shwons.com

Daily Fail (again)

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:53:01 +0100

BT, like any self respecting company not stuck in the dark ages, are evolving their approach to social media, reaching out to disgruntled customers and offering to help sort their problems. This was universally considered a good thing, until the Mail decided it was simply spying.

Interacting with your Social Graph

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:15:02 +0000

Today @fredwilson’s started a discussion over at avc.com about chatroulette.com. I’d never heard of chatroulette before today and I’m slightly taken aback by it’s simple freshness. There’s no signup. There’s no fee. You’re connected to an unknown other’s webcam, and they to yours, from there, you chat. Just head over and give it a go, it’s odd.

There is by all accounts a lot of NSFW material, as you’d expect from an uncensored internet. Fred’s son probably got it right:

“dad, you can’t invest in that, it’s porn.”

Maybe.

I don’t need to know everything you do. I’m not that interested.

I’m becoming rather annoyed of late with Facebook’s inability to understand whos status updates I’m really interested in. At a guess, the algorithm currently favors posts which garner a lot of interaction: comments, likes, clicks. Ok, that’s a very PageRank idea of promoting content and I’m sure it works, but I’d also like the algorithm to unearth stuff further down the pile by people who are closer to me, even if nobody else comments on it. I can see two approaches:

1. Let me define ‘best friends’.

2. Work out my best friends, based on Events we attend, Photo’s we’re tagged in.

I think the second option really has wings. If I see someone frequently in real life, there’s a fairly good chance I’m a close friend.

Meeting people

I like meeting new people through friends. It helps build an immediate trust which you just don’t get meeting people cold. However, eHarmony have just started advertising in the UK. 2% of American newlywed’s last year met on eHarmony. My initial reaction was Waw! or Wow! But the more I think about it, the more I’m realising they didn’t meet cold. eHarmony introduced them. Can a webservice step in for a friendly invite?

Point of note: It doesn’t matter that eHarmony is a dating site, I think this works across the board. It’s just a current example.

Can a webservice step in for a friendly invite?

That’s an interesting idea. Webservice’s know a lot about us that we already know, but they also know a lot that we don’t. Facebook, if they could write the algorithm, potentially knows which of my friends - friends would make good friends for me. Think about that.

This has massive potential in the online dating space.. but less of that. It has massive potential in just being interesting.

In the comments to Fred’s post about chatroulette today, I wrote:

I like it. Though it could work outside of Facebook with your larger social graph.

You’d enter your social network’s (Facebook, Twitter, Disqus…) credentials and then be connected to someone, somewhere, that touches your graph.

I guess a fun game element could be for the two parties to decide which network they’re both in within a time limit. Points awarded. Clearly you could cheat very simply, but I think there’s something in it.

@reecepacheco was thinking along the same lines:

Further, my social network is now pretty big and I’m linked to people who I barely talk to. Randomly popping across their screen might be a good way to reconnect.

Also, I mentioned being matched to friends of friends - this could be
anonymized, and then you have a totally different network. A group of
people who are connected somehow (so it feels safe), but don’t know exactly
how (so there’s still that random interaction). This, I think, might
actually work (at least as a feature of a larger network).

That’d be a very unique, clever, sort of interaction. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it, sometimes two sets of friends don’t need to cross, it could lead to some awkward situations, but it’s an interesting idea all the same.

Do we need this?

It probably works better with networks like Disqus. I really don’t know most of the people I ‘like’ on Disqus, but they’re certainly interesting people I’d like to get to know a bit better. That I think has a lot of use.

Hello WSGI

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:42:00 +0000

I’m working on something that really doesn’t need the massiveness of Django, as a result I’ve been digging into a little FastCGI or WSGI as it seems best presented in Python.

def application(environ, start_response):

start_response(‘200 OK’,[(‘Content-type’,’text/html’)])

return [‘Hello World!’]

from wsgiref.handlers import CGIHandler

CGIHandler().run(application)

I’ve been following this nice little tutorial.

Apostrophes

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:50:44 +0000

I have issues, amongst other things, with apostrophes. In all honesty, I have many issues with the English language, but apostrophes cause me much trouble. I took solace this week in discovering that Lewis Carol, who was slightly more capable than I, spelt shall not, sha’n’t. Thus, fuck it.

Can being a vegetarian help save the planet?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:59:14 +0000

No. Should a black hole come hurtling across our solar system, something I’m inclined to believe they don’t do but-it’s-a-nice-image-so-I’ll-continue-with-it, it’s unlikely it’ll stop to make a quick poll of the inhabitants dietary regime before handing down it’s justice and swallowing us up. Similarly, should a massive gamma ray burst hurl it’s gigantic force at us, the ratio or resident vegetarians to carnivores will play no role what so ever in deciding our fate. Asteroids are particularly well know for they’re utter disregard for those who’ve chosen an Asparagus Almandine over a Lancashire Hot Pot. The truth is, your choice of diet plays no role what so ever in the future of this lump of rocks journey through time and space.

Can being a vegetarian help reduce global warming?

Yes. Here’s the question the media should be asking. This is the question our increasingly irrelevant musicians should be addressing.

As much as I disagree with the late Linda McCartneys assertion that if slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone would be a vegetarian, mostly because I’m not aware that all, if any, butchers are vegetarians, I do agree that if we all ate a little less meat, the climate would be better off. Do the right thing, have some Tomato Soup!

Amazon on the High Street?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:13:00 +0000

The Times are reporting that Amazon is making secret enquiries to setting up shop in a couple of key locations in out cities!

There’s nothing official as yet, and it may just be that as a good company Amazon is keeping an open mind to its future options. Although as the Times points out, this is a definite departure from the tried and tested online retailing formula.

We lost the Virgin Megastores (later Zavvi) from our high streets earlier this year andthere are rumors abound that Borders is about to close shop… they’re running closing down sales all over the country. On the one hand this leads to some prime, large vacant property.. but it also raises the question, do we need Amazon on our high street?

The claim is bolstered by the stat that 18% of Argo’s online sales are picked up in store and for high price tag items such as TV’s this could be as much as 50% for the Christmas period. I’m not exactly sure why you’d go to the hassle of carrying a TV down a high street to you car, instead of having UPS deliver it though, especially if there was no financial gain.

One of my favorite features of Amazon.com is the seamless integrated 3rd party sellers. They’re a great resource for out of print items. If they could integrate this into their high street stores as some sort of Amazon Market, that would be an excellent addition to our high streets and probably a great boon to the fledgling local 2nd handstore. Although whether they’d want Bernard and Manny running riot is another matter.

It’ll be interesting to see how HMV do tomorrow. They own the HMV music stores,Waterstones book stores and 50% of online digital music / ebook retailer 7digital. In their boots I’d consider looking at some of that vacant Megastore / Borders property and consolidating the group onto one site, instead of operating out of two units on a high street. A coffee shop wouldn’t go a miss either.

This is my first post in a long time. I’m hoping to begin being a little more active again.

Update:

Amazon have moved to debunk these claims, said a spokesman: “We have no plans to open physical retail stores anywhere in the world.” Which is a pity, could have been fun.

HMV ended the day up 3.4%

Our tickets for Spa arrived today!

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:10:02 +0100

Our tickets for Spa arrived today!

Muse Knights Of Cydonia A Capella (via @elsmorian)

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:13:06 +0100

Muse Knights Of Cydonia A Capella (via @elsmorian)

The Apple / Google lovefest appears to be coming to an end....

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:10:09 +0100

The Apple / Google lovefest appears to be coming to an end. Turns out, Steve’s done this before with a major player!

Use them and abuse them Steve.

Fake Steve is back

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:47:19 +0100

Fake Steve is back:

This is how it should finish.

Layar, layers information over live images taken with a mobile...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:13:56 +0100

Layar, layers information over live images taken with a mobile camera. Awesome. This’ll really change exploring new places. People could leave messages or reviews on buildings, resturants, shops, cafes.

Splice in Twitter with geo coding. This will be big.