I recently started using Twitter again, after being away from it for at least a year. The first time I noticed the site, it seemed like something for children to write on a global message board, with a noise ratio of at least 99%. In the past few months, I started looking at the phenomenon again, following the US election, some innovative IT people, climate organisations and a few people who simply seemed to have interesting tweets and retweets - a ‘tweet’ being anything you say on Twitter, with a maximum of 140 characters, and a ‘retweet’ being the repetition of another tweet (where the original is created by someone else).

To learn more, I started out by following  a few of the more popular people from a list of influential people from social media (found in a blog post which was later deleted, so can’t share it). Instead of going all out and following everyone, I selected the few who seemed most interesting, and give something interesting in each (or at least most) of their tweets. I included @EpicFU and @happyches and found some fun videos with ideas, went on TweetLater to spread my own tweets over time, installed Twidroid on my new G1, TweetDeck on the desktop and TwitterFox as browser addon, had a look at the Twitter Handbook, read about Twitter ideas for business, looked at ‘Twitter best practices‘, stumbled on the ‘Geeks Guide to Twitter‘ and kept on tweeting (@hunefalk). Of course there’s more possibilities, such as sharing videos and tweeing pictures, or organizing your Twitter experience with public/private groups and discussions.

From this past month of researching Twitter, I have found out that the phenomenon has grown up, and can be utilized for a number of purposes from fighting Climate Change and tweeting for election, to the pop idols and movie stars tweeting for fans. Some have understood Twitter is about two way communication and interaction, just like most new media, while others are stuck in promotion and advertizing loop saying ‘follow me, want me, buy my product’ without giving anything back to the followers, who will soon unfollow. The week previous to this blog post saw popular twitterers @TechCrunch (tech blogger) and @guykawasaki (marketing) make a bet where Michael Arrington had to stay away from Twitter while Guy Kawasaki was not allowed to touch a phone for the week..

One of the reoccuring hot topicson Twitter and many other social networks is the business model and finding a way to monetize the crowd. Advertising seems to be the standard answer for some, while others don’t want ads but would instead be willing to pay for it. An option I seldom see is giving more functionality and freedom for paying members, which is done with services such as RTM and Jott. Of course, with their API playing a great part in the Twitter success, it would be difficult to build around that, much in the same way not many ads would be seen if you need to visit the site to see them.

The first thing one should remember when acting through Twitter is that it’s not only about you, your product, your message, your thoughts or your wants and needs. Instead it’s about the shared thoughts, the community, the interaction, the people, the crowd, the tribe, helping eachother, sharing and more. Through sharing your expertise you can establich yourself as a market leader, while a strategy of one way communication might actually even hurt your reputation. After all, the main audience here is a new generation, a new type of people barely even imagined 15-20 years ago - a group who wants to take part in the discussion, who wants to be listened to and catered for, people without patience for the old way of stuffing advertising down their throats. The future is here, and I recommend taking part. So, have I missed any Twitter related site, app or function you would recommend? How many tweets per day do you like in the people you follow? Which type of tweeting is your favorite for yourself and people you follow; retweets, linking, questions to followers, chatting or maybe something else?

I was at the recent Google Developer Day at Wembley, and got a few ideas when listening to talks regarding development in Google Maps from the past six months:

•  It is now possible to integrate Google Earth as a map type of Google Maps - something they didn’t tell us enough about imho. However, it seems like this  is still at an early stage..
• If you’ve never been to a Google Developer day I would certainly recommend it - even if you know the API’s and have talked to many of the Google people who develop the app’s you use, there’s no better chance of finding other people giving fresh views of the world.
• According to one speaker, using ‘usual Google maps’ gives you a 50 kb download, while the Ajax downloader gives you a 4kb download. A significant claim which I hope to get the chance of testing soon enough - at least within the next few months. Too bad it seems to have a limit of 50 markers..

Of course, there were also a few other interesting subjects, including for example OpenSocial and especially Gears - but that’s not for this post…

Yet again, it’s been a while since I updated here. Since moving to London at the start of March life has been moving in a fast pace, and when not working I haven’t had too much time for going online - instead exploring the lesser known places of this global city, meeting a lot of interesting people from all over the world and still finding some time for short trips in the UK and western Europe.

