Weblog: category "life"

Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool.

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

When returning from lunch today I found a package on my office desk. The handwriting on the envelope looked familiar from pictures I had seen on Qaiku before, so it was clear: I had received my own mystery book:

Mystery books have been received by many prominent Qaiku members before. They are beautifully handcrafted notebooks personalized for the recipient, often containing hints about Qaiku involvement, like having the inner covers made in printed version of that user's profile background. There is no information about the sender or the reason for making them. All are sent from random Turku post offices.

My copy of the mystery book is a mobile notebook, a bit in Moleskine-like style. The inner covers have a map of Europe from 1810, fitting my interest in history and geography spot-on. The book came with a pen, and had been sent from Turku 10 at 12:02 yesterday.

Several Qaiku members have posted pictures of their books on Flickr with tag "mysteerikirja", and there is a Qaiku channel about it. It remains to be seen whether the books are some viral marketing campaign, or have been made by some individual with Amélie-like tendencies. Anyway, quite a delightful surprise!

Why can't we concentrate? is an excellent book review about Rapt on Salon:

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy," he wrote. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I'm at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I'll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I'll watch the rest tomorrow.

Exactly the same symptoms I'm having. This is the reason I've written some of my best code while offline at the countryside or on a road trip, and why it was so relaxing to be without a phone for a week recently.

How to solve the issue of constant distractions? Maybe we'll need to be sometimes offline. And even while connected, we need attention profiling and better user interfaces. Something for the developers of the future free desktop to consider.

Confession: I must've switched browser tabs a dozen time while reading the Salon article. Concentration indeed...

Technorati Tags: attention

Need I say more?

...indeed I do. Next Monday is the Universal Towel Day. Therefore:

How about Babylon 5?

Technorati Tags: montypython, wolframalpha

The tale of Jerry's prosthetic USB finger continues. Helsingin Sanomat has posted the recent Reuters interview video with him:

While the hs.fi site is in Finnish, the interview video is in English.

Technorati Tags: video, usb

Week and half ago I posted a story on Jerry's USB finger. While obviously we all thought the idea of replacing a lost finger with USB storage was cool in a cyberpunk way, we still felt it was old news as all had happened around last summer. And so, the worldwide interest around it took us by quite a surprise. The story was an all major news websites, and even on radio morning shows.

The wave of attention, as shown by Google Analytics fits Morgan Stanley's media coverage graph reasonably well:

First the story was picked up by Digg, then gadget sites Gizmodo and Engadget. Second attention peak came from Slashdot and Boing Boing, and after that there was the long tail of mainstream media followed by smaller local newspapers and websites:

A week after the post Jerry was visiting our office to do integration testing for a project and the media circus was running at its hottest. His phone, and even mine were ringing quite often, with interview requests ranging from Indian radio stations to Channel 4 News and Reuters. Will be interesting to see how much longer the attention stays on when the story hits the TV networks next week.

Never underestimate what a single blog post can initiate!

Qaiku is the new conversation-oriented microblog that many former Jaiku users are migrating to. While the team is still working on APIs and other features, it is already possible to pipe your qaikus to other social services like Twitter and Facebook. This blog entry will show you how.

The first step is to register to ping.fm, a service that can post your microblogs to a large number of different social web services:

After registering, add the credentials to whatever sites you want ping.fm to post to:

Then go back to Qaiku and get the Atom feed address of your posts:

...and sign up with your OpenID account to Twitterfeed, and add your feed address and ping.fm credentials:

After this, your Qaikus should start appearing in the other microblogs. This way, my friends on Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook can easily follow what I'm up to!

Technorati Tags: jaiku, twitterfeed, qaiku, twitter

Yanko Design's You-SB concept:

Jerry's real prosthetic USB finger storage:

The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

Yanko Design's concept via Gizmodo.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, usb

Microblogging is all about conversations. About interesting ideas, and the opinions and clarifications to those. About discovering things happening around you.

But to be honest, Twitter and its clones like Identi.ca do not do that so well. Ease of posting, and good external tools might be there, but what lacks is the possibility to have real conversations. That is where Jaiku has been shining: the original posts follow the traditional microblogging concept of conversation starters being limited to the SMS-like 140 characters. But responses to those are not limited similarly, allowing thoughtful commentary to be written.

That is something that simply doesn't happen on Twitter: thoughtful discussion. The poor threading model, and lack of differentiation between conversation starters and comments simply means everybody ends up shouting on top of each other.

