What from all this data?

Okay: here's a basic list of the things I'm signed up to.

Blogger, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, my Amazon account for something to read etc. Keep in mind I have over ten blogs on various topics, a handful of Twitter accounts and most of my likes/dislikes listed in Facebook and MySpace, and finally my work and professional connections on Linkedin.

Here's a senario I'd like to see over the next couple of years.

I book a plane ticket. London to New York for arguments sake.

i) As soon as the ticket is booked an email arrives with a few reading suggestions - linked to my Amazon account. Even better, I'm paying a few hundred pounds for my ticket - the airline can pay for a couple of books for me :)
ii) From the existing booking list it can see which of my business contacts on Linkedin I'd be travelling with and gives me the option to either network with them at the airport or during the flight.
iii) Be able to figure out what interesting blogs and websites I'd like to see when I'm flying.
iv) Be able to figure out an in flight listening (from last.fm feeds) based on my Facebook/MySpace details and music likes etc.
v) Do I have an iTunes account? Nah, so there's a good chance that I might like to buy an iPod duty free.

A lot of this can be sourced from one point of contact, an email address. Yeah it's a bit freaky, perhaps limit it to premium customers. The technology is there..... perhaps I should create a company.

Sometimes being open is not such a good idea.

Over the years the open source advocates have ebbed and flowed. There are some great products out there that you can download, install and use. Sun Microsystems jumped on the Open Source community and the way that Java was being used to power all this cool enterprise stuff.

Now in 2009 I think it's really bit Sun on the arse. Apple give us the biggest wave of vendor lock in and it's a beautiful thing. Developers are willing to pay to get their apps listed on iTunes, willing to let 30% of their revenue go to Apple for everything sold on iTunes. And aside to that Sun turned away from IBM and went with Oracle.

Though Sun boast wonderfully about how the Java Micro Edition (Java ME or J2ME depending on when you started all this) is on over 1 Billion devices worldwide. The big mistake was to leave the consumer out of the equation and just focus on the developer. So now we have a plethora of applications floating around in space. Sun missed the boat but it's given me an idea.

Onwards and upwards to Open Coffee Derry.

Could J2ME ever had an equivilent App Store?

I've hit a real big junction at the moment. It's a whacking great T junction of a decision that I have to make. It all boils down to mobile apps. With OpenCoffeeDerry approaching this Thursday I'm giving lots of ideas a lot of thought. I missed BarcampBelfast yesterday, but I was recovering from photographing a wedding the day before. Anyway, I digress....

One of the reasons that the iPhone and iPod Touch work so well isn't really down to the hardware, it's down to Apple's way of working in terms of the App Store. You can to sell on the App Store then you have to register as a developer (at $99) then write your app and get it approved. So there's already a level of commitment to producing a good app. If it ain't good it don't get in (you on the guest list, sir?).

Over to J2ME.... hmm I'm struggling with this one. If I look at something like Getjar.com there's a lack of clear layout, that's more to design than anything else. My next problem is finding what I want and for my device... urgh this is getting messy. Give me the App Store for J2ME PLEASE!

More to the point, are there actually any really good I-can't-live-without-this apps in J2ME for mobile devices?

Sounds like I'm talking myself out of this one.

On the opposite side of the coin: first of all buy either an iPhone or iPod Touch (which is going to cost me anything from £165 - £350 depending on what I get), learn Objective C, get a Mac so I can get the SDK (call that another £800), the economics are starting to work against me. So for my £1100 I need to make sure that I'm going to get enough downloads and marketing clout so the downloads happen.

Perhaps I should just build a good J2ME App Store.

Why Twitter?

I'm beginning to see four distinct groups of users using Twitter. Each have their own way of doing things.

1. Casual friends and family.
Basically they want to keep in touch. Nothing wrong with that and easier to broadcast than copy/pasting an email all the time.

2. Users who broadcast but don't care who listens.
The more followers the better and the more people they follow the more will listen. After a while though it becomes noise and difficult to track who is saying way. Take 10,000 followers and a bunch of them @reply to you, how will you know? At the end of the day most of these category of user won't really care. I suppose you could call them Twittagers :)

3. An industry/business collective
Keeping up with a specific domain of intelligence. I keep up with designers, hitech and data miners, some of them even keep up with me.

4. The bots.
The ones that give me cause for concern and the want inside to make my tweets private. If I mention golf then there's a bot tracking the word "golf", next thing I know there's a bunch of followers because I said golf. To give you an idea how lax this system can be, I was stating the fact that I would never ever play golf.

As much as I thought Twitter would be a complete waste of time I do use it a heck of a lot, but mainly in a specific domain context. I do have problems with the signal to noise ratio hence I try to control my follows and followers to a degree that I can see messages that come in. Now I'm also using rTweeter, written by Stuart Manning, which will let me track keywords and phrases as well.

Now I can start putting the collective intelligence together.

It's okay to be a #TwitterSnob!

Your network should be a reflection of i) you and ii) where you want to personally/professionally want to see yourself in the next phase or season of your existance.

Just because one person decides to follow you on Twitter or befriend you on Facebook doesn't not automatically give them the right to be followed back. Derek Hall was being given a hard time about not being reciprocal about every Twitter follow he was getting. A debate then ensues about this and an army of #TwitterSnobs is born. Me personally am happy to be one.

It's not about the quantity of follows, it's about the quality of follows.

Cutting through the bull - when things just don't add up.

I have worked in IT for twenty one glorious years, never thought I could see the day. Programming languages come and go, fads, fashions, websites I've pretty much seen it all. There is one thing that has constantly cropped up in my profession, fake advertisements.

To start off with it was agencies posting fake IT positions on JobServe (and hey, it still happens). In Northern Ireland they calculated that 50% of the agency positions are made up. No shock there. But it's not just the IT job market, oh no.

If you have a Boeing 737-200 for sale, for example, you'd expect any sort of "exchange and mart" sort of sale to happen. I've got a plane, you want a plane, let's talk! No. I've got a plane, and ten brokers want a piece of the action as well. And in time and honoured tradition of the fake job ads in the IT world there's a bunch of made up aircraft for sale or rent notices as well. I'm sure it happenes in every other domain that exists.

Back to my Boeing 737. The senario is:

Owner -> Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->End User

You could add an infinate number of brokers in that chain, it would eventually end somewhere. Each of them is trying to claw their 1% commission for referring a sale. It's the same as estate agent and just as sleasy. Letters of intent mean nothing.... neither does an NDA.

Money is not made on data alone, it is made up on the quality of data. I've used the aviation industry as an example as it's one that I know an awful lot about from the startsup I've done over the last four years. It's all about signal to noise, something I've blogged about before with Twitter and the alarming number of data I seem to amassing. To gather meaningful data is becoming more of a pain.

I'm working on some tools for the aviation sector but I am constantly aware of just becoming another signal to noise service, providing more noise and what constitutes as free advertising ("as long as my phone and email address are on the site, that's all I care about!" sort of mentality).

The question should really be how to cut out the noise.

Google App Engine: on Eclipse it's a dream.

My first proper morning of having a look at the Java support for Google App Engine. A tip for anyone who is developing, make sure you have Eclipse and the AppEngine plugins, it works wonders.

Coding the app up is no real problem. If you are used to JDO queries then you'll be fine, I'm so used to JDBC hell that I had to read the docs. Where the plugins really shine is on deployment. It totally removes the whole command line procedure. Click once, enter your username and password and up it goes (fortunately not in smoke). All done and working.

Not a design classic but here's the first app.

Java in the cloud: First look at Google App Engine for Java

I was lucky to be one of the first 10,000 developers to get a closer look at the new Google App Engine for Java. Up until now it's been Python developers who had all the fun.

What's it got:
The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

First things first, if you use Eclipse there are some plugins that Google have developed for the development and deployment of Java apps for AppEngine. There's also a good guide on getting started here.

The problem with these sorts of things is thinking of something to code up. So I'm going to a think and come up with something.

More later.....

The great IDE clutter

Perhaps it's old age creeping in, perhaps it's just wanting a simpler life (now a reality since I ditched Bebo, my Twitter account will more than likely head the same way).

Next on my list, development tools. Just too many of them, but then again there's not one day when I know what's coming. For Java I use Eclipse all the time, have been since 2002 (I even said nice things about them in 2003). The guys at Silktide have got me into PHPEd for all things PHP, though I have to say the installation did kill my Apache 2 config and removed any trace of PHP. Ruby on Rails, uhm this is a problem child at the moment. I swing from Textpad to Komodo Edit 5.0 and then back again.

In an ideal world everything would run off Eclipse. PHPEd doesn't seem to really create much of the way of PHP code for me. I want a class, I should be able to pull a table from MySQL and it create a class for me. Older versions of Eclipse support a PHP plugin but as I'm on Ganymede a few of the plugins don't seem to be supported yet. I'm just too cutting edge sometimes. As for Ruby on Rails, RadRails was built on Eclipse but was replaced by Aptana's Studio (also for Eclipse as a plugin but, alas, not Ganymede).

Taking a tip from David Heinemeier Hansson, code generators or more importantly scaffolds are a way forward for PHP. I'm just wondering if there's any use in modifying the Ruby scripts to generate PHP code as well as Ruby code?

The purge continues.