Year: 2008

I’m not sure I like the sense of grazing and herding architectures. Although superficially bucolic, it has something horrible and locust-like about it if you think for any period of time.

Occasional errors will be introduced through replication. For error correction 3d printers will connect to each other and blend their schematics. It’s not quite what I expected as our future but it makes sense.

I don’t need an apartment. I’ve never needed to play table football as much as I do right now. I wonder if it’s okay to lick it.

With any luck the same effect will take Clay’s book higher up the Amazon rankings.

I’m sure Cal was scratching on the front door of the Steam offices (or whatever they use instead – orbital organitropolis probably) for one of these a while back.

Very exciting – impressed by both sets of people there. Remarkable good taste, by all accounts.

It looks great, but unfortunately I’ve not had much of a chance to play with it yet as I don’t have an invitation. Sad Tom.

Design patterns are now established. Probably people need to redesign less. So is it a bold new step, or is it a distraction from where the changes actually should be happening?

I mean, otherwise, there’s a precedent for surveillance where we just sort of have to take Phorm’s word for the idea that they’re not tracking personal or private stuff. It seems particularly sinister to me.

Well unfortunately it’s not that awesome, as it only seems to actually broadcast your location when you press a button, presumably as a consequence of being kidnapped or something. Fun though.

“But wait, you say that my iPod isn’t wrapped up in a pretty little white case? Oh, I guess you haven’t heard of a pretty little white case I like to call my skull.”

Difficult to really get too worked up about stuff like this, to be honest.

God, the five dollar bill is a monstrous horror of crap masquerading as a bank note. I don’t know what they think they’re doing. Having said all that, my current favourite is New Zealand’s currency. Gorgeous.

It looks gorgeous. Here’s an admission for you. The visual style of a fair few of my presentations are based around colour combinations that I’ve lifted from their type sample pages.

Still, this way I won’t lose it if I need it in a hurry to freak out a n00b.

Disappointed by the fact that over-half of them are from DC Comics 31st Century super-teams, particularly The Legion of Substitute Heroes, who are intentionally lame. I know too much about this stuff.

It’s from Milton R Cudney’s “Eliminating Self-Defeating Behaviors” (apparently published in Michigan in 1975 by Life Giving Enterprises). This sense of what is natural and ordered basically fucks us all.

Absolutely fascinating book of what appear to be map-like visualisations of literary themes, books, sentence lengths and the like. I’m trying desperately to find out where to get my hands on it. Any ideas?

The last one on the page I think is absolutely beautiful. I wonder if there are any sites where you can find really amazing designs that you can take into a laser engraver to have put on your machine…

It’s a decent piece that I in most part agree with. I’m a little disappointed (as ever I suppose) by the need to package up complex issues in a couple of minutes. My position is … simplified … let’s say.

Had a play with one for the first time the other day down the pub and it was undeniable fun. Looking forward to getting my pink one on Tuesday.

I do get into some trouble for not having much of a sense of humour about gay jokes. This is why.

When a unique person visits it, a new person joins the community. It’s a lovely association to make. In the end, it’s a game about traffic, only it’s assembled in such an elegant form…

Really interesting set of things going on here – stores your auth information in a cookie, which is quite classy. No need to register at all. Shows you your five nearest geotagged places in Wikipedia.

Seems like a lovely piece of work there and in record time. The amount of creative engineering I’m seeing around the place is really cool.

I watched this on stage at SXSW and was totally thrilled about it. Some of the partners we’ve been talking to have been really cool, and Outside.in are definitely among them.

The idea here is that when you return to your desk at home or work, your location will be updated. Lovely little app.

It’s a reasonable point, but it’s worth remembering that this is a developer launch aimed at getting people to build applications against the Fire Eagle APIs. We’ll be showing off some of these very soon.

It’s a bit weird, but there you go!

Samantha Tripodi did the visual layer of design for Fire Eagle and she did an extraordinary job. She and I played for ages with different feels and stories until we found this one. It’s gorgeous.

Our first iPhone location updater! Very exciting! Erica got this up and running in a couple of days (at most) from when she started playing with the API. Very cool.

If you’re interested in Fire Eagle, I think this is the article I’ve read with the most substance.

I’m going to give my perspective on the whole thing soon once my brain de-clenches. He got to thank the team before I did, which is a bit frustrating!

This post really made me happy. It’s such a big deal for us that we work out how to give control back to the people using the service. Seems like we’ve got that at least partly right.

“Users of the PresenceRouter OS X application to fling your Plazes presence about to Jaiku, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wamadu, Frazr, Nabaztag” and now (alpha support) Fire Eagle!

Stops third party sites asking you to give them your logins. Now they can just get formal permission from you to access contact information instead.

Browser Plus is pretty interesting. At the moment my understanding of it is pretty slight. I need to dig further into that one.

It just allows you to update your location from a widget, but it was also put together in just a couple of hours which gives you some sense of how hard Fire Eagle is to develop against.

Want to update your location with Twitter? Now you can. Jesse did a version of Danger Day for the very first public alpha of Fire Eagle last year. Lovely to see him back with us again!

My particular favourite line is about the “Twitter for Location” description. I really hate that one too. I don’t think it explains what we made at all well.

The thing I’m most proud of, I think, is that the quality of the team really shines through in the thing we made. However well it goes as a project, I think it’s a classy thing.

Really looks pretty fascinating. Moreover, the picture of Jon Pertwee is wonderful. Explore! Explore!

Nice and short. Ten minutes. I want to do more talks that length, I think. It looks like I came across reasonably well, anyway!

I really think is worth talking about why we didn’t do a social network. Lots of services manage the social graph and Fire Eagle can be hybridised with all of them. Why would we make the effort?

As is probably obvious, I’m collating a number of the posts about Fire Eagle that have turned up in the last day or so. I really like Matt’s – it gets some of the weird out-there potential.