Spreading too thin?

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bru
2 monthes ago
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Yet another consideration about the (personal) use of the blog medium.
I was chatting yesterday with Gian about his perception that most bloggers in our entourage stopped or heavily reduced their blogging habit. Me first.
First response I gave was that yest, I reduced blogging while increasing participation in other social media, mainly twitter, but also facebook, tumblr, friendfeed (not very active there, but keeping an eye on it) and a few others. Notable exception is Flickr, that I still consume quite a lot but haven’t been producing on for the last 18 months or so (this is hopefully about to change).
Similarly, I guess that other early adopters (that form the best part of our aforementioned entourage) are experiencing a similar situation, where they spend more time exploring new frontiers rather than patrol the growing population of the blogosphere. I guess this is especially true, in this phase, for those who liked to use blogs as social journals. I belong to this category.
Those who like to write fiction, to talk about their cat, to comment politics or to play pundit probably will keep on investing their attention in writing and reading more blog posts.

After that conversation, I went and had a look back (with no anger) at my journals, blogs and other media archives. I found one interesting fact: for my way of using social media, microblogging (twitter) and photo sharing (flickr) are the best tools out there.
The Blog is indeed still invaluable for many purposes, like to explain the result of a long process or chain of thoughts or a research (like what I’m doing now) that needs a proper body, maybe references, links and so on. However, the archives of the early years of my blogs (as well as physical diaries), when I had just them as tools to keep track of my inner and outer contexts, are full of miserable gibberish and automatic nonsense. Twitter, on the other hand, forces me to concentrate my message in a short sentence, that turns out to be a sort of haiku. And the time effort required to do this is small enough to keep this practice lazy-proof.

That said, don’t expect my twitterstream to be nonsense-free.

Enter WakeMe.At

Published
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bru
3 monthes and 2 weeks ago
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N.B.: this post was actually intended for my other blog, but as apparently it’s having hiccups, let’s go for backup :)

Following last week’s exciting news about the launch of FireEagle and the consequent wave of new interest in location base social networks (like brightkite) I think it’s definitely time to come to terms with rough edges and introduce you to what has been keeping me busy for a few weekends in the past season.
Started just as an exercise to learn the FireEagle API, it evolved rapidly due to early feedback, fun and personal curiousity into what is starting to look like a full fledged application. Well, at least the stem of it. Now, to push it one step further, it needs to meet real people. So, without further ado, enter WakeMe.At.

What is WakeMe.At?

While trying to explain the idea to friends, a number of possible definitions emerged
* a location centric taskmanager
* a distributed, serendipitous travel guide
* your ubiquitous sticky notes
* a tool for collaborative local action

Ultimately, you can imagine WakeMe.At as a blank canvas where to doodle with four data brushes: where you are, where memos are, their relationship with you (through your social network), and the media through which you like to be notified.

Also, WakeMe.At is a provocation into try and think differently: it invites you to start mapping your tasks instead of listing them, and it hints to the possibility of sharing them with your friends and find out that they can be carried out in a more eco and time-efficient way by the group rather than the individual.
Incidentally, it also made me notice how the modern cities are built around the concept of personal tasklist, more than on collaboration/communication model.

Why should I care?

Strictly speaking, you don’t have to, at least at this stage.
BUT, you may be interested in playing with a new way of asynchronously exploring the space around you, or share notes and actions about places or events with your friends.
Also, if you are enjoying location based services already out there, like iamnear or brightkite, chances are you already have got an idea of the possibilities that location aware tools unveil.
Finally, from a beta oriented point of view, you may instead be interested in being involved into the development of something slightly different from the usual “show me who’s around and I may be friend of”, help me build a proper enabling web service, and enjoy waves of funny little bugs.

How does it work?

WakeMe.At tracks your position, either through manual updates or your FireEagle account (if you have one). From the site, you can then place memos on specific places (you can identify a place through its address or by using an interactive map).
A memo can be of two types: a note or a todo.

Notes

Notes, like their tangible counterparts, are used to describe the qualities of what they’re attached to (in this case, a place).
You can use a note to remember the opening times or the sales going on in a shop, an anecdote about a monument, or a particularly awesome spot to watch fireworks.
You can share notes with your friends, make them available to the public, or keep them for yourself.

Todo

Todo are tasks that, in WakeMe.At, are bound to a place: of course this includes shopping lists that needs to be triggered whenever you get close to your local market, but also reminders about that exhibition at the museum that is going to end soon, or the travel card you need to renew at the train station.
As for notes, you can share todos with your friends (they could help you with your shopping or may be interested in the exhibition too!), make them public or keep them private.

One of the trickiest parts of building a location based service is that you probably want to be able focus on your physical context rather than having to continuously check the website for notes and todos. This represents two separate technical challenges: asynchronous location update and notification:

Location update

Of course users can update their position from the website, but in order to provide maximum flexibility, WakeMe.At also integrates with FireEagle. This means that, if you have a FE account, you will be able to update your location through a wide range of different ways (some examples include brightkite, dopplr, N95, iPhone…), and WakeMe.At will periodically check and mirror your updates from there, wether you’re actually logged in the website or not.

Notification

While the web interface represent the most complete user experience, you can choose to be notified of nearby memos through different media.
This way we think it’ll be easier for you to keep track of your notes and todos while on the move.
For the time being, you can choose to be notified via email and/or Twitter.
Sadly, Twitter just announced that they disabled the Direct Message to SMS feature from their UK phone number; pity, it was the perfect catch to receive notifications directly to your cell phone. I covered the subject slightly more here.

What’s missing, and where to go next?

WakeMe.At is in its early days, you can call that alpha, beta, or just say it still needs a good deal of adjustments. I’m aware of that and will try to fix them in the near future, based on feedback and time (which is always an issue).
What follows is a list of my main areas of concern at the moment. You’re more than welcome to help me on any of these :)

Design

As you’ll notice by heading to WakeMe.At, the site doesn’t have a real style of its own yet. There are some ideas, of course, and I believe it’s ok to show its goals and the leading principles behind it, but it’s still lacking a proper IA and visual design.
The current general architecture is heavily inspired by Dopplr, which I consider a true source of inspiration when it comes to “proper” design, but since the two sites don’t address quite the same question, I think we’ll have to move away from this layout soon and find a better fit.

Mobile

I’m working on a stripped down version of the site, that will be helpful essentially to _consume_ data from a mobile device. This needs still some work (and some test), but should be available pretty soon.

Seamless experience

Currently, WakeMe.At does a pretty good job in trying to guess your location and deliver notifications, but the experience as a whole is often less than fluid.
I reckon there’s a lot of room for improvement in designing an interaction that feels more “natural”.

API

This is something that’s on its way: WakeMe.At is built as a RESTful application and pretty much all the data is thus accessible and manageable already. There are a few missing bits though, especially access to data via JSON, application based authentication, like OAuth, and some nice documentation that explains it all.

When can I join?

NOW! Even if formally WakeMe.At is in “closed” beta (or should I say alpha), I’m eager to get a little more people on board to see if it just blows off or not.
So, if you’re interested, head to this page and request an invite; it should come to your mailbox pretty soon!

A big Thank You

Last but not least, I’d like to thank the small group of very special people that helped in testing wakeme.at so far. Strictly in order of appearance in the database: simbul, amitkoth, tomtaylor, folletto, phauly, kurai, feba (who also kindly reviewed this post), margotmood, gianchan, abeggi (bugspotter supreme)

Leaving a mark

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bru
4 monthes and 3 weeks ago
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I don’t know if it’s because it was Bastille day or just because for two days in a row we had mostly sun, but today it felt different, so I made a small resolution on writing down a note about it, and here I am in the heart of the night marking this last thing off the list. I’ll get better with timing, eventually.

The day started with me finding in a pocket of the jacket one of my small notebooks. I thought they were all buried deep in the stuff that still lays packed from my move, but no, this little boy was hiding there in the pocket, waiting for the right moment to jump out.
I started taking notes on the train to work. It felt so good. Sketching, especially.
I’ve always been more of a sketch-and-mind-or-concept-map person, but you can’t really do that on a computer keyboard.
Moreover, the little, continuous attention and discipline required to write in a controlled and decent way is, I think, unvaluable.

But enough of my prodigal notebook. The rest of the day has been characterized by meetings, that tends to cluster on mondays, which is good.
Headshift is in an interesting moment. Maybe the gorgeous new office space is blowing new energy in the team (again, having a LOT of natural light helps, I’m sure) but it looks to me that, even if the pressure is as high as usual, we tend to be more willing to get out, interact with the world outside and with each other.


6 Points of View from Tom Taylor on Vimeo.

Oh, today the balcony hosted a lunchtime meeting with Dejan Dinčić of Diplo, that turned into an exciting conversation on online learning and what social media practices share with it. The bottom line I soaked is that as in our case it’s more about the people than about the tools (that were the focus in early e-learning experiments), yet the right tools (not necessarily fancy or too playful by themselves) can seriously empower the community to a new level.

