Anyway, I’m still waiting for the buzz activation in my Gmail but I had some fun yesterday on the iPod touch. Looks like Google Buzz may overcome twitter, facebook and everything else by aggregating all the mess, fuzz, buzz in one “clean centralized place”.

If you have ideas, inspiration sites or suggestions feel free to comment. In the meantime, I will start to look for a great new design compliant with my actual mood

In these challenges, Apple is usually quite good at making WOW effect products. And somewhat yesterday the whole mac planet was waiting for such a big bang as when the iPhone came out. And yeah, Apple did a fine job, but not a great one as expected… This iPad is finally a nice giant iPhone without GPS and camera but including iWork (and iBooks).

This morning I have a bittersweet feeling that I can pinpoint to some missing or disappointing elements:

1. A thick border !  Why after the slim and tiny MacBook Air (and the whole MacBook family), did Apple release such a large ugly border screen ?
2. Let’s go back to the … past 4×3 aspect ratio ? I mean everybody is now HD or  Full HD in a cinema compliant 16×9 aspect ratio.
3. No webcams… no comments…
4. iPhone OS based huh! I get the technical/battery life/optimization idea, but why push so much work in porting iWork on iPhone OS. Or on the other hand why not offer the full Mac OS X SDK on a tablet computer ?
5. No GPS = No Location Based Service… sad again.

All these factors, let me really think that the iPad is finally an iDraft. A firts version not fully polished as we were used to by Apple and Steve.
EDIT: I just find out the mashable iPad missings article. I should add SD cards and HDMI in my list…

The Apple iPad

The Wavyx MacPad

Here is my ideal iPad:  a nice thin 16×9 device. You’ll notice the front webcam is upside, but I’m not it wouldn’t be better on the left side to ease video conferences with multiple contacts. On the back, I put 2 webcams. I know it’s too much but I was thinking about some Augmented Reality application  that could better capture the 3D environment with 2 webcams. So let’s say it’s an optional feature

By the way, it has a GPS and it’s of course Mac OS based, so more a MacPad  or MacTouch.

PS: I still searching through the specs, to find how much RAM is bundled but I hope it’s enough to have bigger application with less memory problems as on iPhone.

Anyway, for this year I’ve summarized my resolutions in 3 themas:

1. OPEN
2. SOCIAL
3. PASSION

First I was gonna details these bullets but now I think they are really clear and suffices to themselves.
So feel free to ask for details, if you’re unsure about what I mean. In the meantime, let’s be an open social passionate electron in the Web Gen !

Planes are like ants trying to find food and auto-organizing themselves (not necessarily with the shortest path). This recall me of the Ant colony optimization for solving TSP problem.

Here are some resources for the ACO optimization for TSP problems: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3689188/Ant-Colony-TSP-Optimization, http://www.ugosweb.com/Documents/jacs.aspx or http://www.idsia.ch/~luca/acs-bio97.pdf.

• Use the search bar:
  this redirect you to your favorite search engine results pages for the keywords entered.
• Use the address bar:
  this also redirecte you to the results pages UNLESS the first result is good enough. If you type in “firefox” or “wiki belgium”, the first result of the search engine is probably what you’re looking for. So why lost time in the results page and click again on the obvious first result?

And for the people willing to know how this works, it is pretty simple. Firefox use this setting “keyword.url” (in the about:config) as the url to query for keyword input. In my configuration, it’s “http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=”. This is the usual google search url at the exception of the param “gfns=1″ which is the “good enough” redirection.

It’s kinda like the “I’m feeling lucky button” but you redirected to the first result only if there is pretty good chance that’s what you’re looking for (above some threshold I guess). And if your query was unclear, for eg “eric rodriguez” (I’ll bet you’ll never find me , then you are redirected to the usual results page to make your choice.