Brightkite, a location-aware microblogging service almost gets there. It differentiates conversation starters and comments from each other, and adds quite cool location-aware features on top of that. Suddenly I can follow conversations happening in the same neighborhood, or in the same city! But the problem is that they have made posting a little bit too cumbersome, and they make following and finding conversations quite difficult.

Instead of these services, Jaiku has been the place where the interesting stuff has been happening. But lately there has been too little development, and too much the failbird happening for it to remain a viable platform. And so the Finnish web community has been actively looking for an alternative. I think Qaiku, released today, could be it.

So, what is cool about Qaiku?

• Multilingual support: I can microblog in Finnish and English, and my international friends don't need to be bothered with a language they don't understand
• Private channels: our company can have a private channel where to handle actual workstreaming without leaking confidential information
• Favoriting and sharing: You can easily save interesting conversations to be accessed later, or share them in other services like del.icio.us or Facebook
• An evolving platform: Jaiku stagnated after Google bought them. With Qaiku there is a dynamic company, a cool platform and many interesting ideas that will hopefully make the service evolve into interesting directions

Sidenote: if microblogs are all about conversations, why doesn't my blog provide a commenting feature? To quote Alex Payne:

The main reason I don’t allow comments is that I want to inspire debate. I think people do their best writing when they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf. It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own readers. It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.

With the same idea, instead of the comments happening on my site, I hope you will either react via your own blog, or by communicating using a microblogging service. If you link to me, I'll do my best to read it and respond :-)

So, if you want to discuss this post, you'll find me on Qaiku, Jaiku, Twitter and Brightkite. This post on Qaiku preferred, but I will watch couple of days for replies on the other services too.

Technorati Tags: brightkite, jaiku, microblogging, qaiku, twitter

JP Rangaswami is writing about how innovation should happen as a dialogue between the developers and the users of the product. As an example of how innovation used to happen, he dug up Henry Ford's early automobiles and assembly lines.

With these early Fords, the customer choice was limited to having your car "in any color as long as it is black". And judging how since then cars have diversified to come in so many different forms, specialities and colors, this thinking must be flawed, no?

As Tim O'Reilly pointed out, JP Rangaswami's blog talks about enhancing the consumer experience in markets that are already out there and are mature. In less established fields, the lone inventor must still press on:

In a talk I attended many years ago, Joseph Campbell said that the Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place.

An interesting comparison with Ford at another, still quite immature and emerging field is Apple. Apple provides a full range of computers from servers to mobile phones and in most cases seeks to control the experience through the whole way. The devices are beautifully designed and work well as long as you use them as intended, and not for anything else.

This is a big contrast to the rest of the computing world, where everything comes with a bewildering number of choices. And these choices rarely work so well with each other. And so Apple is able to utilize their singular vision and attention to detail to make very good business.

In the free software world, the same distinction has traditionally been between the GNOME and KDE projects. GNOME has focused on a controlled environment with strong usability and accessibility, while KDE has been about the freedom to tinker and configure.

At some point users will want to manifest their personality or a tribal identity through how they set up their computers. But at the moment I believe we still need more the working systems that we can use, don't have to spend too much time configuring, and that let us focus on whatever we want to accomplish.

This is what originally drove me from my HP Linux laptop to an iBook four years ago. When I ran Linux I found myself constantly tweaking settings and installing new interesting applications that were supposed to improve my life. With Mac, once some basic necessities had been set up, I have very rarely touched any settings.

Now the iPhone experience has got me to feel the downsides of Apple's total control, and I'm again looking over the fence to see if free software is greener on the other side. While with Linux I would have full control of my environment, the whole synchronized release business keep things fresh enough. Given that a new GNOME desktop and a new Ubuntu would be out in just a few months, I should be able to fight the urge to start upgrading bits and pieces on my own, ruining productivity and potentially breaking my work environment.

If SubEthaEdit wasn't locking me to OS X, I would definitely be trying this out.

As an afterthought

All this talk of Ford got me to think a little about the car problem. Cars make cities unlivable and pollute the world, but at the same time they let people accomplish and experience things that they couldn't without personal transport.

Now the conventional thinking seems to be that what the world needs is more energy efficient, cleaner cars. But to my point of view, that is quite close to what Ford said:

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said "faster horses"

So how about solving the problem in some other way? Segways tried and failed to make mobility more even more personal and less space-requiring - but not very appealing in chilly Helsinki weather. But how about making the world require less mobility in the first place? Maybe World of Warcraft, Skype and Second Life - the field of telepresence - are better answers to the car problem than Prius or Tesla.

Technorati Tags: apple, gnome, innovation, iphone, ubuntu, segway, subethaedit, tesla