I haven’t poured hours into it, but I have looked around a bit trying to find good iPhone apps, and I find the conversation frustrating and fractured — echoing and empty. And I think Apple’s its-a-webiste-but-not-really iTunes store is the problem. It is definitely a 2nd class web citizen, and one that has rather aggressively not learned the lessons of Web 2.0.

I’d love to see someone do a full on iPhone-apps-as-social-objects site as a translation layer on top of the iTunes store. It would be easy, and it would be awesome. And if Apple weren’t Apple (say if they were Amazon) you could earn a nice affiliate income stream. As it is you’d probably wake up every morning and check your inbox for a C&D, but still it would be great. You should build it.

Photo from Paul Hammond

Anyone got recommendations on a good open source URL shortening app (ala tinyurl.com)to run at Flickr scale?

Its an easy enough problem thats its probably worth rolling your own, but I have to imagine there are one or two tricks.

Lazyweb, are you out there?

And yes, I know just asking this question means I’m walking perilously close to admitting that Dave might be right about something.

Photo by bies

And I can’t figure out how to do it.

Help me Lazy Web! You’re my only hope.

http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/page/hightouch?entry=taxonomies_vs_folksonomies

I never liked OSCal, but I couldn’t argue with the late night logic of “OScal – the OSCON Calendar” on the grounds of simplicity. And I might be talked into “OSCal – the EuroOSCON calendar”, but we all draw the line at “OSCal – the RailsConf Europe calendar”.

Plus we’ll be open sourcing it as soon as Rabble or I get a free moment, at which point the name gets really silly.

So, um, help? Good names needed. (not to mention short domains)

Rhymes with Orange?

Concepts I’ve been playing with: conference, event, calendar, social, schedule, discovery, interests, open, network, mob, triage, simple.

ONU – OSCal is Not Unix?

Best I came up with was “decafe” for “decentralized calendar for events”, which had potential except nobody likes decafe (and decafbad.com was already taken).

Not that I suggest you limit your creativity to the rather unfortunate geek tendency towards acronyms, short, pronounceable, and easy to understand when read over a loud speaker at the front of a echoing conference hall.

We need you, you’re our only hope.

(On a related note, I found that a .info domain name caused confusion and consternation among the presumably top percentile net savvy crowd at OSCON)

http://corkd.com/

Now I find myself painfully aware of the ins and outs, and more strangely the cardiovascular health of the Bay Areas freeway systems. Major clogs and blockages have serious impacts on my plans.

So um, how do people track this stuff? Presumably there is some sort feed, or maybe SMS notification I sign up for customized to roads I care about?

I hear we map traffic here at CorporateHQ, which I guess would be fine if traffic fascinated me and I wanted to monitor it all day, but really I don’t have the attention for that, and I was thinking about something a little bit more interrupt driven, and targeted.

Anyone got a suggestion?

update: People did, including * move * listen to the radio * “dialing 511 on your mobile phone can help. It has a Tellme (or at least, Tellme-esque) voice interface that’s kinda annoying and hit/miss, but you can at least tell it a major highway by name and it will tell you about any delays right now on that highway.” * Y! traffic rss | grep ’101|280′ | SMS

thanks everybody!

Please.

Is NetNewsWire still where its at for OSX desktop aggregators? I’ve been away from the desktop so long I don’t even know the players.

Do any of the aggregators do pre-fetching/offline-ing like NewsMonster did back in the old days? (Or did MarkP perhaps nip that line of development in the bud??) Something, you know, for long train rides?

Are there open source clients that sync with the NewsGator API, and run on Linux or do only NewsGator products sync with NewsGator?

Also want a host of other attention based/sensitive features, but to brain fried to put those into words. In the mean time I think the reading list will under go serious (if perhaps temporary) winnowing.

Thanks

http://www.whynot.net/view_idea?id=400

Museum School 25th Annual December Sale: Thursday, December 1, 12-8 pm (Opening Celebration: 5-8 pm), Friday, December 2 – Monday, December 5, 12-6 pm

MassArt’s Annual Holiday Sale: December 5th – 10th; 10am – 7 pm

In other news, it really should be easier to add events to Upcoming, and Markdown needs support for microformats

Its funny, Gmail just added the one feature that I was missing so much that I was ready to leave, the ability to customize the From: field, and yet I’m more ready to leave then ever. Why?

Spam false positives.

Bad Spam Filtering

False positives, are unforgivable in a spam filter, especially lots and lots of them. False positives mean you have to manually look through every spam message you get and manually check that each one isn’t spam. I don’t know what algorithm Google is using, but it sucks. I’ll admit my address has been out on the web for years, and so I’d understand if spam was getting through (and it does), but what I can’t understand is why:

• mail from the moderated mailing lists I’m on get flaggeds as spam
• mail from people already in my inbox gets flagged as spam
• mail from people who I’ve emailed gets flagged as spam
• mail from Google HR personnel

In particular Gmail seems to hate the microformats list, of which a significant percentage of the traffic gets flagged as spam. Editorial commentary I wonder?

Which is really a shame, as Gmail (or any of the centralized mail houses) should be in possession of plenty of information to do an excellent job on the filtering.

The Potential

And once we had our own Gmail-like client we could adding features without having to rely on Greasemonkey scripts!

My short list:

• mailing list aware
• roles ala Pine
• GPG integration
• archive this thread (aka conversation) and all future messages to it

That plus client independence with the IMAP backend. There have been a few good comments added to my original Gmail IMAP post if anyone is looking for inspiration.

http://rc3.org/cgi-bin/less.pl?arg=6840

Ideally IMDB would supply these feeds as screen scraping is never a good option, but I’ve got to say IMDB is up there in the top 20 or so easiest sites to screen scrape, the format has been largely static for years, and the URLs are simple, if not particularly flexible.

Anyone?