My Digital Life

Yesterday a friend pointed me at blippr.com, a new (I assume!) site that seems to merge twitter like short comments with reviews of books, music, movies and games.

As a format it works really well, you just search for whatever movie you want to see reviews for and browse through the results.  Overall ratings are also aggregated  to provide an overall score. 

For things like movies and games I find a consensus of opinion much more useful than an in depth review followed by one persons opinion.   As Blipper can also import contacts and friends from Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook you should also be able to see what you buddies are think of the same movie, and what other things they are enjoying.

Reviews are short <160 character twitter style comments, and use a simple ‘love it’ to ‘hate it’ rating.  I’m not sure if there’s a mobile interface or iPhone app but it would seem like a great addition to catch people views right as they leave the cinema (for example).

The only slight flaw I found was that if you miss spell your email address when signing in the site creates a fresh account for you… so I now have a dummy account there!

Still, I like it :)

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? :)

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 :)

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…

http://www.istwitterdown.com/

A few people have been tweeting about twistory today and I really love it, what a great idea!  It pulls data from summize to scroll through tweets with the words Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish.  One of those things you have to see to appreciate, full fantastic none the less.

Spotted a nice new service over over on Jason Langridge’s Blog.  Dashwire syncs Windows Mobile (and soon Symbian apparently) phones and PDA’s with a web service. 

I’ve only just signed up but it looks pretty cool.  It runs a client on the device that syncs all your basic phone info (contacts, bookmarks, SMS’s etc) as well as integrating with services like Flickr and Facebook  for photos.  Interestingly it can also post status updates (and other Tweeting goodness) to Twitter.

The killer bit of functionality for me is the ability to Sync configuration from device to device.  I’ve not tested it yet, but I change my phone loads as I get to test out new toys devices for work, so this could save me loads of time.

Check it out over on dashwire.com

Just spotted an interesting link on Twitter (I can’t remember who mentioned it - sorry!) that kinda follows on from my Selling Microsoft post a few weeks ago. 

Sam Lawrence has written about his experience at the SharePoint conference that was going on at the same time as Mix.  From what he’s said, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, it seems like the old vs. new camps in MS are alive and well over in the US as well as the UK.

…From Steve Clayton.  I’ve only really been on Twitter for a few weeks but already I spend quite a bit of time on there.  In fact along with Google Reader and Outlook its one of the apps I seem to have open all the time.  At the moment I use it more as a feed, but that’s really because Twitter hasn’t quite sparked yet in my circle of friends and colleagues.  That seems to be changing though, a few people have picked up on it from the Facebook app - my Facebook status is updated with my Tweets.

For now though Steve’s post has some good advice and links.  Take a look and get over to twitter.com.