Pretty useful and neat feature, isn’t it? IMHO, it’s the fastest way to seach & surf (so far). Let’s try it and like me, you’ll get addicted to this good enough redirection

Moreover, this is a one shot generation so any “quick and dirty” solution would have satisfied me Here are the possible solutions I found:

• Webservices: there are plenty of webservices to generate webshots on the go. The pricing is quite low and this is definitely a quick way to build your webshots collection. Among others, you can check: webthumb, site thumbshot, Quick Thumbnail, Thumbalizr. You can check google for more…
• Applications: you can also (as I did) rely on simple applications/scripts like CutyCapt, IECapt, Paparazzi, webkit2png or khtml2png. On the first pass, I used CutyCapt, but on second pass I switched to IECapt since a lot of my websites needed flash plugin in order to render properly.
• Build your own server: there are also a couple of articles describing how to build you own webshot server: with python and qtwebkit, with firefox. You can also check thummer(a global webshot server solution) or this article.

For me, CutyCapt and IECapt (with some batch script) did pretty well

Last months I wasn’t really active (at all), despite my good 2009 resolutions
But isn’t that a rule ? To NOT follow your new year’s resolutions…

Anyway, I have a pretty good reason: I was getting married !
So now things are slowing a bit, I would like to share a few “wedding resources” as a first come back post.

These are mainly DIY shops for decoration, invitation cards, … (I know this does not sounds so geek, but in some case it’s kinda like soldering :

• http://www.ava.be/FR/default.aspx
• http://www.creacorner.be/
• http://www.schleiper.com/
• http://www.lamaisondupapier.be/
• http://www.creatine.be/ with 2 shops: http://www.creatinestockel.be/creatine/ and http://www.creatinewavre.be/
• http://www.maison-lefebvre.be/

IMHO, you should definitely  check AVA and creacorner as a starting point.

Here are a couple of extra links: http://www.parcleopold.com/, http://www.artegra.be/, http://www.cordslafourmi.com/, http://www.nias.be/, http://pagesdor.truvo.be/Papeteries_-_D%C3%A9t./Papeterie_d%27Ixelles/Ixelles/fr_BE_YP_FREE_2659166_0000_1665077_6470_00000, http://www.creascrap.be/

You can refer to the article if you’re interested in their estimated pricing details. I’m more interested by the elements retained in this attempt of business model:

• Message Length: First you define a new online SMS service limited to 140 characters. Then you ask your users to pay for 5 to 360 extra characters.
• New Followers: You can now pay to get new random followers. This will probably up your natural web charisma, but for how long? If you discover you’re following some new stranger premium twitter account, what would be you reaction? I know mine… I’ll probably clean this new following users (the same way I maintain my own list to keep a good noise-to-signal ratio).
• Celebrity Followers: assuming celebrity check their accounts themselves, this could be interesting. As for private users, I’m concerned about being forced to follow new people. So who want to be read by Barack Obama ?
• Auto-Spell check: “free” features are always welcome except when you’ve got to pay for… Moreover what’s the point of spell check when you try to compress your ideas. Or if you have an “eagle account”, which means 250$/month,  I hope you check your tweet before hit the send button.
• Hours on recommended list: This is kind of obscure for me…and since I think people choose followers among friends, friends of friends, celebrities or specific blog writers. It is still nice to have advertising on “recommended lists” but what does it really worth?
• Twitter concierge: This means “you” are no more really talking to your community. However this can be really handy if you’ve got many tweets to handle. For 250$, I guess you’d probably find more than 5 hours in some outsourcing services.

This new Business Model from Twitter is definitely an interesting move to follow. But I have to confess I’m pretty skeptical since these enhancements come to a relatively high price, without mentioning the intrusion in your private followers. So let’s see how the Twitterers are reacting…

UPDATE:

This was a cool blog post joke, and I’m really busted   Anyway a couple of elements are really interesting like the one you pay to get new followers (even if not really viable). You can also see how people are waiting for some Twitter move. Anyway, IMHO, Twitter could propose increased message length for a small price. And I would definitely never pay to follow “celebrities”.

Last but not least, I think Twitter has a classic option to make money: insert random ads, or adtweets between your tweets with respect to your content/subject. Marketers would maybe pleased by such way to get intouch with customers. The only question is weither this adtweet would identified from you or from twitter service…

So If you read till this, just check “take me to the twittersphere” a real funny video about our Twitter deviance I really LOVE these twitter zombie addicts

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.

1. Focus on Content
   A main characteristic of Twitter is the 140 characters limitation. So be sure to be concise & precise. You can say a lot even with 140 characters! And the best way to grow your followers community is to provide clean and clear ideas.
2. Be polite
   This may seem obvious but there are already some abuse reported. So think twice when you tweet, because your short text will be publicly broadcast and read before you’ve got time to fall back. You’ll find a Twitter Etiquette here or here (if you need guidance;)
3. Do not give away your password
   Last item in the obvious series, do not give your password to third parties. If you don’t know why, just ask yourself if you would like to give your phone and the PIN code to strangers. So now you’re warned, don’t cry for identity theft or messages you didn’t write yourself.
4. Control your tweet speed
   This advice can be harder to follow. When you tweet, you’re not only sending a message to 1 or 2 friends but to a whole community. As each one tends to follow more than 2 friends, It can quickly become annoying when you’ve got a black sheep twittering every move each 5 seconds. If you don’t want to loose followers or friends, keep your tweet speed to a decent level. This way everyone can still communicate instead of hearing some white noise.
5. Use @, RT and #
   There are 3 basics twitter syntax you can rely on:
   
   • @ is the common identifier for people. You’ll use it a lot in directed (yet public) conversation.
   • RT is to use when you forward a message you like and want to share with your own community.
   • The # sign is used when you want to specify an event or subject. By using #, you ease the search or filter use to people only interested in a topic.
6. Choose with caution who you follow
   At first, you will be tempted to add as many friends you can, like you do on Facebook. But the thing is Twitter is no Facebook: someone you follow will “send messages to you”. Imagine you follow 100 persons tweeting 5 times a day, it will be so messy you’ll begin to taste some “I’m getting too much spam” feeling.
7. Get an anti-spam
   You may think I’m silly, but I think security software actors could someday provide a Twitter-AntiSpam. If you think this is a joke, you probably don’t know yet: “viraltweets” or “twitter le truc du jour“. So be cautious when you receive strange tweets, sometimes it is no good to click on every link. And if you get caught by some script retwitting this spam, at least clean you account and delete this unwanted message.
8. Less is More: use shortening tools
   Due to the 140 characters limitation, you may find these shortening tools rather useful:
   • To compress urls in a few bytes: bit.ly, tinyurl.com, snipurl.com (sn.im), is.gd , tr.im,….
   • To share pictures: twitpic.com
   • To compress text: 140it.com, tweetshrink.com, twonvert.com
   • To share source code:  snipt.org

   You can also refer to this article about best practices to short-tweet.

9. Avoid pyramidal traps
   If you still think the more followers you have, the best you are… you will probably get trapped in such pyramidal scheme like TweeterGetter. This website propose some “viral” approach to get followers. But the truth is you give your Twitter account to a stranger that will automatically build a pyramid of accounts. Viral marketing should not be confused with basic chain-letter scheme.
10. Monitor and engage your followers
    Building a large and faithful community, do not hesitate to engage your new followers by thanking and trying to know them. This way you’ll build a win-win relation with people interested in what you have to say or share with.
11. Don’t forget your profile
    Once you’ve got your brand new account, take some time to fill your profile details. It can be bad and at least new followers will have some information about you and your main interests. They may even go to your website, so there is no reason to not share such details. Moreover you can also personalize your Twitter page, so visitors will appreciate a appreciable welcome note.
12. Use adequate tools
    There are a lot of Twitter related tools. Thanks to Xavier from Tweetag, you can print this handful cheat sheet card. This toolbox gather the main Twitter tools you may need. If you need more tools, you can refer to the Twitter apps db.
    My favorite ones are:  StockTwits, TweetDeck, TweetWheel and MicroPlaza (if you’re lucky enough to have a beta invite). There are a lot of others but you’ll find easily other tools lists.
13. Split personal and professional accounts
    It is considered as a good practice to have both a personal and a professional email account. And it’s the same for Twitter! If you really are using a twitter account for business needs, you may prefer to split your personal and professional tweets. I know that social media are all about the person engaging a community, but I’m not sure the “Safe at home at 6h12 in the morning after 2 vodka and 1/2 whisky bottle” tweet will enjoy your professional followers

I hope you enjoyed this best practices and feel free to propose more… See you soon on Twitter @Wavyx.

• Feedback: it’s good to let the customer know that you are (or will be) working on his issue. It gives a warm feeling like “I’m not alone in this mess”. It also gives a more professional look to mail support.
• Centralization: it’s easier to manage issues or requests with a centralized system. After all, support or issues tracking is a MIMO (Multiple Input – Multiple Output). Multiple Customers having problems have to meet the Multiple Developers/Professionals and find the one fitting their needs. Moreover, sometimes  you cannot handle a whole case by yourself from A to Z. Then you will be more than happy anyone else in your corporation can solve and close the case if you’re no more available.
• Knowledge: by using ticketing system, you get a bonus! The information is tracked and persisted so you can find back relevant information when someone already dealt with this problem.

If you agree with this, the only thing left to do is to find a suitable ticketing system. So here comes my short list of 4 ticketing systems:

1. RT for Request Tracker. RT is available since 1996. It’s a wells spread system built in Perl and offering an enterprise-grade ticketing system with a lot of features like identification, prioritization,
   assignment, resolution and notification.
2. OTRS for Open source Ticket Request System. Also built in Perl, OTRS offers the same usual features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails.
3. osTicket is an open source support ticket system written in PHP.  It offers a web-based solution to easily manage, organize
   and archive all your support requests and responses in the same place.
4. eTicket is another PHP ticketing system, really similar to osTicket (above).

There are of course commercial solutions but I focused on open source alternatives. So you may also have a look to BMC, helpdesk pilot, tenderapp, simple ticket, mojo helpdesk or h2desk.

And if you still need other systems, you can refer to wikipedia, dmoz or slashdot.

A new media

When you read the homepage of Twitter.com, you may still wonder what so different about this communication tool. You can read more about “How Twitter was born“, but I’ll give here my vision of what is this media.

Let’s put it like that:  blog + instant messaging/sms + tribe = Twitter ! It sounds simple but the combination of personal content (blog) and immediate limited messaging (sms of 140 char max) into a social broadcasting platform is getting more and more attention. After early adopters, mainly geeks and tech people, PR and news agencies are now trying to get into the boat. Even advertisers are slowly offering solutions to monetize these 140 characters (here and there)!

So what’s really new in Twitter? It is a fresh, reactive and fast communication channel. It also have some “RSS like” aspect because you are pulling the updates from your friends. At least this is the first aspect, because with tools like Twhirl or TweetDeck, we are becoming more and more addicted to this IM based community. In such a way that you are no more pulling tweets when you want to read them, but you use this monitor/scanning application to always be aware of the last tweet of your virtual friend.

So in a few words, Twitter is a short broadcast messaging system. To me, it is a new mail system only you’re limited at 140 characters and forced to broadcast publicly your message. Hence, one may ask if Twitter has a real purpose or filling a real communication need… but let’s get back to this later. For now, we’ll cover a couple of limitations of such messaging systems.

