Google Wave – Who owns the wave?

So Google announced Google Wave a few days ago and it’s a very interesting and great re-thinking of email and web-based communication and collaboration in general. In terms of personal use, I think it is great. Additionally, the potential for use in the corporate world is absolutely immense. One of the big barriers to corporate adoption I see is the question “Who owns the wave?”.

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Dear Twitterverse – Enough of the private @ crap

Now I haven’t been a twitter user for years or even a large number of months yet, but I am already frustrated with tweets from one individual to another that have absolutely no value to anyone but those two people involved. I mean how can Twitter continue to grow having to store and archive a massive number of tweets with such low interest value?

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Working with Git – Git Cheat Sheet

After making a move across to using Git instead of subversion, I was desperately in need of a cheat sheet of all the commands that were available in git. Thankfully github have an excellent reference page for using Git. Additionally on this page is a gem of a single-page reference for Git by Zack Rusin.

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Collaborate with Clusterify

One of my strong beliefs is that there are enough good ideas in the world to go around, and thus sharing those ideas early is a good thing. That is the whole premise surrounding my idea of Concept Buzz and it would appear the folks over at clusterify have a similar belief.

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Dabbling with YQL – Getting more from DabbleDb

I’m a big fan of DabbleDb. It’s a slick product and simple enough that anyone should be able to dive in there and start building an online database. For those of you who are interested DabbleDb supports both free and paid plans for their service, with the only conditions on a free plan is that the data is made publicly available on a Creative Commons licence.

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Getting Started with Django on Google AppEngine

Django is a pretty interesting looking web application framework available for python, and a lot of the inspiration for Google AppEngine (in terms of the python implementation at least) have apparently come out of use of Django. Presently AppEngine has out of the box support for Django 0.96 but if you want to get up and running with the latest stable version of Django you have to jump through a few hoops.

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Opinions Needed – Mood Selector Widget

As part of the Global Mood project I am currently working on, I feel one way of allowing people to specify their mood is by using an x,y coordinate on a 2d graph (mood really doesn’t seem like a one-dimensional thing to me). I have my first design done for the mood selector widget (just an image at this stage) and really need some feedback.

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GAE Tools – Google App Engine and Twitter

Tonight I have had a win. It’s a small win, but a win nonetheless. I have uploaded a small application which is making use of my new GAE tools library. The purpose behind this library is to make application development in the google appengine even more enjoyable. At this stage a python version of the library has been released, and I don’t currently have plans to build a java equivalent as I’m finding quite a pleasant language to develop in (not a language I have coded much in before).

The GAE tools library started it’s life with me calling it “Twawler” or basically a twitter search wrapper, but it grew to include other functions inside the library the meant it deserved a more generic name. The high level functions are are described below:

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Twitter – Costing Your Tweet

While there is currently no monetary cost for using Twitter (at the moment), I do believe there is a social cost consideration that should be made. Twitter in my opinion is very much what I consider a K² (Kudos and Karma) driven social platform, and as such actions an individual will take on this platform (combined with actions in the real world) will (or at least) should directly affect their success.

Largely, I am an observer of the twitter platform (the success and internal workings of the platform have me considerably more interested than individual tweets) so take what I say with a grain of salt – but I think I can share some points that will help to have success on this platform, and thusly ultimately assist in growing your concept.

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The OpenHub and Coworking

I was surfing around the blogs of some Australian consultants recently and came across The OpenHub in Melbourne. This is a coworking environment in Melbourne which sounds like a really great place to be if you are an independent developer or consultant.

The coworking movement looks really interesting to me – eventually I hope to go out on my own and create a successful startup, and what better place to spend the infant years of your startup that doing that with like-minded individuals. It just makes sense. I mean most of my ideas come to me when I am driving home from a day of work, so whilst at the time the ideas is formulating I am on my own, the idea is generally related to a conversation I have had with someone that day.

So, therefore, if I went out on my own and worked from home then firstly I wouldn’t be driving anywhere (and thus get my thinking time) and secondly, I wouldn’t be mixing with people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thus I could potentially get stuck in a rut… coworking seems like a great way to combat that. Not only that, but it’s an effective way to set up shop somewhere without the massive initial overheads.