What is twittering and how does it work ? Part 1 messages = tweets
Oktober 11th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiWhat is a global stack of short text messages good for that is free to use and open for multi purpose ?
There are two ways how you can get value from using Twitter:
1) Leverage all messages others putting right now on the global stack of messages
2) Publish your own messages for whatever you see as a value
This is part 1 of a mini tutorial about twitter: What can you put into a message (called tweet)?
a) Type something like “Hello World”
Type a text message (the tweet) and press the update button. That is all. You put your first tweet out on Twitter.
More inside this post, just click here. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Recommended Products | 3 Comments »The whole is greater than the sum of its parts quote great visualization on youtube
September 24th, 2009 Ralf Scharnetzki“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” . The information age was given recently a new visual metaphor for this quote from Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC).
This video was generated by combining thousands of photos (the parts) to generate this animated 3D view (the sum) of San Marco Square in Venice (the whole).
Source: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/
“In this project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images.”
Find more details here: Building Rome in a Day
The group of researchers behind:
• Sameer Agarwal, University of Washington
• Yasutaka Furukawa, University of Washington
• Noah Snavely, Cornell University
• Ian Simon, University of Washington
• Steve Seitz, University of Washington
• Richard Szeliski, Microsoft Research
Thank you!
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »How does Apple Genius work?
September 21st, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiThe Apple iTunes Genius feature can create personalized play-lists for your iTunes library and provide you with recommendations regarding media and other products that you maybe would like to buy.
How does Apples itunes Genius functionality work?
Apple is making no secret out of what Genius does, you can find it all here:
http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/appstore/us/terms.html
We would also strongly suggest that your read Apples Customer Privacy Policy here:
http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/
When you enable Genius iTunes will start to send from time to time from your computer via Internet the following data to Apple:
- information that can be used to identify all media in your iTunes library
(media purchased through iTunes and media obtained from other sources.) - including for example play history and play lists
Apple is saying clearly that this information will be stored anonymously.
Apple will not only combine your information with the information collected from other Genius users. Apple will additionally also make use of:
- your iTunes Store purchase history data,
- aggregated purchase history data from other iTunes Store users,
- and other information obtained from third parties (whatever these may be)
to do the following:
- Create personalized play-lists for you that fit to your current iTunes library (that Apple at that stage knows all about)
- Provide you with recommendations regarding media and other products and services that you maybe would like to buy. Comment: there is a fine line here that is separating advertisement from good advice.
- And obviously the information you provided to Apple in the context of the itunes Genius feature will be from now on leveraged to provide recommendations regarding products and services to other Genius users.
If you do not want Apple to get all this information about your Music Library there is a simple solution: just do not enable Genius in iTunes.
In Apple´s own words:
“If you would prefer we not collect and use information from your device in this manner, you should not enable the Genius feature. You can revoke your opt-in choice at any time by choosing to turn off the Genius feature from the Store menu on your computer. Upon opting-out, iTunes will no longer send information about your iTunes library to Apple.”
It looks like Apple is not stating somewhere that it will ever remove any of your data that it received when you enabled the Genius functionality in iTunes. Therefore you should probably assume that the information you sent to Apple will stay with Apple (anonymously) even when you should ever revoke your opt-in choice for Genius at one point in the future.
Posted in Issues explained, Recommended Products | No Comments »Auf deutsch – Apple nano Bedienungsanleitung inklusive Reset iPod nano
September 20th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiHier gibt es die originalen deutschen Bedienungsanleitung (en) zum Apple iPod nano:
http://support.apple.com/de_DE/manuals/#ipodnano
Insbesondere wichtig kann die Anleitung zum Reset des iPod nano (und der anderen Modelle) sein:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1320?viewlocale=de_DE
Posted in Artikel auf Deutsch | 1 Comment »Search engine trend: remove typing as the barrier to entry
September 15th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiGoogle:
- Search with voice recognition: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-mobile-app/
- Google Fast Flip: GoogleBlog and here http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/
Microsoft:
- Bing Visual Search: BingBlog: Visual Search – Why type when you can see it? Example: VisualSearch (needs Silverlight installed)
About ownership of data on Facebook
September 15th, 2009 Ralf Scharnetzki“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html
Posted in Interesting Links | No Comments »Thematic Web Archives: Capture reality as it shows up on the Web
September 12th, 2009 Ralf Scharnetzki“A thematic Web collection is an archive of Web objects identified and captured using a set of URLs believed to be relevant to a specific theme or topic”
Source
The outstanding, best documented and analysed case is obviously 9/11:
http://september11.archive.org/
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2002/One-year-later-September-11-and-the-Internet.aspx
http://bibnum.bnf.fr/ecdl/2003/proceedings.php?f=schneider
In this sense our article about Carl Backstrom´s death and his traces on the web can be seen as a Thematic Web Archive.
Michael Jackson`s death (25th June 2009), another event that generated immense reaction world wide and on the web, is showing in the following web screen shots:
Techmeme.com, screenshot taken 26th June 2009, click on picture to see the whole page:
Amazon.com, screenshot taken 26th June 2009, click on picture to see the whole page:
Amazon.de, screenshot taken 26th June 2009, click on picture to see the whole page:
Do you have any web screenshots that show reality as it happened, when it happened?
To be continued.
Death: when the life behind shared social streams ended
Mai 14th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiThe Internet is changing not only our life.
It is also changing what is left after we are gone.
Social life streams stop when the life behind ended.
But those streams of activity continue to be accessible until the service provider will delete the account or close doors.
We dont know Carl Backstrom, but we can access his feeds:
Carl shared last time on 24th October 2008 a bookmark on delicious.
