Saturday I went to visit a meet-up of Project Roomware:
The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.
“Roomware” is an application running in a defined space. For instance: linking people’s photographs to the screens of a club, sharing musical tastes with the DJ, finding other interesting people on your mobile phone, a photo booth activated by the entry tickets of two people, etc.
That’s all pretty awesome. On top of that, it’s free software, done by nice people and they even do fun geek stuff such as playing with glasses that track your motion…
I signed up at Last.fm in 2005. I never really used it a lot. Until recently, when I got slightly bored by soma.fm (still great though!). I found out Last.fm is streaming tons of music. A bit like pandora.com, but way better. And it seems they have everything, ranging from Aphex Twin, to the Beatles, your local punk band, Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen, anything.
It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever). You can click “love” if you like something and “ban” is even more useful. It’s especially nice to tune into your friends’ radios. Feel free to tune into mine.
There’s even a client for my Nokia N810. Now we just need free wireless everywhere…
Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven’t seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting “applications”. I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my “friends”.
Today I went through the usual “confirm requests” and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with “how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date” in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. … Not.
A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends.
And I’m not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?
Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.
There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.
This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.
Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam…
The workshop was interesting. I didn’t attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g. XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) was discussed and the intention was spoken out to have a proof of concept and running code available for the conference on February 9th and 10th (SNES). There’s definitely enough momentum. Twitter and Six Apart were present and are actively supporting the effort. Hyves, a Dutch social network that just celebrated their 5 million member party, was mentioned a lot.
I have one constructive remark about organizing a workshop: Try to have some wiki space available before the workshop starts. This way you don’t depend on people sending you their notes later on, and editing wikis in a social setting can lead to interesting (and blizzardly fast) results. Temporarily use another wiki, or even permanently, if there is an existing wiki which has goals that are similar enough. Of course, first ask permission from the community (if there is one) and try to get them involved in the workshop as well, during and after.
I was happy to talk to James Burke again. I recognized some more familiar faces and while brainstorming about a name for the project (and checking out translations into African languages) we found out that we had met at What The Hack, an outside festival for hackers two years ago where I spoke about the Bambara Wikipedia. I’m totally enjoying Amsterdam…
Recent Comments