First thoughts on Twitter Lists

I’ve spent a few days now playing with the new Twitter lists and right now I’m not really sure what to make of them. At first sight the mechanism is straightforward – organise the people you follow into lists and then you can be more selective about whose tweets you read. Put the people really want to follow in a “Friends” list and you can make sure their tweets don’t get lost amongst all the others. This is a step forward for those occasions when you need to use Twitter via the web site but I rarely do that – TweetDeck’s Groups provides this functionality.

But that’s not all that the lists functionality does. You can create lists of people you don’t follow, and follow them via the list rather than your regular timeline. I’m not sure I see the point of that. Why not just follow them and use lists to control what you see when? If you consider that your “timeline” – the tweets from the people you follow – is really just another list now, the “default” list you see on your Twitter homepage, then either follow everyone or follow no one. And certainly this feature makes follower counts meaningless. Some would argue they have been all along, of course…!

You can also build lists for other people to follow. Any lists you build are public by default. But that creates a problem. If I classify my followees for my own purposes I’d end up with different lists from if I classify them for other people’s benefit. And maintaining two sets of lists seems like a lot of hard work.

Finally you can follow other people’s lists. That seemed quite attractive at first, until I realised that those lists were then out of my control and I could end up following people I don’t want to, or not following people I did want to, because control of the list membership is in somebody else’s hands. Some lists might even be deleted and I’d lose contact with everyone on them. Plus, for any given category of interest there are already lots of lists of people. They all overlap but most have their own unique members. Do I follow one list, or several? That’s just a mess. What I’m going to end up doing is looking through the members of these lists and following the people individually. I can’t see myself following many lists built by others.

Aside from all of this, there’s the impact of lists on the people included in them. How would you feel if you found yourself on somebody’s “Annoying Tweeters” list. Or if you didn’t find yourself on somebody’s “Friends” list. Or if all the lists your were on were about X and you thought of yourself as more of a Y person? Think carefully when constructing those public lists, people.

So, where does that leave me with Twitter lists? I think I’m going to end up with a single, private “Friends” list for those times when I need to use Twitter via the web interface, not bother creating any others, and probably only follow one or two lists built by others, those I consider “definitive” somehow. This really isn’t going to make a big impact on my Twitter usage.

Now I’ve only had access to lists for a few days so I could easily have got it all wrong. I know there’s a new version of TweetDeck coming along that integrates with lists. It is early days for the feature, and it could easily change as it matures. We’ll see. What do you think?

Steve Rumsby : 01 Nov 2009 12:12 |  Tags: Twitter |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What is Google Wave?

Writing about web page http://wave.google.com

I’ve seen lots of opinions about Google Wave. “Google wave will replace email.” “Google Wave will replace instant messaging.” “Google Wave is the new Twitter.” In my opinion, none of those is true. Wave is something different from all of them.

Google Wave is an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless—in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Also Lars Rasmussen, one of Wave’s inventors, has said “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

I was fortunate enough to get an invite to the preview system in the first round on September 30th, so I’ve now had a couple of weeks to play with it. I know quite a few other people with accounts and so have been able to experiment with most of the features of it now. For me, the main differentiator is the real-time nature of it. Without that, a wave is little more than a wiki page that only a few people can see and edit. Or a whole thread of emails visible at once. That’s not so revolutionary, really.

So, the key is the real-time nature of it. How important is that, really? I see it as possibly useful in some restricted scenarios, specifically where a smallish group of people are collaborating on a single thing and will all be online at once. When you can’t guarantee that everyone, or a significant proportion of them, will be online together, then the real-time features are wasted and you are back to a wiki/email hybrid. And even if you can, how important is that, really? I’m not sure I see the point. I haven’t come up with an example yet that couldn’t be done just was well with a combination of existing tools. Maybe the that’s the point? Using a single tool instead of several? Or maybe I just don’t have enough imagination? That’s almost certainly true…! I know there are lots of clever, imaginative people out there playing with Wave and trying to find uses. Perhaps the killer app is out there, but we just haven’t found it yet?

