Category: Things I think about

Curse of a thousand blocked ports

PHX Wifi AgreementI landed in Phoenix two hours ago en route to Dallas for Bar Camp and missed my connection because another plane was in our gate… So instead of arriving at 1:40pm, I’ll be getting in around 4. Yuck.

So why am I bothering to broadcast this on my blog? (I realize this sounds like a big whiny complaint, but there’s a reason…)

Because Port 80 is my sole vehicle for outgoing web communications at the moment.

My email is blocked (another vote for moving entirely to Gmail), IRC is blocked, IM is blocked, Skype IM is blocked… I can’t even send smoke signals via FTP. On top of that, my SMS is totally backed up and I haven’t been getting texts for days.

WTF?

Now I know that more capable geeks would tell me to just tunnel into some other unblocked system, but c’mon, I’m a simpleton, remember? I expect (and need!) this stuff to just work. If this kind of service variability is the future of the networked environment, man, add that to DRM and we truly are EFFed. If we can’t even rely on publicly-accessible (though privately sponsored) wifi for these basic communication channels, we’ve gotta think about who should really be in charge of these networks… Who cares about my robot breathren taking over when we’re already turning our computers against us.

Seriously. WTF.

Hacking Photo Booth

Update: Tristan O’Tierney discovered this lazyweb requested and created a PhotoBooth add-on called FlickrBooth! It’s free and works like a charm! Check it out!

Photobooth @ Apple Store Palo StoreI suck at coding, so I’m just going to seed this idea and hope someone does the hardwork for me and releases the results.

I stopped by the Palo Alto Apple Store today on my way back from lunch and had my first Photo Booth experience. Wow. What a cool piece of software…!

Talkin’ to Matt, I had an idea: create an Applescript to upload the shots it takes to either a WordPress blog or to the Flickr group tagged with “” automagically. This should be fairly easy, since each photo is stored in /~Pictures/Photo Booth/Photo [#].jpg. You could simply hook up the Flickr Uploadr or 1001 as the upload tool… and maybe toss in a little Automator action to make it all happen in the background. Then you could aggregate the results (hmm, with Suprglu or Drupal?) and presto! A literally global Photo Booth!

Of course, the real hack here is getting this script on to iMac G5s at Apple Stores around the world… hook it up to Riya and boom, now you can search for your friends getting kissy-kissy @ Apple Stores!

Tom Raftery catches me in the AM

Factory RockstarThat spikey Irish-bloke Tom Raftery (who I met at Les Blogs) interviewed me the other morning.

A little poppy, but y’know, might be worth a listen if you’re into sadomasochism and listening to a web geek waxing intelligent floats your ship.

Anyway, a podcast that smells like bacon must be good and Tom does well grilling me on Flock, Web Two Dot Oh, and software that I’d marry (are you listening, Jitkoff?). I also go off the deep end about DRM and robot take-overs and say something in French that someone else told me to say. I mean, it was like 8:00am, gimme a break.

Pry, To

privacy is dream

personal privacy is an oxymoron. you know less about yourself than the mass of services and companies out there that collect, individually or collectively, information about you and your activities, for their own selective proprietary uses or for selling to other organizations, institutions and/or governments.

you think you have privacy left to protect?

privacy today in general is a fallacy: it’s an impossible dream that we should’ve woken up from some time ago.

a “publicity policy” isn’t enough, but it’s a cute idea. naw, it’s time for a whole mind shift in how we, as individual persons, address and engage the question of what it means to have little to no power to control who sees, studies, sells information about, the things that we do.

repeat after me: “PRIVACY … IS … A … DREAM.”

not for you. not for me. only for the government, big corporations, disappearing persons.

but hey hey, don’t fret. it’s not that bad. and maybe, maybe we can do something about it that won’t cost us all that much, if anything. so long as we follow the superstition that we have any privacy at all, we’ll continue to try to “hide” (in order to “control”) whatever information we can. but that’s just what keeps us in this situation, this is the very thing that keeps us weak.

get it? they already have all the juicy bits about us. it’s all out there in the ether already. and you spend this effort keeping these bits to yourself, bits that really could do you and your friends and your social cohorts some good if you just put it out there.

jamming, yeah, that’s what i’m talking about. flood the network with information of, by and for ourselves… so much so that only our friends and those we care about and are close to can make sense of the data.

yeh, come looking, come stalk me, come steal my identity. yeah, there’s nothing i can do to stop you whether i’m jamming the network anyway. so i might as well take the other approach, do what i can to subsume what’s subsuming me.

personal filters (maybe like Onlife) leveraged put our attention stream into service for ourselves… to improve our day-to-day experience by giving us the information to learn about what we really spend our time, attention and energies doing… so that we can improve, make better, more informed decisions… just like the credit card mongers and insurance brokers do about us.

this data is extremely valuable. there’s a multi-billion dollar market out there for this kind of information. but what they don’t want you to realize, is that this data is also available to you, cher amie, even though we haven’t built good tools for harvesting and using it yet… too afraid that these microscopic pixie dust embers of personal data will be scooped up by Evil, Inc., they’ve done an end-run around us, ignoring those teensy morsels that you protect to focus on grabbing up the good stuff (credit card records, travel behavior, cell phone calls, etc). they’ve got you p0wned. get over it.

besides, who are you kidding besides yourself?

get over it. flood the network.

listen, if it’s about you, it’s yours (yes, I believe that). and yes, you ought have a right to see it, to know about it, to correct it, to use it. you also should have the right to take it back, to conceal it, to lock it away forever.

but good luck, once it’s out there, it ain’t comin’ back. you step out that door, and forget it, you’re already on camera; say cheese.

repeat after me: “PRIVACY … IS … A … DREAM.”

what you don’t know about you, someone else by now already does and has sold off to a mailing label company, a magazine subscription company, a freeipods dot com rip off pyramid scheme. so look, if you don’t think of yourself as an aggregate statistic in your own life, for eff’s sake, stop treating yourself like one. flood it. c’mon, flood it. make it impossible for anyone to ever treat you as just another statistic again.

teh end.

sources, references and influences that partially lead to this flamebait:

Going where no mashup has gone before

dodgiemonk logo

Idea.

