 individual message? Or is it the average size of 1 message? Is is the bandwidth from the point of view of the creator (writing one Tweet of 140 chars every hour) or that of the consumer (getting 20 Tweets a minute from all your Twitter friends)?

NOT CORRECT

• Why are IM (chatting) and SMS (texting) taken as one? They are different in bandwidth (SMS are shorter and take longer to write) and in synchronicity (chatting is a faster medium: you type with a real keyboard).
• How can you put the whole of ‘art’ as one data point? Theatre? Painting? Music?
• Most of all: what is Twitter doing in that ‘hot spot’ on the right bottom? Twitter is low bandwidth, yes, but not lower than texting, and it is maybe fast but still asynchronous, so should certainly be to the left of IM/chat. It seems like Twitter is there because it would be so cool to have it exactly there.

NOT COMPLETE

• podcasts, as it would be nice to see where to put them compared to ‘talk radio’.
• Skype (conf) call with video?
• Fax/Telex/VHS/DVD
• Email can be one-to-one (like chat but more asynchronous) or one-to-many (newsletter, close to talk radio). Are both uses considered the same?

One can’t post a reply on Seth’s blog, and I’d like the graph to mature a bit. I think that with some better definition of axis and data points it will be  a good way to categorize means of communication. And I’m certainly interested to see what it will look like then.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!

WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD

1. Email makes big files bigger
   Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
2. You hurt the recipients
   Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
3. You hurt yourself
   By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
4. You hurt the Internet
   All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
5. It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
   You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
   (Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)

HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK

1. public, popular movie
   Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
2. private, ’secret’ movie
   Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).

We thank you.

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It’s not a bad widget, but it’s too limited. You can only display “Day/Week/Month/Agenda” style, the colors and fonts are fixed and it does funny stuff for events that continue after 12:00AM (which tango events regularly do, believe me).

I’ve already talked about the fact that iCal is a sissy format and that Gcal needs some more features. I was just thinking that it would be nice if some company would jump on that and provide the whistles and bells for iCal/vCal feeds (like those of Google Calendar), just like Feedburner did with RSS/podcast feeds (and they got bought by Google, so maybe their idea wasn’t half bad). So I introduce the following concept: CalendarBurner (since the Calburner/iCalburner domains are taken).

CalendarBurner

• takes any iCal/vCal feed as input -  can also interpret hCalendar and whatever other calendar format might exist (there must be at least 1 XML based format, right?)
• it knows about Gcal, Upcoming, Apple iCal and other hosted calendar applications
• it can ‘explode’ calendars: convert “every Thursday from X Jan to Y July, but not in May” to N individual events. Calendars where each event is non-repeating are easier to process. (E.g. in Google Calendar, a weekly event that goes on until Dec 14th is interpreted as “inclusive” that Dec 14th date. If you feed that iCal feed into PHPiCalendar, it interprets this repeating event as “before” Dec 14th, so it stops at Dec 7th. With an ‘exploded’ calendar, there is no ambiguity)
• It can visualize a calendar as an IFRAME, with a JS widget, through RSS feeds … and every time fully customisable in colors, fonts, links, order …
• Google Calendar has an RSS feed but this shows the events with the date they were created, not when the actual event takes place. It is one way of showing things, but you also need ‘most recent past events’, ‘next 10 events’ …
• It caches calendar info, so that a particular popular calendar does not crash when consulted by too many people.
• it uses easy URLs: /cal/ATS56GE78SH/rss20 and /cal/ATS56GE78SH/js
• it knows about client applications: when fed into Outlook, iCal, Sunbird, … it uses the features of those programs
• it allows for filtering, tagging, merging … (the “Remix” part of my Get/Remix/Deliver proposal)
• it gives you stats on subscribers, clickthrough, popular events …
• it links with Google Maps
• … (any ideas?)

It would really be nice if some innovative company would jump in this void. With an appropriate freemium model I’m sure it would take off and make calendaring an easier task to do.