There’s lots of good technology underlying wave. Making it all hang together in real-time, and all browser based, is clever stuff. The Wave developers have done an impressive job. But the hype at the moment seems to be focussed on that, and we need to look beyond the technology to the uses of it. The extension architecture provides lots of interesting possibilities, and again some very clever people are working on extensions to do interesting things. We just need to wait and see what they come up with. Maybe the technology itself really is the interesting part of Wave, and it will end up being used to support something else that is useful, and Wave itself is just the first demonstrator app and will eventually fade away?

Whatever Wave is, and whatever is turns into, I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to displace email, IM, Twitter or anything else anytime soon. And we need a lot more people with access to it before we’ll see how useful it is in its current incarnation. Keep those invites flowing, Google…!

(And before you ask, no I have no invites to give out – my eight invites disappeared on day one and I’ve been given no more. Sorry.)

Steve Rumsby : 15 Oct 2009 11:49 |  Tags: Google Wave |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Gore cables are awesome…

Follow-up to My bike is a 3–speed… from Steve's blog

I normally try to spend as little as possible on my cycling kit. I’m quite an enthusiastic cyclist, but I’m not a fanatic and I’m a bit of a cheapskate. Unless I’m convinced that spending money on “proper” cycling kit is worthwhile I try to make do. I was long ago convinced that proper lycra cycling shorts were worth both the money and the embarrassment, and that proper cycling jerseys were so much more comfortable on longer rides that the cotton T-shirts I use to wear. I still buy bottom of the range stuff, though, as I’m not persuaded that paying silly money for kit buys you enough extra.

So, when my gear cable broke last week I immediately went looking for the cheapest way of fixing it. In the end I was persuaded to go for something a little above bottom of the range, specifically Gore Ride-On Low Friction Cables. A little pricey for a set of gear cables, but boy are they worth it. The difference between these and the original cables has to be felt to be believed. There’s so much less resistance in the shifter, and shifting happens so much more quickly and predictably. It really is a pleasure to change gear. That sounds stupid to me as I type it, but I’ve had the cable on the bike for about 5 days now and I still enjoy every gear shift. Strange but true. And these aren’t the “professional” version of the cable, which I assume is even better. At over £40 for a set of gear cables, though, I don’t think I’ll be going for those next time. I might, however, go for Gore brake cables when I need to change those.

Seriously, Gore cables are wonderful things. Get some. Now…

Steve Rumsby : 06 Oct 2009 00:04 |  Tags: Cycling Equipment |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Macride 2009 – Ride Report

Follow-up to Macride 2008 – Ride Report from Steve's blog

[ I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, immediately after the ride, but obviously forgot to post it. Oops! ]

I wasn’t originally planing to do the Macride this year, but I’m helping a friend build up his cycling distance in preparation for something exciting next year and the Macride was the right sort of challenge for him before winding down a little for the winter. And I had to keep him company, of course. I was also looking forward to doing the ride in the dry, unlike last year.

This year’s route was pretty much the same as last year’s, but without one or two diversions around the flooded bits. And as last year, it included Bakers Hill – the one hill that made me stop and walk for a bit. I was not looking forward to that!

Everything went pretty smoothly, it turns out. We made good time as far as the hill. As last year, I got about half way up Bakers Hill and had to stop and walk for a bit. We then had a 10 minute rest and re-fuel at the top before carrying on. After that I was nursing slightly achy knees and so slowed down a little, and as we were still in the Cotswolds then the roads were quite undulating still, which didn’t help the poor knees either. Finally, for the last 10 miles or so there was an irritatingly strong wind, always a headwind of course, just to make it a bit harder. Still, we made 4 hours 40 minutes for the 66 miles (note Macride organisers, not 63 miles:-) which is just over 14mph.

I don’t think I could have gone much faster. This isn’t a fast route – the Costwolds is a bit too lumpy for that. The roads around here are much flatter and I can average 16mph over that sort of distance, but not down in the Cotswolds. I said this last year and never did anything about it, but I could do with working on my hill climbing a bit. I suspect my knees might just stop me from getting any faster as I just can’t pedal much harder, but maybe I could work on my technique a bit and that would help. Maybe for next year?