Source:http://delicious.com/carlback/?page=1
He listened last time on 24th October 2008 to a song on last.fm.
Source: http://www.last.fm/user/carlback
Carl published last time a photo from a cellphone to his flickr photostream at 25th October 2008, 8:20pm.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlback/2973612702/
On 26th October 2008, 2:53am Carl died in a car accident.
Until today you can access Carl’s activity feeds via FriendFeed.
Social networks are a new phenomenon, and the Internet itself is immature:
- Is the accessibility of those streams after death a good or bad thing?
- Is it good or bad when those accounts would be deleted (on request or because of inactivity)?
- Should we maybe have not even published this post?
Carl lived, he died, he has family, friends and colleagues that are expressing on the Web their feelings after Carl’s death.
His death is a tragedy.
The details of Carl Backstrom’s life stream activities that he shared during his life and that we accessed months after his death touched our hearts.
You can find here details to donate to Carl’s memorial fund.
Our condolences to Carl’s friends and family.
Zooming interfaces: an alternative to the Windows user experience
Mai 11th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiJef Raskin, the human interface expert who started the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 70´s, was not happy about how most of us today work with their computers:
“In present systems, work gets done in applications (which are sets of commands that apply to certain kinds of objects). Tasks are not accomplished at the desktop, and desktops (or launching areas in general) should disappear as interfaces improve. The idea of an application is an artificial one, convenient to the programmer but not to the user. From a user’s point of view there is content (a set of objects created or obtained by the user) and there are commands that can operate on objects. Commands should be independent of applications and be applicable at any time and to any object.”
Source: http://jef.raskincenter.org/humane_interface/summary_of_thi.html
(This link is not (any more) reachable at the point of publishing this post)
Raskin looked into zooming user interfaces to overcome what he considered as one the root causes of today’s computer usability issues.
What are zooming user interfaces and in how far are they different from what we all are used to by Microsoft’s Windows or Apples OSX?
The following three applications will allow you to experience zooming interfaces yourself. Two of them will enable you to build presentations that do not work based on the concept of “slides” but instead allow you during your presentation to zoom in and out of the set of information that you are providing to your audience.
1) Prezi
http://prezi.com/ is a new web based application to create presentations. It is a great example of how zooming interfaces (can) work.
Creator of this video: prezi / http://www.youtube.com/user/zuilabs
Is Microsoft ignoring zooming interfaces because maybe it does not want to provide itself an alternative to the Windows user experience?
Wrong.
Find out below what zooming user interfaces you can get for Microsoft Office as free downloads from Micrsoft itself.
Posted in Good Ideas, Interesting Links | 1 Comment »Why is there no natively built-in appstore for desktop applications in Microsoft Windows and Apples OSX?
März 14th, 2009 Ralf ScharnetzkiApples iTunes application store for iphone and ipod touch has demonstrated the value that a simple and integrated access/purchase/install/use/upgrade/uninstall life-cycle solution for applications can bring to a platform. Obviously Microsoft (Google has the Android Market, Nokia will launch Ovi Store) is now also introducing one for its own mobile platform.
The better user experience of the application life-cycle is becoming a competitive platform advantage
BUT: Neither on Windows (not mobile but the desktop OS) nor on Apple´s OSX there is a native built-in application store existing for those applications that run on those platforms.
That is not needed because you can buy and download applications everywhere on the Web?
This is precisely where the issue is: The user experience for nearly every application that you download, purchase, install, use, update and uninstall on Windows or OSX is left in a lot of aspects to the individual decisions of the various different software developers. Just look at all the different methods of paying and getting a license, serial number and/or online activation mechanism. Same for updates, some applications offer an individual check for updates others do not have even an option to uninstall easily.
To us it does not look like that this variety of different options to achieve the same goal (buy, install and use a new application) is adding any value to users.
Probably a good example of how an applications store on Windows could look like is Valve Steam platform. Steam is a platform for buying/installing/playing games and it runs on Windows. It covers the application (games) lifecycle in a similar way as Apple does with the iphone/itunes combo. But Steam is limited in scope and reach and because it is not a “natively build into the desktop platform” solution.
Microsoft would have to modify only slightly their announcements for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile like we have done below and we would immediately have to congratulate them for once delivering an innovation without the help of Apple:
“In the past, it has been challenging for developers to get their Windows Mobile applications into the hands of consumers. In addition to fragmentation in the distribution channels, there has been no definitive marketplace experience on the device desktop for users to browse and acquire applications and/or content. This has prevented developers from achieving broad reach with their application offering, and inhibited the user’s ability to leverage the power of their Windows phone. Fortunately, Windows Marketplace for Mobile addresses these challenges while also including a number of key benefits for developers. Examples of some of these key benefits include:
- An easily discovered on-device application that is installed on every Windows Mobile 6.5 device, and includes prominent placement on the Start menu.
- Leverage existing Microsoft developer tools, such as Visual Studio, for faster time to market.
As you can see, the opportunity for developers is quite clear. Windows Marketplace can help you grow your business profitably by connecting you directly with millions of Windows Mobile users that are looking for your applications. Whether you are a hobbyist developer or a large ISV, we’ll make it easy for you to bring your applications to market and manage them effectively throughout their life cycle.”
PS: Also desktop application users would very likely appreciate if Microsoft would help developers so that users would get applications with improved quality delivered:
Posted in Good Ideas, Issues explained | 1 Comment »“We want developers to focus on their core competency of developing innovative applications. At the same time we will work with developers to ensure that their applications run optimally on Windows phones. We will accomplish this by running a rigorous certification and testing process before applications go to market.”
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