Gravity is a twitter client for the s60 and I recently installed it on my N95 and so far I’m very happy with it. With an intuitive interface it makes being logged in to two twitter accounts and one identica account very easy. What is especially nice is that you select which account you want to look at and by scrolling left and right you see the friend’s timeline, the replies, your tweets, your DM and finally searches if you want. That’s automatic and for every account.
It’s far better than the other twitter clients for s60 that I’ve tried so for the moment that is one twitter client I would recommend you use.
I know what I’m talking about. I tweet from anywhere without it slowing down my social life.
Also if you pay for this app after the ten day trial period you’re helping demonstrate that it’s not just the iphone which has people willing to pay for the applications
Twitter is a global short messaging system that allows people to post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. For the moment it is a relatively new phenomenon therefore it’s not too hard to keep track of the conversations going on.
They are also geo logged. As you’re watching people’s messages you can see China say that they’re getting ready for the night ahead whilst in Europe people are going out to lunch. In the US people are complaining about having to wake up early in order to catch their planes, go for walks or in certain cases go to bed.
It’s amusing and it’s reminiscent of ten years ago when I spent 13hrs in a chatroom at a time when spending ten minutes online was expensive. it’s cyclical. One thing is popular, then is replaced by something else before becoming popular again.
One difference this time is the technology used. Google maps show where in the world people are tweeting from whilst the twitter site simply shows what people have written. It’s amusing to watch the world and what people are doing in it.
These streams are to illustrate how easily you can record some video as live of a walk and upload them one you get to a wifi hotspot to avoid paying the data rates offered by most mobile operators.Â
People love to submit portals and portals add excitement to Ingress. The more portals there are the busier you are. Cities are fantastic places for ingress players for this reason. Geneva, Barcelona, Neuchatel and other cities already have hundreds if not thousands of portals but go to the swiss countryside, the spanish sea side or away from big cities and portals are few and far between. As a result of this rural players don’t have much to do unless they get in a car and create megafields.
What I propose is a crowdsourced portal acceptance system. The system would have two features:
Proximity to other portals. If you’re in the middle of the countryside and the portal is submitted then it is moved to the top of the submission list for quick approval. By getting remote locations to have higher portal density so users are encouraged to become more active. As people see them play so new players are encouraged to join in the game.
The second variable is based on geographic location. If a player in New York submits a portal then a player in Madrid from L9 or above sees the portal submission and decides whether or not it is too close to other portals, whether it is legitimate and whether it is worth validating. If a player from Paris submits a portal then a player can accept or refuse that portal.
Of course the second feature requires for the Portal acceptance interface to be opened up to players of level 9 or higher. The permissions would only be “approve” or “reject”. will allow players to question the submission and let a group of people decide on the future of specific portals.
After over a month without the macbook pro it finally appears to be working again. Both the motherboard and the superdrive have been replaced. i’ve upgraded to the procare package and I’ve decided to have a secondary machine running linux as a backup.Â
It’s a shame that apple authorised resellers would take over a month to put my machine right bt now it’s done and I’m not going to think about upgrading mac machines for the next two years… unless I come to a large amount of cash in which case I’d rethink that.Â
What I am more interested in now though is what can be done with mobile phones and mobile devices. In particular I was really happy to have the N95 8gig because it allowed me to cut out the laptop all together.Â
The point is that now all devices should be self contained, able to do everything without the need for a laptop. For weeks I couldn’t get the latest podcasts or keep up with feedreading. Even checking e-mail was less practical. Now is the time to see how far we can go in doing everything from a portable device.Â
Portable Apps is an interesting option for those of us who use work computers rather than our own. It is also a good solution for those of us who change desktop all the time but can’t play with our phones whilst at work.
A few days ago I wrote about Chrome as a PAF file and things have become more interesting as a result.
What I particularly enjoy are the extensions that you can install within the browser. Anyone who works in an office always faces the challenge of getting authorisation to install the simplest of applications. With google chrome and extensions you regain some of that freedom.
The browser allows you to install the extensions of your liking and use them. Some of these applications are the mobile phone version implemented in the desktop format. The best example of this is the yahoo messenger app. Very similar builds are running on the desktop and mobile phone.
The other features are google calendar, facebook and feedly extensions. There is choice. I have feedly running to let me know how many RSS items are left to read. With the google calendar application I can see how much time is left before my next meeting/time commitment. With facebook I can see how many pending messages are waiting for my action.
The advantage of this way of doing things is that you can cut down on the number of open tabs. It is an on demand interaction. It is only open for as long as you are doing something. That’s like mobile applications.
What we see here is a shift away from the traditional web browser where information is displayed according to a cascading style sheet and towards an application based system. The application is installed locally and the only information that you gather from the server is raw data. As a result even with slower connections you can participate, whether from a mobile phone or whilst travelling where roaming charges apply.
It’s an interesting space to keep an eye on. I like having the ability to customise my web surfing environment whatever the environment and platform. I wish that the app syncing would work for extensions, rather than for bookmarks and certain settings.
Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.
Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.
I am not worried about losing bots. Bots make a lot of noise, but don’t help Twitter, as a social network. What bothers me is the phrase “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets.” Facebook said the same thing, and then we read about Cambridge Analytica, emotion experiments, phone draining potential and more. We also read from books like Mindf*ck that Facebook was used to manipulate people to vote one way rather than the other. We learned that FaceBook could not be trusted with our data.
Now Twitter is using the same phrases. As I see the changes made by Musk I see that Twitter is becoming a silo, like FaceBook and Instagram. Twitter is no longer a social network. Twitter is a data farm where we are expected to pay, for content to be pushed on us, rather than seeing organic tweets, and where our data is mined by untrustworthy groups.
Through his actions Musk is turning Twitter into a data silo that I no longer want to be a part of.
Techcrunch addresses the topic from the reverse angle. “Twitter’s new announcement might impact research in different areas, including hate speech and online abuse.” On the one hand Twitter is making it harder to police what content is posted whilst encouraging others, with deep pockets to exploit that data.
TechDirt thinks that this move will encourage developers to move towards Mastodon but Mastodon is just one of many alternative websites. I would go further. By blocking access to the API twitter is encouraging people to lose trust in the company. First it blocks the apps people used to post and read tweets, then it blocked the API for bots, and tools for checking account related information, for example “map my followers” and other functionality. With the decline of those tools such actions will need to be manual.
The Washington Times phrased it as “Twitter shutting down free access to its public data”. Twitter should have become Not For Profit. It should have been made sustainable, whilst allowing people to converse globally. It is now sliding in the opposite direction, to become a silo, for people who want to exploit the data to manipulate people, rather than help spread news, information, friendships and conversations. Twitter, by moving towards becoming a silo, is removing the features that made it the strong, vibrant community that it was.
The Instagram API
I posted over 4000 images to Instagram over the years, until FaceBook bought and then destroyed the app. I used to post every single day, until I found that the app felt more and more lonely, and more and more of a waste of time. It had switched from being a social network to being an influencer network, where loneliness was the cost.
I tried to play with the API, to use Instagram externally but because of the blocks in place I couldn’t access my own data, without first proving that I should have access to it. That is what encouraged me to spend a few days trying to import the Instagram JSON file to WordPress. It worked, and I was happy. I had found a workflow to recover my data, and use it for my own website, rather than to provide content for a platform that did not respect me as a user.
Twitter is now doing the same. If we can’t access the API to use twitter as we want, then it does encourage us to move along, to the new alternatives, or, as I am doing, to write blog posts every day. This is day eighty of writing a blog post every single day.
If it wasn’t for the community I would have dumped Twitter years ago.
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