Steve Rumsby : 29 Sep 2009 10:39 |  Tags: Cycling |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My bike is a 3–speed…

Or more precisely it is a 27-speed with only 3 reliable ones. My rear gear cable has started to go just at the shifter end, meaning the inner cable doesn’t move freely inside the outer. I have persuaded it to stay in the fourth gear of nine at the back and I’m leaving it there for now, giving me just the three gears I get from the triple chainring at the front. That makes riding interesting, but it has also been educational.

My commute in in the morning is overall downhill and so quite quick. Not good without lots of gears. This morning I managed to get it up to 28mph, but only by pedalling at 149rpm!! Interestingly, over the course of only a couple of miles I got much better at that. To start with 135rpm was feeling fast, but I ended up feeling not too bad at 149rpm. I’ve got to go for 150 tomorrow morning!

Going home, I thought, would be more of a challenge. Obviously it is overall uphill, and with my knees I usually end up on the smallest chainring and a nice low gear on the steeper bits. Can’t do that at the moment so I thought I might end up killing my knees. Apparently not. I didn’t even use the small chainring last night. I guess having all these gears has made me lazy. Without them I just had to get on with it, and I had no problems at all.

This hasn’t persuaded me to go out and buy a singlespeed, but I can certainly see how it might improve my riding. I will definitely have to stop being so lazy, and avoid the low gears a bit more often.

I am looking forward to getting all my gears back, though. Replacement cables on order…

Steve Rumsby : 29 Sep 2009 10:24 |  Tags: Cycling |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Evernote as a Twitter archive

These days I keep all of my notes in Evernote. In fact, not just notes, but anything I think I might want to refer to later. Web pages, product brochures and manuals, scanned articles from magazines. Pretty much anything. All are suitably tagged to help find them, and all are available on all my laptops, via the web, and on my iPhone. Evernote is brilliant.

Something I set up a little while ago now is a feed from Twitter into Evernote. Twitter provides RSS feeds for various of your twitter pages. I take the feeds for my updates, my mentions and my favourites and feed them into Evernote. Evernote doesn’t (yet) have a facility to import RSS feeds directly, but it does give you an email address that turns emails into notes. I use feedmyinbox.com to turn the Twitter RSS feeds into emails to my Evernote email address. This gives me an archive of everything tweet I’ve ever sent, every tweet mentioning me, and every tweet I’ve favourited. It would be nice if Evernote supported this directly, but until then this does work quite well. The emails from feedmyinbox.com produce somewhat messy notes, but at least the content is there.

I’ve had this set up for a few months now and not really used it until this afternoon. I remembered something I’d said to somebody on Twitter but couldn’t remember who. A quick search via my iPhone and I found the tweet from back in July and so found who I’d sent it to.

I’m not sure how often I’ll find this useful, but Twitter doesn’t make it very easy to search through your old tweets directly so I’m happy knowing I have a way of doing it.

Steve Rumsby : 10 Sep 2009 23:44 |  Tags: Evernote Twitter |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

O2 mobile broadband dongle a disappointment…

Writing about web page http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/o2mobilebroadband/tab/Pay_and_Go

Just before I went on holiday last week I noticed that O2 were selling their pay-as-you-go mobile broadband dongles at half price – £15 instead of £30. £30 is over my threshold for “just in case” purchases but at £15 it was hard to refuse. And as I was going to be away from home for a week and I was planning on having a laptop with me anyway, I thought it might be useful. So I got one.

An initial test at home suggested that it got a stronger 3G signal than my iPhone did, which was very encouraging. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way in practice. I was staying just outside of Ashford in Kent. The mobile signal wasn’t great, but my iPhone would happily maintain an EDGE connection most of the time, occasionally dropping to GPRS indoors. No 3G, sadly. The dongle, though, had a much harder time. Indoors it couldn’t connect at all. Oh, except once for about 5 minutes. All of my laptop-based surfing had to be outdoors. Fortunately the weather was good.

Even outside, though, things were very flakey. Sometimes I couldn’t get a connection at all. Sometimes the connection would stay up for 5 minutes or so before dropping. Sometimes the connection would stay up but stop passing data. Once I got a connection for 30 minutes or so. And all the time, just feet away, the iPhone, talking to the same network, would keep a constant, working EDGE connection.

The O2 coverage checker does say it won’t work well where I was. That’s not the problem. What I’m disappointed at is that it did less well than the iPhone, on the same network, and I guess talking to the same cell? Others have told me the iPhone isn’t the most sensitive receiver, compared to other phones, so I was expecting the opposite.

At least it was only £15, and it might come in useful some day. Somewhere else…

And it is funny how you get used to high speed connectivity. Everything felt soooooo sloooooow at EDGE speeds. Like taking the Internet back several years to the days of dial-up modems. Most frustrating.

Still, other members of my family have Orange phones and they had no signal at all, not even for calls, so things could have been much worse:-)

Steve Rumsby : 17 Aug 2009 14:40 |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A comparison of the iPhone and Windows versions of autostitch

I’ve been a big fan of Autostitch for ages now. I’ve always found creating panoramas by hand very difficult and extremely time consuming, so I never really got into it. Autostitch automates the whole process. You just throw a collection of photos at it and it does the rest. You don’t even need to tell it the order – it figures that out by itself and does all the blending for you to hide the joins. There are times when it doesn’t do a brilliant job but most of the time it does at least as good a job as I could have done by hand, and it does it far faster and with almost zero effort.

Then along came the iPhone version and I bought it instantly. I didn’t really expect it to do such a good job as the Windows version but actually I’ve been surprised at how good it is. Here’s a quick comparison. These two panoramas were created from the same set of three images taken in the iPhone. The first was done by autostitch on the iphone itself and the second by autostitch on Windows:

iPhone version

Windows version

It is actually quite hard to choose the better of those two. They each have good and bad points. Fairly obviously the Windows version hasn’t managed to blend the exposures very well. Because I was shooting into the sun, and the iPhone camera is completely automatic, the exposures were not consistent across the three images. The iPhone version of autostitch has handled that very well while the Windows version has pretty much failed miserably. I could even the exposures by hand first to help it out, and the result would then be much better.

However, the Windows version has matched the images up much better. If you click on the images to zoom in, you’ll see quite a lot of ghosting on the iPhone version where the separate images haven’t been properly matched up. I guess that’s where all the processing work is needed, and so where they’ve cut a few corners to get the iPhone version working at an acceptable speed. I hope they improve this in future as it really is the whole point of autostitch in the first place!

The other disappointment with the Iphone version is that the resolution of the output image is lower than I’d like. By the time the image is neatly cropped it is less than 1MP while the Windows version comes out at 2.5MP. I’m not sure of this is a limitation of the iPhone OS, or autostitch, or me not using it right. More investigation required…

Overall I’m really impressed with how good a job the iPhone version of autostitch does, and I’m happy to have paid £1.20 for it. A little bit of work on the image matching, and the ability to get higher resolution results, and it will be perfect…

Steve Rumsby : 17 Aug 2009 11:21 |  Tags: Autostitch Iphone Photography |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Another unexpected use for Dropbox

Writing about web page https://www.getdropbox.com/

I’ve been using a free Dropbox account for a while now, as a backup mechanism for some of my important stuff from both work and home. With only 2GB of storage I couldn’t hold everything in there but it was still very useful. A little while ago I finally decided it made sense to upgrade to a 50GB account and use it to backup my digital photo collection and some other stuff. I don’t take a huge number of photos so 50GB was more than enough. I’ve also ended up putting my iTunes library in there.

And that’s where this new use comes in. As well as copying and synchronising files between my various PCs, it makes them all available via a web interface so you can get to them from anywhere. There’s also a nice iPhone optimised version of its website. So, now I’ve got access to my entire iTunes library via Dropbox, even those tracks I don’t sync to the phone itself. Obviously I need a working data connection, and it only plays a track at a time, but still it turns out to be very useful.

Dropbox already provide a nice interface for viewing photos via the iPhone web site. I wonder if they could provide a nicer interface to music, too?

If you fancy trying dropbox, even with just a free account, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite. You can sign up directly but doing it through an invite gets both of us some extra space for free…

Steve Rumsby : 04 Aug 2009 09:48 |  Tags: Dropbox Iphone |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Nokia N97, Two Weeks On

Follow-up to Testing out the Nokia N97 from Steve's blog

I’ve had the N97 for a couple of weeks now, thanks to the kind folks at WoM World. Before I got it I’d heard some quite negative things about it, and slightly fewer positive things. Opinion was clearly divided and I was looking forward to finding out for myself. On paper it does everything I want from a mobile device, so two weeks on, how has it fared?

To test it I spent a couple of days just playing with it to familiarise myself with the interface – I’m not a regular Nokia user any more – and upgraded the firmware to the most recent release. Then I switched my SIM to it and used it as my regular phone for a while. As this is a proper smartphone I wanted to test all the online capabilities of the software, as well as the hardware. I was especially interested in the keyboard and the touchscreen. I’ll admit now that I’m an iPhone user and have been since the day the iPhone 3G came out. I do like the iPhone a lot and there was no way the N97 would escape being compared to it, but I think that’s what a lot of other people will be doing too.

In summary, I almost like the N97 a lot. It does everything I need. Some things it does better than others. The hardware is really nice, and I like the keyboard a lot. I wasn’t expecting to, having disliked the slide-out keyboard on the N810, but it works really well for me. I think the iPhone on-screen keyboard might be slightly faster to type on but I’m a lot more used to it so maybe that’s not a fair comparison. The major disappointment I have with the N97 hardware is the touch screen. It is a resistive screen rather than the capacitive screen on the iPhone and Google phones, and it simply isn’t as responsive. You have to press quite hard sometimes to get it to register anything and it just isn’t as satisfying to use. There are a lot of iPhone apps that wouldn’t work on the N97 because the screen simply isn’t up to it. Nokia provides a stylus with the phone and using it does make the screen work a lot better, but it doesn’t live inside the phone like the stylus on the 5800 – it hangs from a loop attached to a corner of the phone. It just looks wrong. And anyway, a stylus! Really?

On the positive side, the camera is up to Nokia’s usual standards, and the LED-based “flash” is much brighter than I expected and works very well. Not quite a Xenon flash, but actually pretty good. I like the sliding lens cover. Audio recording also works well and is very good quality. As usual for an N-series device, this makes a good multi-media machine. Overall the device feels solid and the flip-up display to reveal the keyboard doesn’t feel like it will break after a few days.

Moving on to the software, the S60 OS and default apps just feel old. S60 is clearly an OS from quite a few years ago now that has been tarted up. It looks pretty, but under the covers it just doesn’t work so well. One of the first things I always have a problem with on S60 devices is the network connections. Each app has its own idea of how to connect (WiFi or cellular). Some have defaults that you have to change if they are wrong. Some will ask you each time. Some simply refuse to work if there’s no cellular connection. It is all just too much hassle compared to the iPhone, which just connects the best way it can and gets on with it.

Then there’s the default email app, which is barely usable. Yes, there’s a much better one you can download for free, but why isn’t is installed by default? There’s no excuse for that, really, Nokia. There are lots of other little things, like that some apps will flick scroll and some won’t, that all contribute to the general feeling that this is an old operating system that’s been prettied up.

In summary, I like the device more than I was expecting to given what other people have been saying about it. It is the closest Nokia have come in a long while now to persuading me to part with my own money. It does everything I want, but that’s not good enough these days. I didn’t enjoy using the N97 in the same way as I enjoy using my iPhone. The iPhone is as much about usability as it is about functionality. The N97 might have better functionality, touch screen aside, but it falls a long way short in the usability stakes. You could say I’ve been spoiled by the iPhone. If I hadn’t seen the iPhone I’d probably love the N97, but now that I’ve seen how much better a mobile device can work I’m afraid I don’t.

Nokia – you really do need to do something about the S60 software, and you need a better touch screen. Come back when you’ve fixed those and maybe you’ll have a better chance of competing with the iPhone. Of course, if the iPhone doesn’t do it for you then maybe the N97 will. It is certainly worth a look.

Steve Rumsby : 13 Jul 2009 12:05 |  Tags: N97 Nokia |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem