Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Archives
This gem from Whimsley makes the point - with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument - that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines. "Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture."
This is the fifth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of October and different sources such as tweetsentiment.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. Joe continues to provide some great 'hard' data that allowed me to better place more items on the grid this month. A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter.
A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.
In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony... and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative. More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.
We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I'd love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
One of the interesting things about the new Lists feature is the expansion of the asymmetrical nature of relationships on Twitter. I use Twitter Lists to control the flow of the fire hose of my data streams into manageable list streams. But another important aspect is the ability to create lists composed of accounts I don't follow. This is radically changing relationships and the way we build communities on Twitter. As Mark Drapeau pointed out it will become more important which lists you are on than who is following you.
We all know the network is everywhere. It's pervasiveness is what makes it the most endearing platform we have to address many of the issues we face today. Thanks to the convergence of increasingly affordable, powerful and mobile devices, access to the network has spread out and infiltrated parts of the globe that have typically remained impervious to previous technology advancements. There are some interesting numbers that I've heard recently that I wanted to highlight to articulate the scale and scope of today's network. Let's start with the fact there are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world representing almost one quarter of the world's population. Who are they and what are they doing?
If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.
News Topics
Subscribe to our Newsletters
O'Reilly on YouTube
O'Reilly on Twitter
O'Reilly on Facebook
News Feed