So Michael Arrington posted about BillMonk, a hella cool service that lets you keep track of outstanding debts between you and your friends… part of something they refer to as “Social Money“.

Now the first thing me and Tara thought of (before really taking a look) was — hey cool, but wouldn’t it be better if you could be at restaurant or something and SMS your debt to the service… which, duh, it does (okay, we’ll read more closely before jumping to feature ideas next time)!

But the second idea we came up with really has some legs… and will probably make the Attention Trust folks go all squishy in the knees: perhaps the next frontier in mashable services will be the nexus between your cell phone/SMS/remote devices and the range of services previously-reffered-to-as-Web-Two-Dot-Oh that you access through http-type connections (yeah, like the one that your browser made to this blog).

What huh?

Ok, in English 1.0: Behind the scenes, all these services which currently provide some utility separately really start to become incrementally indispensible when you can mash them together to form aggregate services of your own design. But now add in a Firefox-extensions-like model as personal in-betweener web service… kind of like Suprglu meets 43* meets .Mac meets Ning (conceptually). Ok ok, that still doesn’t make it much clearer.

I mean, here’s how it works now: I check in with some friends on Dodgeball somewhere… who cares where, but for example’s sake, let’s say Tantek‘s Lair (aka Crepes on Cole). At some point in the evening, we determine who’s paying for what… split the bill, etc., and if there’s any discrepancy (oops, Chris is out of cash again!) we ping BillMonk with the amount that I owe to so-and-so. Simple, but Dodgeball and BillMonk don’t know jack about each other. So while I’ve just created a checkin and an IOU, I can’t go back in my history of Dodgeball checkins and see where I incurred said IOU. Similarly, I can’t go to BillMonk and see where the IOU originated from. Sure, I can add a description to the IOU, but should I really have to when Dodgeball already knows where I am? See what I’m getting at here?

So let’s see how that fabled Web-Two-Oh open-API-goodness that we’ve all become accustomed with could make both services more valuable… Hell, let’s throw a little Plazes cell-phone action in there too for fun… And let’s see what kind of cake we can bake with the following: 

  • a service to notify friends where you are (Dodgeball)
  • a way to record IOUs (BillMonk)
  • a location-service for identifying and recording where you’ve been (Plazes)

Now, let’s say we merge in some kind of attention stream aggreagator and — presto! — we’ve got a view of where you’ve been, who you’ve told about your whereabouts, and where, with whom and when you incurred (or became the benefactor of a friend’s) debt.

And that’s of course, only the beginning. Toss in some mapping APIs (which Plazes and Dodgeball already support) and you can see watch your debt-accrue as you travel the globe! In fact, you could map your friends’ whereabouts to the same map and play your own mini debt arms race. Fun while watching all your friends go bankrupt! 

Yeh, anyway.

While this is all good and smaht, etc., you’re likely to start throbbing with, “ooo, yay, convergence!”

Okay, eff convergence.

I don’t want one service to collect all this data. I’m not a privacy maven, but even if it were possible to do the one-stop-shop thing, don’t do it, don’t try it, don’t even think about it coz I won’t use it. Nope, I don’t wanna be boxed in and so-help-me-Ford, I won’t let you. You and your proprietary megaservice can kiss my RSS.

BUT, I do however, want an external agnostic service aggregator (which I control and plug stuff into of my own choosing) to help me make sense of all this data… one API/feed at a time. Avoiding convergence allows me choice of services, allows each provider to innovate in their particular domain, and also gives me the freedom to experiment with different combinations of services as they are released and/or improved. Maybe I want to switch from TextPayMe to BillMonk without losing my history of transactions. This proposed third-party service aggregator would allow me to do this smoothly and seemlessly coz the data would be out there and tracked, yet neither BillMonk or TextPayMe would need to know about my prior service history. That’s data for my eyes and my eyes alone.

Sucks to be a service provider with open APIs you say? Puts them at the mercy of the whims of fickle “consumers”?

No, I don’t think so. Indeed, if you don’t open up, the open source community (or your competitors) will build something that does the same thing as your service and then they’ll open it up and give it away for free. So hey, I’d pay a couple cents per hundred transactions if you’re innovating and providing a really nice user experience… that also spits out data that I can plug in elsewhere, invisible to you (what do you care anyway?). Put your customers in the driver’s seat and I can pretty much guarentee you’ll not only get long term investment from them in what you’re doing, but heck, you might even get new Plazes, Dodgeball and BillMonk buddies with lots of friends who haven’t yet found out about you… and are eager to use whatever it is their friends are using.

Mashing up social networks: oh yeah, now there’s the next killer app. Gimme a way to cross-polinate, cross-aggregate, mix up, re-use, recombine or reinterpret and reshare and you’ve done something interesting.
Something I’ll use, and yes, probably tell my friends about. This is where mashups are going. And I can hardly wait…!

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