I wrote back in September that Jaiku was the ultimate microblogging platform. In the 4 months since then, it’s gone from Microblogging to Lifestreaming, but it’s still the same thing. SocialStream didn’t come about as anticipated, but I’ve tried a bunch of different Lifestreaming/Microblogging web apps since then. Tumblr keeps being brought up as one of the top lifestreaming apps, but the advantage of easily mapping your tumblelog (sp?) to your own domain is immediately counteracted by the fact that you can only import 5 feeds. That’s probably enough for most people, but for those of us like me (how many of us are there anyway?) who have Twitter, Flickr, blog (you’re reading it), Yelp reviews, del.icio.us bookmarks, recent Diggs (or other social news site votes), and recent Halo 3 games, you can’t fit them all. (I could add my Netflix At Home or Queue feed in there, but I haven’t really decided which of those Netflix feeds I want to expose to the public) Anyway, as you can see, there are too many feeds to put into a Tumblr lifestream.

Soup.io lets you add as many feeds as you want, and they make it pretty easy to map your own domain. Buuuuuuuut, neither Soup nor Tumblr let you leave comments on someone else’s Lifestream/Tumblelog/Microblog. Jaiku does. And Jaiku still lets you unsubscribe from friends’ individual feeds. So, if you don’t care when I play Halo 3, or what I digg (not that it happens that often anyway), then you can (still) unsubscribe from those aspects of my Jaiku-ing. And now that Google has purchased Jaiku, you can rest assured that the service will continue (even if no further development is done on it) for what will probably be a long time (in web-relative time).

I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the Jaiku feature set integrated into the social activity streams that Google is slowly adding to their suite of applications. At first I thought that the mobile app Jaiku built was the reason Google made the acquisition (and I still think that’s probably part of it, since Google is now launching their own mobile OS), but I can now see that the – shall we say – more advanced lifestreaming features were also an important part of the deal; the ability to unsubscribe from individual feeds probably being at the top of the list there.

While I’m on the subject and rambling away, I think Google/Jaiku made a serious error in shutting down the open sign up process when the purchase was made. I’m sure that day was the most traffic Jaiku had ever seen, and I know that both Twitter and Jaiku were set ablaze with comments on which one people should be using. Google should have capitalized on the momentum to get as many new Jaiku users as possible, and given them the opportunity to see why Jaiku is still the best Lifestreaming platform as well as a great microblogging platform.

Hey, here’s a good way to get more people as friends on our new social network: take a contact list from somewhere else, and then search for people on our network. Match people on our network by email address, username, or full name.

Email address? I sure hope the person I’ve been emailing has the email address to which I’ve been addressing their correspondence.

Username? Well, that’s probably not as unique… but in this Web 2.0 world, people usually use the same username across a bunch of different sites. Unless they’re like me and can’t make up their mind between nwadycki and nelswadycki. Or if they have a common name, and someone took their username on some other social network. Speaking of common names…

Full name? Sure, no one else is named Nels Wadycki. Might be more of a problem for my friend Andrew Moore. Or Carl Smith. Or Brian Cooke.

Now, I realize that Pownce is developed by a single person, and she has made a significant accomplishment in launching the service single-handedly… but Full Name? Did Leah check with anyone before implementing that? Or are all the Pownce users just supposed to know that their newly imported friends might not actually be the people they’re looking for? This seems especially true for people importing contacts from Gmail where just about everyone ever is added to your address book.

I took a picture of Colin with my cameraphone, and I was all excited cause I found out the USB cord for my real camera connects to my phone, too. But when I connected it, Windows couldn’t find the software, and so, no picture.

Anyway…

Colin was a great presenter, and I applaud him for presenting for essentially 8 hours (he kept saying 9, but that included the lunch break). I guess when the name is “ActionScript from the Ground Up” I shouldn’t have been expecting any real advanced coverage of the topic. I got a great review of OOP, though, and I’m sure for all the Flash “design” type people there, it was way too fast. It was essentially a 9 week course crammed into 9 hours with no time for homework. So, yeah, I’m sure there were some minds blown. But I also am sure there were people who were bored out of their minds. I was close, but I hung on and managed to pick up things here and there even in the OOP stuff. That said, I’m pretty sure I can skip his book (sorry Colin!) since the reviews on Amazon say that it goes a lot into the OOP stuff. But that frees up some cash, so I can get the RIAs with Flex and Java book I’ve been wanting forever, or else Adobe’s Flex 3 training book. And for Adobe, I think that was the point anyway; just to get people more exposure to ActionScript and make them more interested in using it; so they can stay on top of Silverlight.

I am also glad I got to see how similar ActionScript is to Java. I’d say that AS is probably more like Java than JavaScript. Of course, names for languages really don’t tell you anything about them.

I overloaded myself with the Flex/ActionScript by reading my Flex 2 with ActionScript 3 book on the train and bus to the event. Now, I will try to busy myself with a game I’d like to develop using Flex/ActionScript, and try to also fit in an extra credit project at work using Ruby on Rails. My FA side project will be a good one since I can probably move quickly to advanced Flex/ActionScript concepts since the languages are so similar to what I already know. The RoR project will have a bit more of a learning curve since I’m still getting to know Ruby.

Just an FYI (while I was finding the picture below), I came across this TIOBE software site that ranks programming languages. As of Dec 2007, Ruby is at #9 while ActionScript is #25 (glad to see it’s at least that high; MXML doesn’t count as a programming language). Java is #1 with a 20% share, so I guess it’s good that I’ve got that one down pretty well.

There are seriously some times when Michelle Ryan (aka Jamie Sommers) looks exactly like Jennifer Garner (aka Sidney Bristow). And I’m pretty sure I like it (it being Bionic Woman – not Michelle Ryan looking like Jennifer Garner) because they’re pretty much copying the Alias formula for all it’s worth, and actually getting it right. Could use a little more Sarah McLachlan, though. Nothing says “Heroine Emotion” like Sarah McLachlan.

I also like it because the parts that are different from Alias are well done. Sometimes so well done that I wonder if Bionic Woman might not turn out to be a better show than Alias. Scary, I know. But the little sister part is well done and takes up just the right amount of time to be a good diversion from the rest of the show (except for the part where Jonas drives her home from the police station and then appears in Paris the same night to talk to Jamie; though, I’m sure the Berkut group has a private airport, and maybe they have a plane like the Concorde).

The flirting went a little overboard in the most recent episode (The List), but I liked it at least as much – if not more – than the brooding, deep stuff that went on with Sidney and Vaughn. I’m sure it’s hard to write it so that the humor works while still keeping the show fairly dark and not going off into Chuck territory.

I was going to make a list of things that look like:

Marshall = Nathan

Sloane = Jonas

Fiance killed in 1st episode = Fiance killed in 1st episode

but I’m sure that’s already been done on about a dozen other blogs. So, let me end with this:

Dear NBC,

Can you please switch Bionic Woman with Journeyman (or just go ahead and cancel Journeyman; it’s too much like Day Break and nobody watched that dumb show). Journeyman seems like a much better fit with Life (both single white men trying to solve mysteries about their lives), and Bionic Woman seems like a much better fit with Chuck and Heroes (that doesn’t even need a parenthetical – it’s practically like Chuck and Heroes had a baby who was Bionic Woman).

Also, this would allow me to watch Bionic Woman when it’s broadcast, forcing me to view the commercials that appear on my TV screen, as opposed to watching it online where I can just click over to my email or Bloglines for 30 seconds while Toyota plays a nice little song for me.

Thanks for helping me out,

Nels

E.g., the last two posts here have shown up as “endub” and “see_through_bikinis.jpg” on FriendFeed. And while, yes, I did technically post “see_through_bikinis.jpg”, that wasn’t really the point of the post.

So, as a test, the 2nd link in this post is the one that goes to FriendFeed. Let’s see if I posted “FriendFeed” on Nels Wadycki…

(You can click it to see the whole thing)

Related only by the fact that it’s Gmail… I found this to be an interesting advertisement:

So you conspiracy nuts who think that Google is reading all your mail… um, yeah. See Thru Bikinis.

Developers have been writing and/or porting software for more than one platform for as long as they’ve been writing code. So really, this is nothing new; it simply means that OpenSocial and Facebook are (probably) the 2 platforms you’ll have to learn when developing applications for social networks.

• Google Talk status updates
• Google Reader shared items
• Google Calendar events (added, invited, updated?)
• Google Documents (recent changes, new, updated)
• Picasa (new photos from friends)
• Google Video / YouTube (new videos from friends)
• Blogger posts
• Orkut updates (whatever those consist of)
• Gadgets added to home page, aka “iGoogle”
• Google Shared Stuff (or whatever it’s called) added

External properties:

• Anything with an RSS feed basically… including stuff like…
• Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku, Tumblr
• Blogs not on Blogger (like: Facebook Notes, LiveJournal, VOX, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress)
• Photos not on Picasa (aka Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug)
• Bookmarked items not on Google Shared Stuff (aka del.icio.us, ma.gnol.ia, etc.)
• Last.fm, Pandora (any other social music with RSS feeds?)
• Digg posts, votes feeds
• Upcoming (Yahoo Events)
• Apps built on social APIs (think Werewolves and Vampires), though these may come in the form of Gadgets

What I’m wondering – well there’s several things, but I think the highest on my list of wondering – is where the Activity Stream will be displayed. An answer to that may solve the second thing on my list, which is, how is Google going to decide who my friends are and which updates I want to see on the Activity Stream?

They have the new contact manager that they’re rolling out with the update to Gmail, but I have 220 Gmail contacts, and I certainly don’t want to see all their updates from all their Google (and other) activities… And I’m guessing most of them don’t want me to see all that stuff either. So… Google will have to do two things (most likely): 1) Have some way of determining who is allowed to see what (privacy level settings), and 2) create an algorithm like Facebook to decide what is most important to show.

I don’t like Facebook’s algorithm, but I feel like Google could come up with a much better one. I also think, though, that Google could create an interface (like the one on Socialstream) that would allow for a much larger number of items to be displayed and still make it fairly easy for users to understand.

I’m waiting for the November 8th (or so) announcement, but I’m pretty sure it will be a release of the API glue, which will seem underwhelming until Google (or developers) starting using the glue to stick things together.