Why doesn’t Friendfeed let me import the people I follow in Twitter? Sure I doubt it would be doing Twitter’s performance much good at the moment but it should be relatively easy to get the info via the twitter API (I’m not a dev so I may be wrong there…).
This is the future…. where’s my jet pack and single identity provider for the web? :)
From what I’ve read about Fav.or.it (if anyone has an invitation let me know!) you can write comments within the fav.or.it platform and they are written back to the blog itself.
One of the things I like about Friendfeed is the commenting, but quite a lot of feedback and comment on Friendfeed will never be visible against the original media. It would be good if Friendfeed did the same as Fav.or.it and wrote comments back to the source and attributed those comments to me. Perhaps using a some sort of FF prefix - "Tom commented via Friendfeed:….".
This would be good for the end users as their comments would be more visible and attributed to them, and probably quite good for Friendfeed as comments on blogs, flickr etc. would spread the FF word.
After playing around with Friendfeed yesterday I just saw this useful post of on Louis Gray’s blog about Five Ways to Use the Hide Function. Good stuff.
With all the problems Twitter has been having recently there’s been a lot of talk about people moving to Friendfeed or whether Friendfeed is the future etc etc so I decided to dig out my old account details and give it another go.
Now I have to admit, when I first tried FF I didn’t really get it… I found it useful as an aggregator for all my own activity on the web - and I’ve used it for that in a few places - but I other than that it didn’t really leave a lasting impression.
Part of the reason I didn’t get on with FF was probably because I didn’t add many contacts, so the first thing I did was search out a few more people I follow on Twitter and add them. I was pleasantly surprised to find most of the people I searched for, and it was good to check out the other things they’re doing. But… that did lead to quite a lot of noise. I’ll investigate some settings to see if I can filter things out, but there are only so many ‘friend of Robert Scoble‘ posts I’m likely to read in any one day! On the plus side, I really like the comment functionality. It’s useful to see replies threaded and is something I’d love to see in Twitter.
I played around with the Rooms tab a little, it’s interesting, but (maybe I’m being stupid here) wouldn’t it be better to be able to search for rooms you might be interested in? I can’t help thinking there’s a gap here in both FF and Twitter for the equivalent of an old IRC channel, a way of focusing comment and people around a particular topic.
Overall though, whilst I do like the idea of Friendfeed… and I will stick with it in case I’m still missing something obvious… it still leaves me a little underwhelmed… to me Friendfeed doesn’t seem to have the character that Twitter has.
It’s a hard thing to describe - let alone quantify - but for me Twitter as a site and a service has a character of its own. It could be that its just me that sees character in ‘things’ I don’t know, but it’s something that I reckon can make or break a product. It would seem to be something that can be captured and used as a marketing tool - look at BMW and the Mini. Fiat are chasing the same with their 500.
So that’s it really… I prefer Twitter, even though it does seem to be built on servers made of cheese, because it has a character of it’s own. I like that :)
Just following on from my lost post, I’ve just watched an interesting piece on Channel 4 news about fuel prices and green taxes.
In the piece, one of the talking heads said something like "road pricing is far fairer [than fuel duty] by pricing on distance travelled". I can’t help thinking that this way of thinking is flawed. Surely we have to drive behaviour towards more environmentally friendly fuels and vehicles rather than away from travel altogether.
If fuel and vehicles are taxed based on the CO2 they generate, it seems to me that the carrot and stick are then acting in the right direction. Especially if some of that tax is aimed at the fuel and car companies rather than the consumer - this would incentivise them towards creating cleaner fuels and cars that can use them.
Being a fan of all things Lotus, I’ve been following news about their tri-fuel Exige 270E technology demo with some interest. It’s essentially a standard Exige that has been modified to run on either Petrol, Ethanol or Methanol - or any combination of the three. Sensors tell the ECU what fuel is being used and it then adjusts the engines combustion appropriately.
Although there has been a lot of focus on hydrogen as a fuel for the future, Lotus is arguing that due to the inherent problems and costs involved with hydrogen, synthetic methanol may be a better choice. From my layman’s perspective Lotus arguments seem pretty sensible.
Simply storing hydrogen is difficult, you can either compress it to 700psi, or liquefy it at -230 degrees centigrade, neither of which are best suited for transport in vehicles. It’s also not very energy dense, I understand it’s something like a fifth the density of petrol, and once you add in the energy spent creating and storing if the well-to-wheel efficiency drops even further.
One of the biggest problems though is that hydrogen will mean a complete change in engine design and use, a hard change that will cost manufactures and support services like petrol stations huge amounts to implement.
Methanol, whilst not a panacea, does offer some advantages. It’s a liquid at room temperature for a start. It’s also more energy dense than hydrogen, though not as dense as petrol. It does however have a higher octane rating - something that allow the 270E to produce more power than the regular petrol based version.
In my view though the biggest advantage has to be that a move over to methanol can be gradual. The chaps from Lotus reckon most modern engines should be able to run methanol with very few changes. The main physical obstacles seem to be around the fact that methanol is more corrosive so seals, pipes, tanks etc need to be changed.
That being the case, a change over to methanol would be much simpler for manufacturers. Potentially they can future proof their cars against future ethanol or methanol fuels now, or at least within a few years.
If new cars were able to use these fuels in various mixes, fuel producers would be able to add synthetic methanol into their fuels and phase out petrol over a period of time.
Of course, methanol still produces CO2, but as it can be synthetically produced from carbon dioxide and hydrogen the potential exists to recover these from the atmosphere or existing industrial waste collection. The idea being that CO2 emissions at the exhaust will be balanced to a neutral point.
It seems like an interesting technology challenge, and I’m glad to see Lotus taking a lead in it. What I’d love to see though is Lotus taking a lead in delivering tri-fuel cars to customers. It would seem like most of the development for their current Elise and Exige range has been done for this project. If the costs per car weren’t too great it would be a hell of a marketing tool, and would certainly set them apart from their competitors. Would the other manufacturers follow? Who knows, but it’s a Toyota unit that Lotus have been working with, so it would be easy for at least one major company to follow.
Yesterday I left a comment on a post over on istartedsomthing. The post was about a job advert for developers to work on virtual hard disks, and it’s implications for Windows 7 functionality.
There seems to be quite a bit of focus on this line from the advert:
"Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file."
Whilst that’s all very nice, for me the real interesting quote is this:
"Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it."
Specifically the last bit.
If the intention is to include the ability to boot from a VHD, this implies that the platform will be built around, or at least support, a hypervisor like Hyper-V.
Of course this may be a focus for a future server version of Windows 7, but if included in the desktop as well it could make virtual desktops (VDI) and blade workstations a much more appealing prospect for the future.
Imagine running an office full of desktop machines. The low end requirements could be met using VM’s hosted on large servers, say 20-30 per server, presented to the user by a thin client. If a user has a more complex requirement, you could simply move that VM to a dedicated blade workstation. Hopefully that would use the same thin client and be pretty transparent to the end user - perhaps even VMotion style transparent. If the user then needs to move office or go mobile just copy their VM to a remote server/blade, or to a standard desktop or laptop.
It would need some good management tools but it could be quite a nice solution.
As Brian Ellis at vertigo says… you know you’re in trouble if you have a site dedicated to tell people if your site is up or down.
On the other hand I’d say it could also be a measure of success…
I’ve been playing about with the Mesh preview for a week or so now and overall I’m pretty impressed. Unfortunately I’ve not had time to look at the dev side of things (or it could be that I couldn’t code my way out of a paper bag…) but its clear from talking to developer buddies that they’re equally interested.
Anyway, I was chatting about Mesh earlier and the subject of Office and other ‘business’ apps came up. Or more specifically what, if anything, Mesh would mean to them.
I guess the most obvious place that Mesh could integrated is Groove. It’s one of Ray Ozzies former projects and has more than a little in common with Mesh - or at least the functionality provided in the preview.
The most common use of Groove is peer to peer, you’d create a workspace or share a folder with a number of people, but there’d be no central point where the data was kept waiting for other people to come online when you were away.
There is however the option to use Groove Enterprise Services to provide the equivalent of the cloud Mesh, a centralised service that clients could sync with which would then be available to pass on changes to other users as they came online. Using Mesh as the sync provider for new iterations of Groove would seem to make sense. The question to my mind is quite how that might work.
One option would be to allow clients to sync directly with the Mesh cloud. Although that would be the obvious and easiest solution it may not always suit enterprises. Clients would all be syncing directly to the Internet over the corporate network, not ideal unless you have huge bandwidth. Some companies may also be unhappy about having a copy of all their synced data sat outside of their network.
One way to provide enterprises with some additional flexibility might be to provide some form of internal Mesh - an internal Mesh cloud that clients can sync with privately. Potentially this cloud could then sync with the main Mesh cloud in a controlled way to allow a company to better manage the bandwidth over it’s Internet connection.
How would such a Mesh cloud be delivered? Maybe as part of Exchange or SharePoint?
One of the examples Ori Amiga gave in his Channel 9 video showed how updates made to data in an application could be synced in near real-time to other Mesh clients. In his example he used a family tree application, but for some reason it reminded me of the Excel Calculation services in SharePoint 2007.
ECS allows you to maintain a central version of an Excel worksheet and show updates in real-time via a SharePoint webpart (that’s a huge simplification I know). Presumably if Excel was able to use Mesh, changes to shared workbooks could be synced with other users of that workbook. How useful that might be I’m not sure - I’m not a huge Excel user - but the same could apply to PowerPoint or Word.
The other day I read a blog post about using Mesh as a messaging platform, unfortunately I can’t find it now to reference it. The gist of the post was that Mesh and Feedsync provide the basis for simple IM and email tools.
Thinking it through a bit more though surely Mesh would make a great platform for an enterprise Twitter style messaging platform? This could be a component for Outlook or Communicator that connects directly to Live Mesh or possibly connect the notional local cloud I mentioned up above.
Of course this all just speculation, but given the obvious investment MS has made in Mesh it would seem sensible to use the framework in some of its other products.
Try some, it’s great. That is all :)
