Neil Phillips’ blog

I’ve been using foursquare for a while now, and, inspired by Tony’s post, there are a few features I’ve love to see implemented either by them or one of their competitors in this space (foursquare, gowalla, brightkite, urbanspoon, dopplr, tripit, latitude).

• Optional automatic check in when I’ve stayed in one place for more than, say 15 minutes (could include a list of pre-approved auto check in places, like work, and unknown places would be stored for post approval before publishing).
• Needs to work in the background, with no user intervention
• Be able to rate locations (e.g. 4 stars) and tag them folksonmically
• Be able to photograph them
• Be able to add metadata (e.g. twitter account names, or facebook profiles, last.fm location)
  Be able to say “I’ve been there” without tagging a particular datetime - e.g. to be a past record of places I’ve been, like urbanspoon
• Be able to see who’s there now, and who’s been there before (optional for visitor, e.g. as a privacy setting)
• Be able to say “I’m going there in a few weeks”
• Be able to say “I’m going to this city or area in a few weeks”, rather than just a particular venue.
• Be nice to have some augmented reality goodness on appropriate clients
• Should be able to edit data as well as add data about a venue. [edit 2010/01/05] you can do this once you’re promoted to a super user
• [added 2010/01/16] Context sensitivity would be nice - if I look at a cinema it shows me what’s on, if I check in at a cinema, when I check in to the next place, it asks me if I want to review the film etc.
• links to facebook fan pages for venues
• opening times / dates (would have been handy at Christmas)
• graph of when people check in - is this an evening venue or breakfast place
• better browse - e.g. show me where’s cool nearby (and nearby should be a relative term depending on 4sq location density)
• should be able to flag users, locations and tips as offensive
• ’star’ a location, for later comment[end of added 2010/01/16]

All of that said, I think there’s a lot of value going to be had out of these kind of apps.

If you’re using Excel Web Access (from Excel Services 2010) and you get the error “An error has occurred. Please try again”.. maybe check that Excel Calculation Services (as distinct from the Excel Services Services Application) is running.

So.. Barcamp Sydney was a great day, hosted at the Australian Technology Park. The unorganisers did a tremendous job, and in true barcamp style the eclectic crowd were very entertained, and entertaining.

A few personal highlights:

• Google Wave introduction by Alex from the local dev team - great to get first hand insights
• A great introduction to #Gov2AU, #publicsphere by @MatthewLandauer and @katska from OpenAustralia, and follow up from @Alegrya
• @maxnippard talking about helicopters and @littlebirdceo explaining Arduino
• @djinoz talking about iPhones vs. Android
• @neerav giving us a review of the latest Android handset
• liked the singing from @stuandrews more than I’ll own up to
• annoyed to have missed what looked like a great typography discussion

Also interested to learn more about @futuresummit.
More than anything else I met some really interesting people, and had some great conversations over beer.

So, I watched through the Google Wave Video and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. Maybe not quite as impressed as the Google I/O audience, but impressed nonetheless.

My highlights were:

the ntalk style asynchronous conversations (/email/documents), and the whole federated distribution model which makes it possible.

Document component building - so difficult to do now with existing (Word) docs - basically allowing groups of people to edit sub documents, and then automatically building these into master documents on the fly

The Robot APIs - The two demoed were great, but conceptually, the extension model for Wave makes the app very compelling. I wonder whether Spelly will automatically include people in your address book as acceptable words?, and just how good is Rosy etta ? (it looked pretty damn good).

Looking forward to downloading the code and building our first server.

So.. I got a new computer at work the other day, and I looked for a list of things to remember when migrating settings from one laptop to another, I couldn’t find one so here’s mine. I’m moving from Vista to Vistax64 so not much to report.

• Firefox settings come across in their entirety using the lovely Mozbackup passwords, bookmarks, add-ons, plugins and the like. It’s all anyone can do until Weave is up and running again
• Custom.dic - copy Word’s list of all the words I’ve ever made up (really quite a lot - 3554 as of today) where’d I be without them?
• Autocorrect migration in Office 2007 - this tool lets you back up your autocorrect settings (I’ve got another 3400 of them), and restore them. It says it’s only for Word 2003 but works fine on 2007
• Move all these files .MP3 .jpg .pst
• OneNote files .one and .onepkg
• anything under :\Users\\

I also installed :

• Firefox
• Last.fm
• foxit
• Fingerprint reader
• Windows live messenger
• Google Talk labs edition
• Wacom drivers - for my Bamboo tablet
• Linkedin toolbar
• Paint.Net
• Outsync (facebook profile pictures in Outlook)
• 7-zip

I’m hoping next time I do this even more of this stuff will be in the cloud, especially autocorrect stuff, it’d be interesting to watch as people’s language evolves.

I’d not been to barcamp before - here’s a rundown!

@voirol delivered an impassioned case for custom CMS development (as in completely proprietary) - which seems vaguely compelling for a small organisation, but scary in terms of TCO and maintainablity. He made a fine point on throwawayability, and the benefits of ‘do just what it needs to do’.

@pamelafox introduced the google appengine, a kind of platform as a service currently for python, which looks altogether very nifty.

@chieftech on enterprise 2.0 reconfirms my thinking that.. there really isn’t any yet.

@maymaym great intro into practical semanticness-really first class stuff. Talked about oomph, microformats, icalness.

random (in a good way) conversation about community management from Scott

@spellrus - interesting techcrunch sanfran intro, and a really interesting idea on how to quality assure content on websites

intro into xblui which went a little over by head.

weird off topic ‘mind hacking’ thing - not entirely sure it hit the barcamp mandate. And @http://headwellred running the session seems over aggressive and controlling of her victim (@nickgonios) in the audience.

@pamelafox reminds us about HTML5, which now does some really useful things - better canvas stuff, form elements (like datepicker, slide, flex style data sets) and better form validation too.

Completely inconclusive conversation on Android.

The man Burch gave a helpful prod into using eLance.com - am persuaded to get my Symbian app developed at last.

Annoyed I missed the first bits of the dataportability discussion from @liakos and others - mainly because I had no idea from the title what the topic was.

Thanks for to the sponsors, who know who they are. Also big thanks for the unorganisers. Now.. to beers.

We went to look at Wisdom, an exhibition by Andrew Zuckerman at the State Library. It was really quite bad, which was a shame. The idea was great, the photos good, the participants mainly worthy (Willie Nelson - WTF?), but the curation was just plain mad. The photos were in the middle, with numbers, the text matching them was sprinkled around the wall no where nearby, and the biographies were thoughtfully posted at the very end of the exhibition. The result was altogether quite physically jarring.

Curious curation - how not to label an exhibition

So, we had a great lunch today at Coffee Cup on Crown (just up from Blank Space) - it’s a fine addition to the area’s eateries. Anyway… they’re doing DIY breakfast from Monday - all the toast you can eat - you toast it yourself, organic breads galore and condiments aplenty. Seems like a bold idea.

Coffee Cup on Crown
368 Crown Street, Surry Hills
Ph: (02) 9368 0004

Not my headline (see Coolhunter), but a sincere hope that Americans will get out and vote.

In one hour the (main) polls open and there’s a very real chance we’ll see President Obama duly elected, which surely would mark the end of the beginning of racism in America, and, equally importantly a bold generational change in leadership.