Technology
Entries related to technology.
A maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/14/2007 - 10:03The other day I read that a bunch of my friends were moving from Twitter to Jaiku. I set up my Jaiku page and subscribed to the RSS feed of my Twitter page. I tried sending an SMS, but it never got through. I checked around. I then tried snowballing my contacts, and the only person I found there was Scoble, and he didn’t have any contacts there. So, I’m not currently using Jaiku in any significant manner.
However, it does have the nice feature of bringing in a bunch of different feeds, so I added Orient Lodge, Blip.TV, Flickr. Later, I read about someone trying to tie their Facebook status to their Twitter page, and I poked around a little bit on this. If you go to your Facebook status page, and change profile.php? to minified.php?status& you will get the minified page that has your statuses. From that page you get the RSS feed for your statuses, which you can subscribe to with Jaiku (or any other feedreader).
The next question became, could I subscribe to any of these via Twitter? One person recommended TwitterFeed. This raised a new issue. To sign into TwitterFeed, you need to use OpenID. LiveJournal uses OpenID, and I could have used that. However, TwitterFeed also pointed me to idproxy.net. idproxy.net provides a service where you can use your Yahoo! id as an OpenID. In addition, they have details on how to set up your own site for OpenID, using idproxy as the server. I’ve added that to Orient Lodge, so I can now log into sites using OpenID using Orient Lodge and Yahoo’s authentication.
I logged into LiveJournal, and that worked. I then started to set up ClaimID. I didn’t see ClaimID doing a lot for me, so I’ve left it with only a little information.
Back to TwitterFeed, I added Orient Lodge to my Twitter feed, and every time I add a blog entry on Orient Lodge, it is now showing up nicely on Twitter. I then tried to add the Facebook feed, but that isn’t showing up properly.
Even the Costa Ricans want universal broadband
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/10/2007 - 07:52Back in March, Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont addressed the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, DC. I wrote about his talk briefly in a previous blog post. David Weinberger, Tom Evslin, Steve Smith and others have all written about the talk. It was a pretty geek audience and Gov. Douglas showed that he could keep up with the geeks.
At lunch at the New England News Forum conference, Gov. Douglas spoke to a crowd much more interested in the implications of his initiative to media and politics. Lynne Lupien live blogged some of his talk, and I want to add my own insights here.
Back in 2003 and early 2004, I followed around a previous Vermont Governor as he spoke about his vision for our country. My wife and I heard the stump speech so many times that we could recite it pretty well, ourselves. So, it was no surprise when I heard Gov. Douglas speak about the four doctors from Boston. They needed to be able to get back to their hospital within four hours of an emergency. They went up to Sugarbush to ski, only to find that there wasn’t cell phone coverage there. They said they could not ski there again, until that problem was fixed.
He told the story of a business in northeastern Vermont where there was no broadband access that was now being required by its suppliers to place its orders online. To these stories he added the public safety aspect, mentioning the story of a Brooklyn, NY man who froze to death when is car went off the road in the Adirondacks in an area where there was no cell phone coverage. He spoke of the ‘creative economy’, noting that Vermont has more authors per capita than any other state. Yet artists living in Vermont suffer from having to send images of their paintings to galleries over dialup connections.
The continuing saga and AT&T v. FreeConference
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/30/2007 - 11:29Back on March 14th, I posted a blog entry about AT&T blocking calls to FreeConference.com. In that call, I described my experience and noted that I filed a complaint with the FCC. Well, yesterday, I received a phone call from Rosalyn Young at AT&T’s Office of the President about my complaint.
Unfortunately, I was on the road at the time in an area where there is poor Cingular Wireless cellphone coverage, and the call cut out partway through. I suggested that we talk later in the day, but when she called later, I was also out of range. I’m not sure if there is some hidden message there.
Anyway, this morning, I called her back to follow up. We had a good discussion. She explained that AT&T gets charged for calls to Freeconference.com, so technically their not free. I’ve been reading up various posts about the issue, such as the one on e Pluribus Media, so I was prepared for the discussion.
I asked her if the charges were different from the standard termination fee that Interexchange carriers (IXCs) are required to pay Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) as part of the FCCs Rural Communications rules. She didn’t seem exactly clear about what I was asking, so I put it this way. Yesterday, I called Gavin TV and Appliance in St Marys, Iowa. The same town where Freeconference.com’s interconnection is. Is there some sort of termination fee that AT&T has to pay Freeconference.com or the LEC that is different from what AT&T pays the LEC for a termination fee for me calling Gavin TV and Appliance? She did not know the answer and said that she would get me information on the different termination fees and get back to me.
Wireless Net Neutrality
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 21:13On February 8th, Tim Wu wrote a blog entry about his beta draft of Wireless Net Neutrality. For a long time I’ve thought that the wireless industry in the United States was not operating in the best interest of consumers, that there actions are anti-competitive. I’ve been concerned about why Europe and the Far East is so far ahead of us in wireless innovation.
Yet most of the time, it hasn’t particularly affected me. Sure, the ridiculous pricing on text messaging discourages me from using text messaging as much as I would otherwise.
Then, this evening, I got an email that changed things. I often use Free Conference.com for conference calls. They sent out an email saying,
As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".
Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you.
Web 3.1: Real Time Enterprise Internet Presence
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/12/2007 - 11:18Between Twitter messages about SXSW, video streams and online text chats about Freedom to Connect, Blogging the Libby Trial, and preparing for theNew England News Forum, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Internet and I want to share some of these thoughts in terms of the financial services industry as well as a broader context.
Web 2.0 has already gone from the hot new thing to the Web 2.0 bubble and people are now talking about Web 3.0, the semantic web. I had been talking about my visions of Web 3.0, which are a bit different, and since the marketers have taken Web 3.0, I’ll take Web 3.1.
Yes, the tools that are predicted to make up the semantic web, which will mine and connect data sound very cool and I look forward to using them. As Lars noted the other day, Dow Jones is Introducing Elementized News Feeds for Quantitative Algorithms. The ability to take this information, mash it up with a market data feed, data about positions and trading strategies and any other information that can found is a good illustration of the sort of data mining and analysis that will make Web 3.0 very cool.
Yet there is more to this than simply mashing up data. More and more, the data is becoming real-time. The Twitter messages are coming in as instant messages or text messages, as well as updates to webpages and RSS feeds. Chats, like those that took place on the backchannel for the Freedom to Connect conference are content rich real time data, and many people wanted information coming out of the Federal Courthouse in Washington in as near real time as possible.
