Wayne D's Blog

Need a friend on Plurk? Here is a link to my Plurk page, sign up and I'll be automatically be your friend. Then you can tell me whether you think Plurk will really be "the next big thing". If you find the timeline annoying a more Twitter like interface is available at www.plurk.com/m.

Over the weekend I started to hear about Plurk, the "next big thing". I am a joiner so I signed up. Now I hate to jump on the Toronto boys who have decided to try to knock Twitter off the top of the microblogging heap but in my humble opinion there is one glaring omission in their implementation. The first thing I looked for after I signed up was a method to search for people by name so I could start adding friends. Plurk did offer to read in my email address book and invite all the people in there to join up but that's not what I was looking for. I know that people I know are already on Plurk because I saw them mention it in the Twit Live chatroom. I finally ended up typing their name in the Fireox address bar after grokking how Plurk made up profile URL's. Way too much work. There is a reason Twitter has the search box at the top of the page.

The strangest thing was when I went to the Plurk team page the people who put Plurk together are shown but their cutsie icons aren't linked to their profiles. Sigh. Getting a critical mass of friends is the lifeblood of a social networking site and Plurk isn't making it easy.

My advice to the Plurkists, link to user profiles everywhere,and make is easy to search for current Plurkers. Also, don't try to get me to spam invite all my friends like some kind of rogue Facebook app until I have decided the service is worthwhile. Your karma number is a thinly veiled carrot to help you service get to a critical mass.

Good luck Plurk, Twitter has the momentum if they can keep Ruby on the Rails. You need to be three times as good and execute flawlessly if you hope to overtake them.

After trying unsuccessfully to record my award winning video for the CommandN Mesh contest I decided to experiment some more with the webcam on the 701 version the EEEPC. I used the built in software (ucview) and tested it at 7.5, 15 and 30 fps at 640x480, 352x288 and 160x120. I have included the 320x240 15 and 7.5 samples below. A quick synopsis, nothing really worked at 640x480, the video was frozen at 15 and 30 fps, the 7.5 fps at 640x480 at least has some motion in the video. You can see the 352x288 samples and the 7.5 fps video sample on my page at Blip.tv. I choose Blip.tv because they support .ogg format that the EEEPC video recorder spits out which I found out in the latest CommandN episode. The EEEPC is just too underpowered to do 30 fps video capture, which is not that surprising. What was surprising is that the 160x120 format didn't work at all. It either froze or crashed the software. he loud click at the end of the videos is from clicking the mouse button to stop the recording, sorry. I was thinking about making this post a video blog entry but decided it would require better production values than what I possess. How did I get the various frame rates? By moving my "studio light". There must be an easier way, maybe someone out there can tell me how.The EEEuser forum implies there is a way but I couldn't find it. If you'd like to contribute some samples please contact me, especially if you are running something other than the stock install.

Here is the 320x240 7.5 FPS sample.

Here is the 320x240 15 FPS sample.

Finally here is a video recorded on ustream using flash, frame rate is 11 fps.

Last Tuesday when I was at MeshU twitter was up and down like a toilet seat. This week it's working only with a whole bunch of features disabled and the Twitter denezins are not happy. Molly Wood of CNet has started a contest to build a better Twitter. She is promising 30,000 people to stress test the service. Among the few people I follow there has been much grumbling about how unreliable Twitter is. The funny thing is that people are so upset because they are so addicted to Twitter.

Twitter is one of those services that you either love or hate, there seems to be no in between and Twitter is victim of it's own success as it groans under the load of it's users who tend to be major tech heads. Twitter should beware before someone us comes along and sets up a more reliable competing service. The number of people using Twitter is small compared to the number of potential users and Twitter has shown how addictive microblogging can be. When I was at MeshU one of the people I was talking to was bemoaning Twitter's unreliability. I suggest they use Pownce and this person said that they preferred the simplicity of Twitter, they didn't want their friend's timeline cluttered up with video and pictures and other stuff. No knock on Pownce, that's what Pownce is for. Should Twitter have designed a system that would support millions of users and the myriad of interconnections between them when they were hacking together the thing together that first weekend. Twitter has no revenue and if they are following the model of getting bought before they work out a revenue strategy they better make sure the wheels don't fall off. Tough to do when you have no revenue though I suspect the VC's who gave them money are anxious to see their performance issues resolved soon too.

I hope Twitter gets it's act soon. Since I got on Twitter my time on Facebook has dropped precipitously. I'm so lazy that I watch for my Twitter friends to suggest blog posts to reads. If you decide to check out Twitter be aware that it is quite shaky now and it might be better to wait until they spend some of the $15 million they just got to shore up the dike to prevent the service from drowning in a flood of Tweets. Good luck Twitter, we are all rooting for you. Until the "Next Big Thing" comes along of course.

Things didn't quite work out as planned, this blog post is coming a few days later than planned. Wednesday night I ended up going to the Marlies game right after work. The game ran longer than expected so I didn't get to the second day Mesh afterparty until almost 11. The only good thing was that it was a cool Wednesday night and after I decided I didn't want to drop $10 for parking on an unsure party I pulled around the corner and found a parking lot where the attendant appeared to have deserted his post. You have to love free parking.

When I first walked into Rockwood I thought I had missed everything, the room was almost completely deserted, after poking around a bit I realized tthere was an upstairs where the party was in full swing. The lack of draft beer meant I had to switch to Scotch. I wandered the room, ran into Leah who had earlier followed me on Twitter. We had a nice chat and then we separated to continue to work the room. I must have looked a little lonely because a woman and her golf playing friend came over to talk to me. We talked about social media, we talked about golf simulators and by the time they left the room was almost empty.

You may be wondering why I didn't mention anything about the sessions I attended yet. I caught on moving beyond relational storage presented by Avi Bryant, iterative design strategies with Daniel Burka, John Resig's jQuery and Leah Culver's oAuth sessions. Though they were all fantastic but my favourite part of MeshU was the chance to talk to other people between the sessions and at the parties. I have about half a dozen new people I follow on Twitter and may end up at a Ruby conference later in the summer. On a separate note I'm thinking of attending Gnomedex this summer too.

I'll definitely be signing up to attend both MeshU and Mesh next year and if you are at all interested in the web and social media I'd suggest you check out the schedule next year and see if there is anything that interests you.

I never got a chance to thank Amber MacArthur in person, may be next year.

I almost forgot to add that I found twemes.com gave more complete results than summize.com when trying to search for posts tagged with Mesh08. Telling point for me was that my posts showed up on twemes.com and not summize.com