Playlab.net || Mark Rochefort

Filed under: Technology

Yet another critical web app has a brief spell offline…

Again - while annoying - I do find a slight comfort in the fact that even the big boys have bad days.

Filed under: Technology, Random

Bit of a random rant this one but I seem to be caught in a perpetual loop with Tiscali and BT support. Over the last couple of weeks, there has been no ADSL connection at home - which affects both our internet and TV, as we receive Homechoice (aka Tiscali TV). So we’ve called support, they’ve gone through the standard questions and then sent out an engineer. The engineer, when at our house, then blames the company that they are not from (i.e. Tiscali or BT). Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. I’ve heard from a couple of other people that their ADSL connection with Tiscali is also down. Is this an issue with the ADSL line supplied by Tiscali TV then? Bring back Homechoice!

Filed under: Friends, Media, Technology, Random

I’ve just taken a quick look at friendfeed.com - it’s basically a lifestream service, where people can aggregate and publish their web-lives. It’s done rather nicely - enabling you to quickly create your own lifestream from various feeds (here’s mine) and not too different in look to the lifestream I quickly hacked together with pipes - but done way better and on a grand scale! You can also track friends’ feeds easily too, making it a much more two-way tool than others out there - say Tumblr, for example, which publishes your combined feeds. There’s definitely a need for this - with the whole micro-blogging/twitter/lifestream thing, it is useful to show this data in one place and provides an excellent way for potential stalkers to gather all their up-to-the-minute information on a particular target in one easily digestible feed

Filed under: Media, Technology

This could be huge

Filed under: Technology

“Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, Writeboard, Ta-da List, and our blogs are all offline” - Ouch.

37signals System Status, originally uploaded by markrocky.

One reason why you shouldn’t rely on all this fancy web 2.0 stuff for your business…

Although I do get a certain reassurance from seeing that even people like 37signals can have bad days (sorry 37signals)!

Filed under: Media, Technology, Random

I’ll admit I’m quite a fan of Tom Hodgkinson’s work (being an avid reader of the Idler and having read both his recent books - “How To Be Free” and “How To Be Idle”), so I might be more inclined to understand where his rants and raves are coming from. But his latest outburst in the Guardian concerning Facebook certainly seems to have generated a bit of a maelstrom in the murky waters of the social media world (more than 500 del.icio.us bookmarks after one day and counting). While a little conspiratorial, there’s a certain weight to what he’s saying.

Lately there’s been a spate of negative blog entries and articles slating Facebook - and the furore surrounding Mr Scoble’s recent quarrel with Facebook pushed things even further. [Although some may argue that this simply served as an excellent PR pre-cursor to last week’s announcement that Facebook (along with Google) were to join the Data Portability initiative.]

Is this the beginning of Facebook fatigue? In 2008, will Facebook go the way that Second Life went in 2007? Or is this simply the natural media/ public reaction to “hype”, as described in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, and we’re now in the “Trough of Disillusionment“? I have to admit that the tedious slew of unanswered invites in my inbox from zombies, pirates and vampires has sent me sliding down my own trough of Facebook disillusionment. Although, rather lazily, I do find it handy to have friends’ details in one place on the web - I use Facebook to arrange meeting after work or even to message someone, for example, as it is easier than digging around for their contact details. Will I still be doing this in 12 months? I certainly wasn’t a year ago, so who knows? Maybe Gartner does.

Filed under: Photos

dew drop bye, originally uploaded by markrocky.

Dew drops on barbed wire, one fine Winter’s morning in rural Somerset.

Filed under: Technology

While not exactly something I’d advise for your critical web apps, I’m still intrigued to see this in action…

Filed under: Photos, London

Chelsea chimneys, originally uploaded by markrocky.

Looking west across London from Peter Jones in Chelsea, on a bright and Christmassy winter afternoon.

Filed under: Technology

Got a web app that relies on a 3rd party service? Well, I hope you selected that service well! A year or so ago I was evaluating Zimki and nearly selected it to provide a platform for some web app development at work. I’m rather glad I didn’t now…

Please note that this is your final notification of the withdrawal of the Zimki service, which will occur on the 24/12/2007.

All user applications and data remaining on the Zimki service will be deleted and the servers decommissioned shortly after this date.

It certainly highlights the importance of building your fancy-pants web 2.0 application on solid and reputable services.

Filed under: Friends, Technology

24 ways to impress your friends is back for the third year running. It’s like a web geeks advent calendar and I’m impressed.

Filed under: Media, Technology

The “social graph” is a global mapping of everybody and how they’re related. I had a play with a visualisation tool for Facebook relationships last night and it was great. Slightly scary but fun nonetheless. However, our weblives are not just about Facebook (although Facebook does provide a platform to bring them all together). Google’s OpenSocial is promising to provide another way to pull them together but, as Brad Fitzpatrick points out, a centralized “owner” of the social graph is a dangerous thing. Social networks need to be made open and portable. And they can be.

Tim Berners-Lee stated in a post yesterday that

…we have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology…

In other words, the connections and relationships made possible by the semantic web (or social graph - use interchangeably from hereon). He goes on:

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.

and on opening up this data:

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

So, yes - I am excited but how are we going to do this? Think data feeds, microformats and openID - things that would tend to be met with blank stares if I were to suggest them to clients. But show a client how you could remove barriers (such as log-in/ sign-up) to that all important “conversion” (with openID or microformats - here’s an excellent microformat implementation doing just that) and show how this person would be able to instantly tell all their friends about it (via their social graph) and then they’ll be interested.

Filed under: Technology

With all the feeds available from the various apps that make up my weblife these days, there’s a wealth of data that can be brought together into a single data stream - or “lifestream“, if you will. Using Yahoo! Pipes to mash up these feeds, I’ve hacked together something that displays all this fantastic data on one page - with the idea of this eventually being displayed on a timeline. I don’t expect the hordes will be rushing to view my aggregated weblife in a single life stream but there are some rather nice applications for this in a wider micro-blogging context.
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Filed under: Travel, Random

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you follow these instructions:
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Filed under: Media, Random

Two complete strangers agreed to look at each other for an hour in complete silence. A lot can happen in an hour.
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