1 hour ago
Angry Robot BooksUpdate to a Favorite Tool
Two pretty cool updates yesterday from social media related apps that I use. #Klout added G+ to it’s indexing and since I am using G+ more and more it will be relevant to what I am doing. This is a passive update and I did not have to do anything really, it just happened. The other is a bit bigger for me personally and a lot more fun.
I’ve been a user of #hootsuite for a couple of years. It started as strictly a twitter client, but they have steadily added features . I used it when I was powering twitter and had three accounts. I have backed off and really only watch one of them now. I just don’t have the time to work it like I used to. I went through a lull when I started my new job hardly checking it more than once a day and interacting very little. (My Klout score suffered) I am slowly working back into the swing of things and today when I opened Hootsuite I found they had added Apps. The two I am mildly jazzed about are Flickr and Tumblr. Let me ‘splain.
Flickr, while a great site 6 years ago (and for what it is), still a great site, has fallen short and become a stagnant beast that a power user bangs his head against on a daily basis trying to keep up with all his contacts. This is obvious to everyone except the stewards of Flickr – Yahoo. Very little if any major changes to the social aspects of Flickr have been made in house. You can make a connection to other users by designating them as contacts. Your home page has a small section for those contacts, but I have no idea how it determines what images it is going to place there from those contacts. They sure as heck aren’t the obvious, most recently uploaded images. The only way to see those is about two or three menus deep. I am sure there are other user developed tools for getting around this. The app community is pretty rich and deep, just to me, adding the functionality into something I already use a bunch ROCKS. So now I can create a new tab within Hootsuite (which is a web application so I can access it anywhere) that has a live feed of image posts from all of my contacts. As you can see above, you can also create a feed for your own images or a feed based on a search. Very cool, thanks Hootsuite.
The addition of Tumblr while good is not as big a deal for me, but I like having my dashboard available to just keep up with.
iPhone Applications
Like my previous post on Firefox plugins, I thought it might be fun to post my most used iPhone applications. Feel free to leave a comment and add to the list. I’m leaving out some of the obvious ones like Amazon and Facebook.
Darkroom – I use the free version primarily for the “steady cam” feature.
CameraBag – Several prepackaged filter effects for modifying shots. I have examples in previous posts.
TiltShiftGen – I have lots of examples below. I have a blast with this filter.
Waze – Crowd sourced mapping and a meta game. Almost augmented reality.
Foursquare - Another meta game wrapped around checking in when you go somewhere. Offers the ability for users to provide tips on destinations.
Convertbot – Just a handy little tool with an awesome interface.
SketchBook – My preferred drawing / finger painting app.
Tweetie – My preferred Twitter client, but there are several good ones.
These are the apps I hit the most, I did not include any of the games I play or any of the many apps I bounce to once in a while. I am starting to use Tumblr on the phone a little though.
Apple / Amazon / Censorship
Apple gets pounded for having an often incomprehensible approval process for applications submitted to the App store. Pretty much weekly there is yet another app that gets rejected often in opposition to some other app that was previously approved. Sometimes just an update to an app already approved will get rejected (NIN / Trent Resnor’s application comes to mind)
How amazon figures in to this post is their huge snafu when supposedly some code monkey “accidentally” flipped a switch that caused any book that even hinted at gay content to be blocked from being reviewed or coming up on searches. After a huge uproar this was “fixed”. I was suspicious but their explanation was believable. Now however I am stepping back and wondering if it was some sort of collusion between Amazon and Apple (at Apples insistence) that those books be VERY hard to come across. You see Amazon just recently launched their Kindle application for the iPhone and Apple has no direct control over the content viewable within that application. So it is pretty easy to see Apple putting the screws to amazon and finding a way to impede users reading what they want to read.
What popped the light bulb on this was another story about a rejected application, coincidentally another e-book reader. Saw this story on Just Another iPhone Blog. So apparently this nice new app which allows access to all the books available on Project Gutenberg, which much to Apples prudishness include the Kama Sutra. So when one of the reviewers specifically searched for Kama Sutra, they found it and rejected the application (called Eucalyptus).
This whole mess for Apple has to be a huge pain, I sort of sympathize with them, but they are so arbitrary in what gets banned and what doesn’t that my sympathy is fleeting. I really feel sorry for someone who spends the time to develop what looks like a nice little application to get shut down for providing access to content that is freely available on the internet, including the Safari browser ON THE iPhone!
iPhone Apps
I’ve had my iPhone for around 3 weeks now and have been what I consider pretty sparring in installing applications on it. I’ve stuck with mostly free apps, but have paid for a couple. What follows is a rough order of usefullness/launched non standard apps, but not strictly so. this does not include the iPod features, etc.
Twitterrific
FaceBook
WootOn!
Google Apps – including reader
TWC (The Weather Channel)
SteadyCam
WordPress
i.TV
NPR Mobile
Shazam
JellyCar
Last.fm
Pandora
Urbanspoon
Amazon.com
CameraBag
AirMe
PhoneFlix (netflix)
Characters(Warcraft)
WarcraftStat
Chest(Warcraft)
Flashlight
SimCity
MachDice
iNXES
Lightsaber
I must confess
Hurricane season causes me to watch the weather channel more than any other time of year. It is interesting to see how accurate they are gonna be. Storm tracks and strengths, etc. It is also fairly engrossing when the actual power of mother nature gets captured for us all to see. Well I just found a really really nice website that blows away weather.com for tracking storms.
Behold StormPulse
Repost: New iPhone
Nice toy and all, the little apps they are selling for it are all geeky nifty too.
Repost: Amazing what you can do with Statistic Spin
Twitter is what some call a micro blogger. Essentially you get an account, post in a maximum of 140 character “posts” and other twitter subscribers follow your posts. You of course follow your friends, interests, famous people etc. I’ve got an account, couple of friends and web acquaintances are on their and the latest Mars Lander.
If you already knew about Twitter then you must know they have been having lots of problems. Service outages, have been rampant of late. They have basically from what I can tell outgrown the basic infrastructure they went with. They had found a nitch, were quirky enough to sneak up on folks then BLAME, exploded. Another problem they have I think is their general openness of their API. There are “spammers” out there following 17,000 people. No way is that a human on the other end of that twitter account.
Well today was WWDC which is where Apple rolls out the next frenzy of non products that the Apple Geeks freak out over. As expected (even by twitter) it went down.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
Initially, we turned off some features to shed load as we announced yesterday but we were able to turn them back on during the keynote as Twitter handled the dramatic amount of traffic. About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.
I’m sorry but those numbers are just the downtime for today. Not to mention, saying 4% of the requests telling people to wait for a few minutes was acceptable…. They are fooling themselves. Eventually one of their competitors will step up and be able to handle the load. Folks will jump ship like crazy. Also live software used by hundereds of thousands of people, some of who are watching a very important event ( to them anyway ) is not what I would call a stress TEST.
Book Burro
I know folks who read this blog are fans of real books also. If you are buying books online ( and who isn’t ) and if you use Firefox for your browser ( and you should ). You really need this extension. Book Burro detects when you are on a site looking at buying a book and goes out and hits other sites and pulls their prices down so you can compare. On install it compares Amazon, Alibris, Abebooks, half.com, buy.com, Barnes and Noble and a few others. Since I often buy books at Amazon and then kick myself for not checking Abebooks, it has saved me a few bucks a couple of times since installing.
It also is very subtle once installed so does not get in the way. Nice that is does not add a freakin toolbar, eating your browsing window or cluttering things more. Highly recommended.