Category Archives: Social Media

Getting help from twitter, just ask @walkermartyn

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Martyn

While trying to figure a way to test some twitter response code I thought it would be fun to get twitter to answer questions, any questions. So if you have 5 minutes to kill try out my mini twitter responder.  All you need do is follow @walkermartyn and then post your question prefixed with @walkermartyn and I will DM back the answer.  Full instructions can be found here.

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How many people are connected to the Internet?

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Martyn

1.6 billion reasons to start an Internet business in 2010

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It’s Official: Google Apps Suck, here’s Zdnet’s top 10 list Google should kill

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Martyn

Zdnet found 10 projects Google should kill after the demise of the Wave beta yesterday.

  1. Google Buzz. What was that anyway?
  2. Orkut.  I honestly never visited the site unless by mistake.
  3. Friend Connect.  Not sure I have heard of this either, what was it or will it be?
  4. Google Desktop.  I install and deinstall this regularly.  I love it, I hate it.  I sleep better without it.
  5. Google Base.  Isn’t that where all the chiefs meet?
  6. Google Checkout.  Ahh, now I know about this one, I developed an API for shopping cart software and their API really does suck.  As a consumer I refuse to use them.
  7. Google Toolbar.  I use it and like the way it allows me to click through keywords in searches, and I use the spelligna chhecker.
  8. Google Lattitude.  Don’t they mean attitude?
  9. Google Pack.  Huh?  What do they pack?
  10. Photo Screensaver.  Not another one, surely this is innovation at its thinnest?

toolbarssuck Its Official: Google Apps Suck, heres Zdnets top 10 list Google should kill

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The RealCall Specification Circa 1995

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Martyn

SMS and mobile phones were not as popular in 1995 but from this short (and excellent demonstration of how a demonstration should be done) you can see a modern incarnation of the service, one we were told would never find a market.

Although Twilio and OpenVBX are nothing to do with RealCall I wish they were, the quality of the work demonstrated in this video encourages me to think the time is right for a rethink on some of our pre Adeptra strategy. The XML used in the demo uses the same principle tag used in our own XML API.

I do not think we need to reinvent the wheel but unless Twilio decide to bring this to Europe fast they may face strong competition.

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Never miss an important Twitter message again

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Martyn

On Monday Adam and I released PalRelay.  It is a solution to finding information without having to navigate the rats nest of irrelevant information often found in search results.

It is not a replacement for searching, its an enhancement that will reduce the number of irrelevant pages found by with the leverage of opinion from friends and colleagues.

It also solves issues that have been headlining recently.  Taking control of your privacy and retaining ownership of your social graph.  PalRelay allows you to decide who gets to know you and how they use that data.  It allows you to remain completely anonymous yet should a website request personalization privileges you can choose whether to allow it or not.

The impression that personalization is universally a bad thing is a decision each individual has to decide.  I like the idea that Amazon tailors its website to my likes and dislikes.

PalRelay acts as a gatekeeper to your personal information and can be used to stop commercial organisations from surreptitiously recording personal information.  Equally it solves the privacy issue by allowing you, the owner of the private data to decide who gets to see it and use it.

PalRelay goes everywhere with me except secure pages (SSL addresses beginning with https such as online banking pages).  Its useful while blogging too, see the following short video for an example:

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Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming three

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Martyn

Are you still surprised when you discover a friend on a new social network?  The number of useful social media sites is growing.  Specialist sites for our interests help keep us focused as opposed to facebook and twitter.

3736525 s 300x200 Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming threeYou have to be specific to be terrific, as my mentor used to say.  Facebook and Twitter are great just so long as you have a good tool to agrregate the data (sly reference to PalRelay).

I recently joined SoundCloud and managed to get martynwalker as a username.  A couple of days later I was contacted by an old school buddy.

How valuable is that? A school friend not spoken to since 1974 contacted me and we enjoyed a 36 year catchup that we couldn’t hoped to have done without social media.

He found me as I favourited a musician we both like and my username rang a bell (or should that be a triangle?).

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