On other news, I spent the last few weekends extending my little FireEagle experiment. It started just after the FireEagle development meeting here in London, as a way to understand this fascinating API, and then evolved thanks to a few inspiring conversations over the course of the months into a proper, if maybe trivial, application. More to come on this subject very soon.

walking vs. driving

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bru
5 monthes and 2 weeks ago
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Today I read on WorldChanging this post about the debacle concerning the climate impacts of walking vs. driving.
John Tierney writes:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

Now, Karl Schroeder in the WorldChanging post linked above already scores a few points back to the walking practice but I think he’s missing the major one: where does your food come from? I don’t have any number here but I’ve this very strong feeling that practices like the 100 miles diet can help reduce our impact quite considerably, together with possibly tightening a bit our ever-loosing bound with the local territory.
Of course this is not applicable everywhere, as I guess harvesting food in antartica would be quite troublesome, and similarly growing bananas in the uk I think (again, just guessing) would be far from eco-efficient: but do we need bananas in the uk? maybe the same principles could be found in other local products, that we could produce and consume in a shorter timespan, thus saving chemical treatments, freezing, and so on.

On the run for digital ground and its value

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bru
5 monthes and 2 weeks ago
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Plenty of news these days, but not the right time to talk about those.
Just wanted to quickly point out this thing that dawned on me now, sa I was finally having a closer look at Plurk.

Plurk, you may say, is yet another twitter clone. I like to say it’s twitter with added motion sickness, because one of the main features is this visualisation mode where you scroll messages horizontally on a timeline (btw, if you’re interested in this kind of visualization effect, have a look at the great SIMILE project).

Feba\'s timeline on plurk

The other added feature is Karma (of Slashdot’s fame), that is used to turn user’s experience in a sort of game. Higher karma means more colorful messages for you and added motion sickness fun for your readers.
All in all, a quite clever strategy to get people in, would be nice to find out if it will be able to be sticky enough and thus if it is here to stay.

So, now that the main rush has passed, today I went and tried to subscribe. Only to discover that (unsurprisingly enough, it’s three letters and pretty open to interpretations) my nick was taken. Now that’s really no big deal: I’m not particularly attached to it and in networks where 3 letters are not enough (why why why?) I use other permutations already.
The interesting thing is, that the nice brazilian girl who claimed “bru” on plurk apparently has a lot of my Italian friends now in her roster. Which, being plurk a game, is totally cool!

However, that raises a few interesting issues:
How valuable is the claiming of digital ground?
Is the whole concept of friends/followers still valid?
What happens to physical relationship metaphors when not only space and time collapse, but identities fragmentates too? People may say “I’m a friend of bru”, and being asked “yes, bru… but where?”
And maybe even Where’s the point in claiming identities, if the whole point is just connecting to more people? Just get them all!

What’s in a name, would the Poet say…..
Again, this is totally cool in a context like Plurk, but could be annoying or even awkward in other environments to find you’ve just declared your friendship with a bunch of perfect strangers :)

Oh, btw, I’m iBru there.

post BarCampLondon4

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bru
6 monthes ago
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another day, somehow shorter than the first, but equally engaging.

I eventually did my small presentation, with the effect that I realized a good title for it just while presenting it. Here you can find the slides, published on google docs:

Geeky note #1: presenting in google docs is ok… for a barcamp at least. But no nifty transition and no timer yet :(

Geeky note #2: the speech was meant to generate a discussion, no demo was presented, although some code already exists and I’m looking forward to push it to github soon.

Among the conversations I participated to today:
* Distributed social network primer, Ben Ward exploring XFN and microformats
* Guy Rintoul on the geography of technology - from a pretty abstract start this one developed in a quite rich discussion on scenarios of possible future perceptions of space and place.
* Pedro’s Agile Low Cost Usability Testing - a few tools and guidelines to squeeze usability testing into “everyday life” of development projects
* Some eye tracking case studies (cool to see a Tobii output again after quite a long time :) )

Kudos to Ross Bruniges and the whole staff. This has been a great camp.
Oh, and thanks to the sponsor too: eBay’s rubik’s cube’s been keeping me busy since I jumped on the train (and will probably haunt me for the next few weeks).

Back from day 1 of BarCampLondon4

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bru
6 monthes ago
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The first day of this first barcamplondon of the post-BBC era is over, and here I am to write down a few considerations on the experience.
The overall impression is awesome, and I think the general mood is that this event is definitely up to the standard we were used, although in the morning I saw a quite a big stack of “undelivered” badges that gave me an early feeling of emptiness.
Another thing that hit me as soon as I got to the leicester square venue was the fact that the rooms are actually spread over three different non-contiguous floors of an eight floors building and, on average, quite tiny (10-12 people). I immediately thought this was going to be a logistic nightmare.
I was (happy to be) wrong: having many (8) small rooms (well, two are actually biggish boardrooms that can easily host 40-60 people) turned out to be a very good context to spark conversations, as each and every session I’ve been to turned out in a lively, often inspiring, discussion.
And about logistics, I must say that thanks to the wonderful endurance of the first floor staff that kept giving direction and routinely FOB-ing the door (I felt sorry for them), and a really awesome 6th floor terrace overlooking soho and acting as decompression space (and no, it wasn’t even raining!) the experience has been more than enjoyable.

Among the topics I’ve learned about today:
* Arduino rfid hacks (by Nigel Crawley with whom I attended the RFID workshop at the Dana Centre a couple of weeks ago - it’s been interesting, although a bit frustrating, to see where he went from there)
* Making a better system for government consults. With Harry Metcalfe from tellthemwhatyouthink, and also Rob McKinnon from theyworkforyou.co.nz.
* How to make a proper Italian espresso (no, really!) - with Carmen Boscolo and Julius Solaris, who then went on presenting his ideas on building a “proper”, all-in-one solution for event management. Thanks to a really interested audience, the follow-up conversation lead to the potential basis to start outlining and/or building something! Fingers crossed (and yes, good espresso is obviously essential to properly manage a conference, so everything fits).
* Usable Conference, a project by Jure Chalev on creating guidelines for a successful conference, something along the line of what we did in Italian on the Bzaar Wiki - note: I think a set of tangible deliverables would really help in this case, like a checklist that you can actually print and carry with you when you’re considering venues, or at the event itself.
* Usability testing for console games, with Andy Budd. A lot of interesting facts and ideas, first of all that, quite unexpectedly, most of the console games that hit the shelves don’t actually go through a proper usability testing process. Key idea: games, unlike for example office suites, cannot afford to be unusable.
* Comet web application architecture, with a cool demo chaos game session.

A great part of the day has been also, as usual, the presence of old friends with which to hang on,
and force you to talk through your thoughts.

Like a Zippo

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7 monthes and 1 week ago
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Yesterday while reading my daily techmeme I saw this headline:

Beautiful to use: Nokia unveils three new handsets that merge modern functionality with classic and sophisticated looks

The first thing I thought was “wow! Are they really releasing the Nokia Remade?”
Actually no, the new Nokias are just pretty neat handhelds, but nothing along the line that CradleToCradle authors would endorse, apparently.

For those who are wondering, the “Remade” project is (as Nicholas defines it):

a provocation for serious conversations at the tippy-top of the Nokia enterprise to seriously consider how upcycling can become part of the design, construction and consumption of mobile phones. Materialized ideas on a really impactful concept.

As Jan Chipchase, researcher for Nokia Design, puts it on his blog:

sustainability is a pressing issue in a billion+ products-per-year industry

While talking in the office with Tom, who met Jan and had the chance to play a bit with the Remade, and listening to his description of the experience, I thought that, apart from the upcycled materials, the Remade gives the feeling of an undying object, something that is there to stay, like a Zippo lighter.

Even if I don’t smoke but I’ve always been in love with Zippo lighters: they’re solid, their design is always contemporary, not too loud (well, at least the classic model) nor too dull, and when you have one in your hands you can’t help but play with it, in your own personal way: whether to try and light it in one clean swoop, or just spin it through the fingertips, or compulsively open and shut it to hear that distinctive, reassuring “clack” sound.
I’m definitely looking forward to devices like these.

Filo, the line that joins your dots

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bru
7 monthes and 1 week ago
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About one week ago I wrote a post with a similar title on my Italian blog. It was to announce the “beta” of Filo, a small service (well, more like a weekend project) that I developed a while ago, and that turned out to be a good testbed for experimenting a bit with design ideas and development practices.

What I’m giving you here is an introduction to the project and an overview of its features, I’ll update my dev blog with more in-depth articles about the techie stuff.

Filo __ welcome _ index.jpg

What is Filo?

Filo is a website that allows you to keep track of what you want to read (and don’t have the time to do it right now). It was heavily inspired by Instapaper, a web service by Marco Arment (one of Tumblr’s developer) and basically started as an exercise to bend Instapaper’s behaviour to my needs.

Wasn’t del.icio.us / ma.gnolia / $othersocialbookmarkingsite enough?

Yes and no. Other existing services are mainly aimed at people who want to share their bookmarks with somebody else or who want to tag / archive with their own tags.
This is awesome, but requires that you actually know where to put that document!
Filo instead provides you a simple, strictly first-in-last-out list of items you want to remember.

How does it work?

Items to read in Filo are called knots (that’s a little linguistic joke, as filo means line in Italian). You can create Knots either manually (using a form accessible from everywhere on the site) or using a bookmarklet that you can drag in your browser’s bookmark bar.

filo_bookmarklet.jpg

Using the bookmarklet is very easy: you just browse to a page you want to “remember” and click the bookmarklet. It will contact Filo in the background and create the new knot automatically.

Once a knot is created it will be available from the website and in your personalized RSS feed.

Filo __ u _ index.jpg

Once a knot is accessed (either clicking on it on the website or clicking it’s title on the feed), it will be marked as read and archived. It is possible to mark archived knots as “to be read again”, as it is possible to trash knots entirely. At the moment, there is no way of bringing items back from the trash (but it will be possible in the future).

How to access the service

The procedure to sign up and sign in have been reduced to a bare minimum: when accessing the site, you’ll be prompted for an email, just type in yours; if it’s recognized as an existing user’s, you’ll be asked for your password, otherwise a new user will be instantly created so you’ll be able to start generating knots!
You’ll also receive an email to confirm your address. You’ll need to click on the link provided in it to fully activate the account (and be able to log in again in the future).

users are prompted for their email address

email not recognized, will register a new user
email recognized, will ask for password and log in

Note, the über-simplified registration process was first presented as an idea by Davide Casali at the recent ExperienceCamp.

Localization

As of today, Filo supports English and Italian.

Mobile version

Filo is already designed to be used from mobile devices (well, actually the CSS still needs a bit of love). Moreover, there’s an iPhone/iPodTouch version available at http://filo.m.bzaar.net/ (well, you can go there with any browser, but with the iPhone is cooler ;) ).

Reading from a feedreader

Filo creates a personal RSS feed for each user. This feed may be imported in any feedreader. Every time you access a knot form your feed reader, it gets automatically archived in Filo (and will disappear from the unread feed at the next refresh).

Boring Technical Details

Filo is written in Ruby, builds on the Ruby on Rails framework, and stores its data in a couple of MySQL tables.
Front end logic is powered by jQuery and the whole thing should degrade gracefully. The iPhone version uses the iui library.

Potential Troubles

. Filo is hosted on DreamHost. Now, don’t get me wrong, DH is great and considered what I pay for the hosting, the service I get is just awesome. BUT it’s not really inteneded for hosting Rails applications: we’re running on Apache + FastCGI and, well, the whole thing tends to “feel” quite slow.
The good site of it is that I put some decent effort in optimizing the code, so when eventually Filo will move to a more rails friendly service it will possibly scream (well, maybe just whistle :) ).
. The whole thing (and especially the integrated login + registration) is not thoroughly tested on a number of different environments (e.g. IE and javascript-less)
. CSS needs some love, and the same is true for the user settings page.

Where next?

Some ideas for the future:
. OpenID support
. “social” stuff, as being able to read and comment your friends knots.
. suggested reads
. offline storage of long articles

Earth Day, focus on CO2

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bru
7 monthes and 2 weeks ago
in Chaos
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In case you didn’t notice, yesterday was Earth Day. I’m not a big fan of whatever-days, but there’ve been a couple of interesting events in the last 24 hours that stimulated my interest.
First, Dopplr added a carbon calculator service. Discussing it last night with MattB, I mentioned the fact that for the first time a web two service makes me feel guilty, and felt a bit ashamed too when it prompted me to share the carbon profile with other travellers. He replied that the idea is to push people into starting conversations on the subject, and I think this is a good way to raise awareness. As Matt Jones puts it:

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.

On a similar pattern, today in Milan at The Next Web Now (Microsoft event) FIAT presented Ecodrive: new FIAT cars are equipped with a sensor that register CO2 emissions; data can be stored in a USB drive and dumped in a PC for analysis and access by the driver.
The idea is kinda neat, and makes every FIAT 500 a potential 6 gears OpenSpime :)

Update: Information Aesthetics posted about this video today. Neat: