Tag Archives: technology

Sandy Pentland's Reality Mining

Posted on by
1

From “Technology Review: What Your Phone Knows About You“:

Sifting through cell-phone data to get at the truth of people’s social interactions falls under the umbrella of an emerging field that Pentland has dubbed “reality mining.” And he thinks that social networks are just the beginning. The same techniques can be applied to other sets of cell-phone data to help people communicate more effectively, manage their time better, and even make their neighborhoods more livable. And it’s all thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones–the ultimate data-collection machines.

Via ReadWriteWeb.

iTunes Canada Gets the TV Treatment

Posted on by
Reply

Patrick Tanguay led me to Apple’s announcement of the new TV programming offering through iTunes Canada.

I have to admit that I share his lack of enthusiasm for their offer… There’s just no way I’m going to spend money on 4:3 ratio video.

All my screens are 16:9 or 16:10: mac laptop, external monitors, iPhone, and so on. And whatever I’ll buy in the foreseeable future will obviously not going to be any other way.

They’re obviously targeting the last two remaining iPod models with such screen proportions, the Classic and Nano, but it’s just not for me. Sorry.

Nice try though. A bit late maybe but nice.

DiSo Is Born. OpenSocial Delayed Until Next Year.

Posted on by
2

Ha! I knew I could almost taste the mythical open, decentralized social network of tomorrow. In context, turns out it was the network of the day-after-tomorrow, with Chris Messina posting today that:

Steve Ivy and I have embarked on a prototype project to build a social network with its skin inside out. We’re calling it DiSo, or “Distributed Social Networking applications”. The emphasis here is on “distributed”.

The initial implementation of the project is built on WordPress, though making clear that this project is intended to be an example whose concepts should be able to be implemented on any platform. Since Steve offers a path to contribute to their effort (see “What’s Next”), I think the floater in my break list might just have found a permanent slot. With a twist and all for the better, so long as I find an area I can effectively contribute to.

I’ve tried to address related subjects on wp-hackers before, but the thread never picked up. The plugin paradigm is always a good approach, and if the implementation solidifies, code could ultimately make it into the WP core. +1 for that on my side! Just visit this very site with the excellent Operator FireFox add-on, and you’ll see what I mean. :-)

On the other hand, Open Social is now being reported as being delayed until next year:

OpenSocial received a ton of hype when it was announced. Rumors of an early November launch surfaced following Arrington’s announcement of Maki Maki. The announcement turned out to be only that, an announcement. Soon after, I spoke with developers that suggested would open their platform by December 5th. That hasn’t happened either. Techcrunch has pointed to a Google group about OpenSocial in which a Google employee states “This puts us into January before the API is ready to be implemented by containers, so expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008.”

With so much activity at the standards/architecture level in the identity and social spheres right now, I’m one to say waiting a few months might actually be a very good thing for all involved parties here. A project of Dilo’s scale will thrive on the experimental angle and be malleable enough to rapidly adapt to changes, but OpenSocial is expected by many to be a stable platform to invest in, and has been presented (or represented) as so.