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• Matt was born in 1984 in Houston, Texas.
• Amongst other things (see below) Matt is a passionate photographer.
• In Jan 2003, unhappy with the capabilities of B2/Cafelog, he starts with the development of what will grow to be the hottest blog platform software around: Wordpress.
• In October 2004 he moves from Houston to San Francisco to work for CNET on, amongst other things, Wordpress.
• In October 2005, he leaves CNET too concentrate on Wordpress and also launches Akismet, a (comment/trackback) spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. Wordpress).
• In November 2005 Matt launches Wordpress.com, the (free) hosted Wordpress provider.
• In Dec 2005 Matt annouces the creation of AutoMattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, Akismet.
• Matt is cited as #16 on PCWorld’s list of “50 Most Important People on the Web”

At my right hand: Dries Buytaert:

• Dries is born in 1978, in Belgium.
• Amongst other things (see below), Dries is a passionate photographer.
• Grown out of a small-scale bulletin board experiment, Drupal is released as open-source CMS in Jan 2001. Dries is and will remain lead developer and ultimate-veto-editor-in-chief.
• In Nov 2007 Dries starts Acquia, “a company that is to Drupal what Ubuntu or RedHat are to Linux“
• Dries becomes Dr. Buytaert in Jan 2008
• Acquia launches its Mollom service, a spam detection platform (with plugins for e.g. Drupal)
• In April 2008 Dries is cited as one of BusinessWeek’s Young Entrepreneurs of Tech

I especially like the ’spam detection’ detail. If this is the main concern of two of the leading CMS platforms, you can imagine spam is a real problem.

If we extrapolate on the previous similarities, we could expect:

• something like Drupal.com – a freemium hosted Drupal provider. The free version gives you an instant xyz.drupal.com site with some standard themes (layouts) and plugins. If you want your own domain, or a custom layout, you will have to pay.
• a Mollom plugin for Wordpress – because there is already an Akismet plugin for Drupal
• Wordpress starts releasing ‘distributions’: a special version for e.g. NGO’s, for schools, for music groups. This distribution will contain the latest core of Wordpress with some plugins, themes, widgets, pages … pre-installed.

In any case, I admire both guys and hope they continue to successfully lead some of the most promising web software platforms around.

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http://twitter.com/fmbrussel

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According to Metatale

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Metadata/Folksonomy

Currently an event in the agenda has the fields Title, Date/time (with recurrency, if any) , Location and Description. What I really miss is Tags (or categories, keywords, whatever you want to call them). Tags would allow me to attribute events to categories so that I can easily slice and dice them: only display the “milonga’s”, the events in Antwerp, the events in a specific place. Now I had to write a modified ‘filtered printable view’ for PHPiCalendar so that I can search on specific words in the event title, but that is really a hack. E.g. I now ask every editor to create the event titles as

“[TYPE]: [name of the event] @ [LOCATION]“

so that I can filter on “CONCERT:” or “@ Gent”. With the tags “concert, gent, polariteit, openair” it would be so much easier.

The iCalendar specification even mentions a ‘Categories’ field, although Google Agenda currently does not use it.

Filter/Merge/Expand

Currently you can only get the URL of the full ICS feed, nor do the ‘Calendar’ or ‘Agenda’ view allow you to filter the output on a certain date, keyword in the title or location. And sometimes I only need to have the feed or data for events in the future, to be exact, 1 month in the future. While we’re talking about the Remix part (see above): how about ‘Merge’? I could take the ICS feed for tango festivals (which is maybe not hosted on Google), merge it with my feed, and show both in 1 view, with -say- different colours. I also suggest an ‘Expand’ option: instead of listing a recurring event in 1 record with the recurrence data attached, expand it as N separate events, so that it’s easier to work with. An example: if I want the events for the next two weeks, I don’t want an entry ‘Every Thursday at 8PM’, I want two entries: one for the next Thursday, listed with all the other events for that Thursday, and one for the week after.

An example of URL syntax:
http://www.google.com/…/basic.ics?scope=2weeks&summary=milonga:&expand=true

RSS/REST API

RSS feeds are made for things that happened (in the past) and a calendar is mostly used for things that WILL happen (in the future). This means that an RSS feed with dates in the future looks rather weird. The way Google solved this for their RSS feeds (which they indicate with the XML icon – bad practice!) is to use as the date, the moment the event was added to the agenda, regardless of when the actual event takes place. So it is not necessarily a feed of ‘upcoming events’ but rather of ‘recently added events’. I would allow the user to select a ‘future RSS’ format for the next 10 upcoming events, or the next 7 days. There are so many tools that can do neat stuff with RSS feeds, it’s a pity you can’t use them in the logicl, intuitive way now.

