Not able to find a WIFM around Twitter?

So i use jaiku, as i have an S60 device (S60 is the name of the operating system that drives most of the mid and high end Nokia phones), and the native S60 client is really Useful|cool|fun.

Point's of comparison (after only a week or so of being signed up to Twitter admittedly)
* ugliness/difficulty to follow conversations on twitter site, vs the Jaiku site
* staying up (there has be a couple of short down time's after being bought out by Google and the subsequent increase in load)
* Presence (small icon shows profile in use on the phone)
* Location. There are a number of other location apps - plazes, dopplr, and now Yahoo's FireEagle.
* Jaiku has an RSS feed import and export. Although, you will probably need to send the Jaiku feed through Yahoo pipes to "clean" it before TwitterFeed can use it. My notes on this can be found here

In fact, while I was thinking about this , Stefan Constantinescu (Jaikunaut extraordinaire), points out that having to use a second website to be able to make sense of Twitter conversations, could be better done using just Jaiku see here

Some links to other (probably much better written articles) on this topic:
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants by James Robertson
dancingmango
Joi Ito
Mathew Ingram

How to get twitterfeed working for Jaiku

Note here as it took too long to get working (probably due to me missing the RSS link at the bottom of various pages!)

Setup a Twitter account
then login to Twitterfeed (it uses OpenID, so pick one of the listed ones (or maybe use another?)
then enter http://your-jaiku-name.jaiku.com/feed/rss into the box, where your-jaiku-name is the login name you use for Jaiku.

That will get your full Jaiku feed (Jaiku's, blog posts, Del.icio.us links etc). To get just the posts i used a copy of a Yahoo Pipe.

Check this for a link, or search Pipe's for Jaiku, to get a pipe that will filter all the other stuff out.

Once you have the Pipe working, get the RSS link and place it in TwitterFeed.
Don't forget to *SELECT* the description only option. If you leave it on the default Title and description then you will see everything doubled up (look at the output from "View Results" option for your pipe and you can see that the Title basically is the same as the description!)

a small success in languages

Last night i achieved a small step forward in communicating in Finnish, i managed to buy a pair of trousers, using only Finnish!

The shop assistant was not admitting to knowing English, so instead of her going off to find someone else, i attempted to communicate in Finnish.
We managed with a lot of erm's and pointing etc, but finally the transaction was complete.

It is the small things in life eh :)

BarCampHelsinki is Go!

So, via jaiku i signed up to attempt to help out with BarCampHelsinki (and yes it should be written like that :).

Details at BarCampHelsinki. This might be the first bar camp organised over Jaiku, as discussion are planned over at BarCampHelsinki channel on Jaiku
For more details on what is BarCamp, read the links on the RightHand side of the page.

Here are a couple of articles with somethings that could do with thinking about.
http://www.capulet.com/weblog/darren/how-to-run-a-great-barcamp
http://www.cleverclevergirl.com/?p=10

Any volunteers?

Chip&Pin Not secure - not a big surprise

via boingboing which links to a google video of how easy it is to hack the terminals.

I have always thought chip&pin was a really dumb idea. Take something (the PIN code) that you use rarely on a very secure network (ATMs are linked using a VERY secure network), and now get ordinary people (mass humanity is never that smart!) to enter these codes multiple times a day.

The old system of using a biometric (your signature), always seemed more secure to me.

Why i see the iPhone as good For Nokia

So now that the general noise has calmed down, i thought i would put down my thoughts on this.
Disclaimer; i have paid, out of my own pocket, for an E90, so i am probably a little biased towards the Nokia/S60 world view.

The best thing, IMNSHO, to come out of the iPhone announcement is that, with all of the coverage of the iPhone (in the various media forms) it has introduced the general public to the term "smart Phone".
It has also allowed Americans to get used to the concept that mobile phones (handsets) can actually cost money and also be objects of desire. From my readings (and i have no first hand knowledge of this) the American market is being held back by the operators, so Apple being able to force one of them into concessions, and remove the operator branding is a good thing.

Now everything has strengths and weaknesses, but here i am listing what i see as the major weakness of each "platform" when compared to the other (i.e. the limitations of one are mostly a strength for the other)

Limitations of iPhone;

• closed platform. Being able to send a short-cut to a web-page/service to the start screen *really* is not that big of a deal.
• no memory expansion. SDHC cards are now up to 8GB, with 16GB a month or so away.
• screen rotation only works for a couple of the applications (pictures and movies, from what i have seen). For me this makes the screen rotation feature a bit "meh"
• officially only available in a couple of markets

Limitations of Nokia's current S60 range:

• QVGA (320*240 or 240*320) just does not cut it any more (and never has for web browsing!)
• the native S60 browser is rubbish. Nokia should go back to bundling Opera Mobile rather than trying to build their own, as the development resources could be better spent elsewhere.
• Synchronisation needs to "just work"(TM). Calendar and contacts as a bare minimum, tasks and notes being a nice to have (for me at least)
• specify the current preferred "data connection" once and all applications should use this, and if it is no longer available *then* prompt for what connection to use. Remember not everyone has a good data package, so if WiFi/WLAN is not available then we do not always want an automatic connection.

Where they are both strong;

• both have lots of "small" software companies developing utilities to extend their platform. Admittedly in Apple's case this is only for their desktop OS currently.
  
• The software on both platforms normally has a "low-price". My experience is that it is in the range of some tens of Euros/Dollars, so quite a low risk to buy.
• Basic usage does the expected thing, but it is possible to extend past this using free scripting tools. My thinking here is Apple has applescript, Nokia has Python.
• Both have their "fan boys" (this is a plus and a minus for both :) )
  

By showing users things that are fun or cool to do once you have good data rates, should help in *forcing* carriers to offer better packages to everyone.
Both Nokia and Apple are doing this. Nokia via it's Ovi.com initiative, and Apple by making almost all of the features need a data rate to provide any real value.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

wrong on a numer of points

so i was on boingboing and came across a link to this article, which attempts to educate people about the Nordic countries, shame they got sauna & Santa Claus in the wrong country.

so what is the point of plazes, dopplr etc

So following on from joining Jaiku, where i finally sort of got the point of some of these Web2.0 things, i had also signed-up for both plazes and dopplr (on the day it came out of closed Beta).

Dopplr i could sort of see a WIIFM (What's In It For Me), in that i could publish up-coming trips and this would then get sent into Facebook, where people i know could see it and try to meet up.
Plazes on the other hand i could not see a use for, it certainly looked nice, but almost no-one i know is all cutting edge web2.0.

But i found this post which made a use case for both. Now i just need someone to mash it up so i only need to enter the data once.

New levels of security theater

Just before the Christmas season I needed to travel to the UK for work for a couple of days, and encountered a new twist in the dance that you need to go through to get on the plane.
I have a Finnish first name and a non-standard (for the UK at least) spelling of my middle name, so i have always used the short form of my middle name.
On these flights, for the first time ever, at both ends the check-in person was upset/concerned that the booking was not in *exaxtly* in the same form as in my passport.
I am not sure how this latest idea helps with security, and when did this change.

Me as a Simpsons character

Don't want to rush into these things eh ;)


from http://simpsonizeme.com/