Digitally Refreshing

I arrived in Vegas a few days before the MIX09 conference so I could revisit my birth country (my family and I left when I was 9) and take in a few of the sites.

Sunday was spent on an Adventure Photo Tour which was a great sightseeing opportunity but hardly a ‘Photo’ tour as the website suggests. Pitching up with my Canon 5D and tripod must have seemed odd to the camera-phone wielding group. I charming couple even asked me how to switch off the flash on their automatic so it wouldn’t startle the helicopter pilot.

Monday and Tuesday were really exploratory days. Me, with camera, on foot. The sun was out and it was hot, I mean really hot, so my bar stops were many and quite frequent. This obviously took it’s toll on me and I spent the rest of the week alcohol free. Probably a good thing as then I could focus on MIX09!

The conference

Watched a great opening presentation, setting the pace and excitement for the next three days. I especially liked Bill Buxton and all his energy. Stack Overflow (a bit like a Yahoo! answers for programmers) is technically great and a fab resource too. Netflix showed just how good Silverlight can be. And if you’re still not convinced take a look at the Rolling Stone back issues site (not live yet). Great design and love the way it feels.

See Expression Blend in action, from concept to production. Need too many words to explain, so just watch.

At the end of a long day I attended the launch party at TAO, where I met some great people – mostly Microsoft partners, all out to have a good time and talk about technology.

Friday was probably my favourite day. This was down to fascinating presentations by Luke Wrobleski (I even bought his book) – Web form design and Dan Roam – The way of the whiteboard.

Both sessions were packed full of great ideas and examples that I can bring back to PruHealth and PruProtect and implement on our sites.

Overall the conference was great, the venue fantastic and the people, both presenters and attendees friendly and interesting. I’ll definitely pester my boss for the budget to go again next year!

And finally, a big thanks to Conchango for inviting me!

Further reading and viewing:
A list of all speakers

Check out some photos taken at MIX09

Just came across this blog post from Facebook – looks like they’re going to ‘Free your Facebook page’ after all!

It’s called Facebook Connect and it will let you take your Facebook page with you, where ever you go. Security comes to mind almost immediately, does this move just weaken the wall between your personal data and the rest of the world? I’d be interested to see how corporates block Facebook connect, if it can exist on any other web page will blocking techniques become futile?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave the web away to the masses. If it were to be commercialised by the likes of large corporates it’s growth would have been slower but I imagine just as vast. It would have been like the Web, but within a giant bubble with corporate branding which you had to pay (in one way or another) to enter and interact with.

Kind of like Facebook. Of course, the types of information found within Facebook is limited (for now) but there is still plenty to read, watch and learn from.

Facebook is growing into a concealed Web (behind a walled garden some say) wrapped in a brand. You even pay to enter. You hand over your personal details, photos, videos, news and gossip. Facebook can use this as they see fit – forever.

I would like to free my Facebook page and allow it to live independently on the web – keep the permissions so only your friends could see the page in it’s entirety, but allow it to link and be linked to by ‘outside’ pages.

Allow it to exist as other pages do ‘in the wild of the world wide web’.

You can kind of see this happening ever since Facebhook allowed Google to trawl through its members, here’s my Facebook page for example. However, to access the full version you still have to hand over your info as payment.

When I searched on “Dot Com Burst 2.0” (with the quotes) (in Google) there were two results, one of which led back to The Register – where I had seen the phrase coined by Chris Morrison.

This all stems from an article about Facebook and a few other social sites crashing any time soon. To quote The Register, here are a few facts:

Five per cent fewer people in the UK visited the site in January compared to the previous month. A total of 400,000 seem to have become bored with the social network and didn’t bother to return.

Similar drops in interest have hit Facebook’s competitors. Bebo has seen an eight per cent drop in UK users since October.

MySpace, meanwhile, has seen 14 per cent of UK users desert it in the last three months.

Google, the undisputed motherbrain of flogging ad space online, says it has yet to find a way of turning the News Corp site’s traffic into dollars.

The Register

Despite my lack of interest in Facebook recently, I just uploaded a whole gallery of images which felt oddly good – like I was reminiscing with friends. However, saying that I’m still trying to ignore the 56 invites calling for my attention …

A look at what the Internet could become in the year 2015. Google merges with Amazon, forming Googlezon.

Googlezon takes on The New York Times and wins, eventually spawning a new type of media.

It’s a scary projection of the future, one which on one hand seems inevitable, but on the other impossible.

Watch Epic 2015

Taken from Julian Harris’ blog:

67% of Facebook users had not even heard of Facebook Beacon and the evil that it is (summary: it shares your profile information with third party vendors even if you’re not logged in and even if you have opted out of everything).

I used to visit FB every day, every hour if I’m honest with myself, but I just seem to be tired of it now.

I think now that I’ve found all my friends – some of the appeal has gone. Now I just email those who I want to stay in touch with. Email – the greatest social networking tool of all time?

Maybe I should download the Flock browser and relight my social fire?

I’ve just downloaded and installed Open Office 2.3. The main reason I did this? So that I could use it to save my documents in Google Docs.

Using an extension called OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs, much the same way that Firefox uses extensions, I am now able to create a document locally on my PC and then easily save it to my Google Docs folder.

However, when I actually tried to save my document to Google Docs I ran into an error (I’m working on Windows XP):

Problem: no object DCH for MIME type application/atom+XML

I’ll do some research now and see what I can find out. Will keep you posted.

Find the closest Virgin Active, LA Fitness or Cannons gym to your home, place of work or any UK postal code.

Find your closest gym now.

whypayforthegym.com is actually a website designed to show you how cheap you can get gym membership, based on how often you go to the gym, provided you take out a PruHealth health insurance policy of course. Read more about that in this handy article from Money Saving Expert.

whypayforthegym.com uses Google Maps to allow you to search for your closest gym, displaying the typical map interface we’ve all come to love – complete with address and contact details for each gym. You can even select distance in miles from the given postal code and which gyms to display – very handy indeed.

I’ve been a member of Facebook for about 5 days and I can’t get enough. I barely know half the people I talk to and I’m obsessed with who they are talking to when they not talking tome… It’s like eavesdropping online and it’s OK. I can’t help poring over the profiles of the friend’s of my friends.

it’s ridiculous. It’s like being involved in one massive relationship. I haven’t felt like this since Six Degrees back in 1998 / 99.

Here’s my Facebook profile, come join in the fun.

I joined both networks within a few weeks of each other and proceeded to set up my profiles (Facebook and MySpace), add photos and make contact with ‘my friends’. The following commentary discusses the first few days on each network – rather than an extended experience of either – I’m just talking about first impressions now. I’ll be back with a ‘longevity’ review after a couple of months.

I started with MySpace simply because of the Google association. Google have rarely disappointed me in the past – so I expected MySapce to live up to myExpectations (ha ha). Sadly I was mistaken, clearly Google have nothing to do with MySpace other than advertising to its members and providing a handy search interface.

After entering all the relevant details I was presented with my home page – and let’s face it, it looks bad. Layout is shocking and it’s just as well you can customise your MySpace homepage yourself – because it’ll need a good working over.

In order to add my friends I had to go off and search for them, how tedious, where’s the import contacts facility which Facebook provide so elegantly? All I had to do was provide Facebook with my email login details (Gmail in this case) and it would go off and find existing Facebook members from my address book – I didn’t know I knew so many people already involved in the social networking phenomenon. From here it was just a case of selecting who I wanted to become friends with and Facebook took care of the rest, sending invites et all.

Adding my personal information into Facebook went smoothly enough, already impressed by the contacts import system I was eager to see what else Facebook could help me with. I uploaded a couple of photos which contained Facebook members and to my surprise was able to highlight these people in the photograph and link to their Facebook accounts! Visual networking like I’ve never seen it, it’s not just about words any more!

It seems that I can’t edit the look and feel of my Facebook home page – good or bad? I think it’s good – the interface is clean and easy to use and that means everyone else’s home page will also be easy to use.

Sadly MySpace is already falling by the wayside, I’m off to edit my Facebook account.

Now I need to join Google Groups to round off my social networking experience.