The agenda also needs a public REST API  for reading and writing to the service. There is a Google Agenda REST API. i should have looked better. Maybe I should dive into the PHP client library. But an API is made for a different audience than the filter features I requested above.

Let’s see what happens when Google Agenda goes out of Beta…

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Something I threw together, just because I could: Twitter Quotient indicator. This page will get your # of friends, followers, favorites and updates from Twitter and calculate some ratios. The result might be confronting, disappointing or slightly funny. You choose.

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Apart from the fact that the transporter screwed up their tracking of the package, the whole process of showing up at closed doors and going back seems so inefficient. It’s like so much effort has been spent to smoothen out the process of purchasing online, but the physical delivery still works basically the same as twenty years ago, eventhough the drivers now have wireless devices and you have to sign on an electronic sensor.

Let’s describe how I would have preferred to have my goods delivered:

Package Delivery 2.0

• When the order ships:

  From: Vendor Customer Support
  To: Peter
  Subject: Your purchase of 22/3/2007
  Dear Mr. Forret,
  
  we thank you for your business!
  We have just prepared your order and released it for delivery.
  
  The transport will be taken care of by NewDelivery Inc,
  and you can expect an email from them shortly
  to allow you to choose the delivery options.
  
  Your package number is #34556554456 and
  you can track it from this moment onwards(*) on
  http://track.newdelivery.com/(...)
  

  (*) The times I have gotten the message: “this is the tracking URL, but it won’t work yet”. If there is a unique tracking ID, then just display “Currently waiting for package to arrive at our depot” or something.

• From: NewDelivery Customer Support
  To: Peter
  Subject: The delivery of your package #34556554456
  Dear Mr Forret,
  
  We have just received a package for you that
  we want to deliver at your earliest convenience.
  
  Tomorrow between 9h and 12h one of our drivers
  will be visiting the following delivery address:
  (...) 1000 Brussels
  
  If you will be there to accept the package,
  there is nothing you should do now.
  
  If, however, that is not the right time/place to deliver,
  please choose one of the following options
  1) I would like you to come at a later time
  2) I would like you to deliver at a different address
     (e.g. your office)
  3) I would like to pick up the package
      at one of the nearby pick-up points
     (see some suggestions further down)
  
  Click the following link if you want to change your delivery options:
  (...)
  

• Let’s say I change to option “pick up myself”

• From: NewDelivery
  To: Peter
  Subject: The delivery of your package #34556554456
  Dear Mr Forret,
  
  We have changed the delivery options as you requested.
  
  Your package will be available at the following pickup location:
  [Post Office/Fuel Station/Bookshop/...]
  (...) 1000 Brussels
  
  Don't forget: if you pick up the package within the next 2 days
  (before March 26, 20h) you will also receive our PearlyPickup surprise gift.
  

  My gift would be something small like a sticker or a gift certificate, but at least I am rewarded for picking up early and helping keep the storage space limited.

• Or even more sophisticated

  From: NewDelivery
  To: Peter
  Subject: The delivery of your package #34556554456
  Dear Mr Forret,
  
  We have just received a package for you that
  we want to deliver at your earliest convenience.
  
  Since you already have a package stored at
  [Post Office/Fuel Station/Bookshop/...]
  (...)
  we will let this package join the other.
  
  If, however, that is not the right time/place to deliver,
  please choose one of the following options
  1) I would like you to come at a later time
  (...)
  

In my opinion, this would streamline the delivery process, keep the costs for unresponded house calls smaller, and give the buyer more confidence in the whole process. There is already a pick-it-up-myself service Kiala that works with bookshops, supermarkets and fuel stations (I use them for Proxis deliveries). But now you have to choose for either that mechanism or the delivery by a courrier, whereas it’s easier to choose the best formula once you know which day the package would be delivered. The Belgian Post could only deliver such a full service when the post offices would stay open until 18h or 19h, so that people that are not retired or unemployed would also have a chance to use them. To me, current practices leave something to be desired.

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