Limitations

Like I said, Twitter is really a mail like system with almost the same problems or limitations:

1. Load and scalability
   One of the first issue Twitter encountered was scalability. In the early days, the website and notifications suffered notification delays and off-times. This seems in order for now. But think about how Twitter is built… it’s a pyramidal scheme. You know a bit like this never ending mail chains. Each time someone tweets (and is possibly retweeted), all his community has to be notified. This results in a fast growing function, moreover since people are now followed and following thousand of people.
2. Privacy
   The starting point of Twitter is like public broadcast. You have no real way to contact a specific group of people. You may either broadcast to everyone following you, or use direct messaging. Replies are in a middle ground: public message but intended to one person. A last remark, if you are “public”, you’ll need to clean your new followers from time to time.
3. Authenticity
   Like blogger identity theft, there is no way to really authenticate a Twitter profile. And if you think “Who cares?”, do not forget about the emerging business uses of PR agency or branding.
4. Spam and virus
   Last but far to be the least, Twitter will suffer spam issues (and maybe virus). I was wondering when I would see the first attempt of spam, and here it goes (DO NOT USE THIS!). There are 2 related concerns. First, you don’t have practical metrics to know if a threat is really widely spread (unless you’ve got some friends working on some alpha project)  Second, Twitter makes great use of tinyurl.com or bit.ly services, making it harder to filter spam messages.

The first and last problems are really the most important to me. And I think that if Twitter do not offer soon a reliable way to handle these, it will become a really messy place where you’ll keep blocking user to keep your account clean.

Content

It is now time to think about the What? What content do you think Twitter messages contain? Here is my personal short list:

• Personal status: hello world, I’m hungry/tired/sad/happy/…, I’m going to the movies,  and so on
• Weather or Earth related news: snow, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes, …
• Twitter itself: a lot of tweet are about the platform itself, talking about twitter status, features or discovery of a new twitter tool
• Funny and ephemere URLS like youtube, vimeo, slideshare, …
• Notifications: blog posts or alerts

I maybe forgot some typical use, but do you find any of this kind of “news” relevant to you ? Yes, it’s funny like a mail forward, and it’s also quick like IM. But nothing in there really sounds like a business or work related feature. For the sake of argument, I should mention the presence vertical markets around twitter, community-based like stocktwits or monitoring tools like tweetag. Eventually, a lot of people consider Twitter being the same as FaceBook status (there also has been rumor about twitter buy out).

With such frivolous content in a very limited messaging container, isn’t Twitter about massive noise production overall the Gen-Y generation of blogs and IM ?

Next step?

So this is IMHO the big picture of the current Twitter world. A last note worth mentioning is how Twitter has still not clearly defined any business model. This has already been widely discussed in the twitto-bloggo-sphere and you can find plenty of resource on your favorite search engine.

As for now, the last approach seems to be “Buy a friend” model. This is far to be stupid but it is based on the assumption that tweet does actually contains relevant or useful information. This may be true but I’d rather doubt that for the time being. Do not forget the Burger King experiment with Facebook: WhopperSacrifice showed up how really your virtual friends are important to you.

Let’s hope Twitter does not end up in an alternative spam-full media.

But here comes the BUG: on a google apps domain (not gmail), if you try to send an email with  to: me@mydomain.com and bcc: allmyfriends@domains.com, the bcc adresses do not receive the mail !

I tried many times.  From and to my usual gmail account, all is working perfectly. But using google apps  gmail version (tried with 2 differente domains), I still cannot send email using the to/bcc mails to protect privacy (see gmail help).

I just filled the gmail support form, we’ll see how quickly google fixes that. (let’s hope I didn’t miss a small config step;)

UPDATE: still no answer from google, but it is not a bug, it’s a feature The mail only arrived 18 hours later ! (of course I was not so patient and I sent it through my own mail server)

I believe a blog is a two-way communication tool, so I would like to know your opinion about the content, shape, subjects, … I talk about.

What are you interested in? Which post do you skip reading? Are there specific topics you want to discuss here ?

Feel free to engage in this “white card” post, either in english or in french   and I will definitely get back to you.