Some of my Panoramio photos have been included for Google Earth. Meanwhile, one of the most popular Danish national newspaper had a full page published about the great hotel search I created for Momondo, where I’ve also created a search for Car Rental and translated everything for the site to Swedish. In it’s first month, the Car Rental search engine won an award from one of the partners, letting me drive around in a nice Porsche in the UK for a weekend. Also, adding Swedish seems to be the start of another success for the Momondo site. In other words, there’s a great foundation to build on for that site. Currently, I am looking into new functionality and optimization for the Hotel Search, even though it’s already one of the best, the one with most sites covered and probably the fastest of its kind.

Currently, besides working, I’m preparing a trip to northern Italy, the eastern-most town of the country, named Trieste, which give ten relaxing days before the journey moves on to the croatian capitol of Zagreb for a day of exploration and fun. From there it’s time to visit old friends and relatives in Scandinavia - Copenhagen, southern Sweden and Gothenburg.

I tried a few microblogging sites lately. I’d recommend having a look at those before creating your own - don’t forget Web 2.0 is much about mashing it all up, having a the social part, combining everything to make something new. At a quick glance there’s something positive about all of them. I see twitter as the current “big guy”, while Jaiku will probably get moving soon with big G in the back - however, both experience downtime when discussion-worthy mews with interest to many people come around (for example the release of Mac Air) and the question is how much they can take if the idea becomes a common day phenomenon..

If I get the time some day, I’ll have a look at the different API:s. Until, I may or may not keep twittering, and if I keep it up, will probably keep the box in the left bar.

For a while now, I’ve been in need of upgrading the Wordpress installation for this blog, especially after reading an article over at CyberNet about how easy it was to access old posts with the version I’ve been using. When finally getting around to doing it, I found that an upgrade to Wordpress is one of the easiest things you can do - just follow these simple steps:

1. Download, upload and activate wp-db-backup if you don’t have it, and make a backup copy of the database
2. Disable all plugins (there’s a link for that at the bottom of the Plugins page, no need to do it one by one)
3. Delete all files (no folders yet) except .htaccess and wp-config.php in the root of your install
4. Delete wp-admin and wp-includes folders with content
5. Upload the files and folders you deleted, from the latest WP version
6. Go to (blog.url)/wp-admin/upgrade.php
7. Click the link, wait a few seconds and you’re done

I am not often impressed by what people call new technology or “inventions”, as I often find that these things are simply built on existing knowledge and/or modifications/combinations of what was already in place. In other words, many of the things becoming popular today already existed in a somewhat different shape, such as cell phones being created before the iPhone, portable mp3 players before the iPod, search engines before WebCrawler and music before CD (alternatively tape or LP if you’re not in the youngest generation, or mp3 if you feel CD is outdated)

To continue the thought I started with, most “inventions” are not new, and most thoughts build on the ideas of others. This is one of the reasons why I am not often impressed. Whatever you do, someone has probably done it before (I am more innovative than most people, so decided not to say “whatever we do”), but with the right marketing and contacts you will still have a great chance of succeeding with the idea.

Returning to the original thought yet again, what impressed me for the first time in a couple of years was a site from Stanford University, claiming to create 3D model from single photos - something anyone in the area of Computer Vision (or related) knows is close to impossible without at least some manual work. The site however claimed that you simply uploaded the image and you would get a 3D version back. The following is what I got back (you may need a plugin for viewing VRML content)

In the end, it took 1-3 days (actually I thought it failed after I uploaded a photo from Dublin) before I got the results, making me wonder about their method of 3D extraction from the single image I provided. There are after all relatively simple algorithms which lets you define a great number of points (i.e thousands of points) in the image which builds on estimates and probability (simplification, I know). Since the result impressed me a bit, I decided to look through their publications, and will try interpreting it in “plain english” to see if they have found something which I believe could revolutionize the way computers interpret single images and video streams, or if the this is simply yet another experiment on the way to greatness.

Thinking about what’s related, Microsoft is working on a tool (Photosynth) for creating 3D models from collections of photos. Although the creation of a model involves relatively advanced algorithms (I studied many ways of approach both in my thesis and in various projects) a glance at the work makes me think their algorithms needs much time and processing power, and too many photos for an average user. In other words, it’s not something for a startup to hope for without a budget. As another early impression, I find an interesting part in how they created the feature recognition, since many parts of the image analysis should be greatly helped by understanding the scene. On the BBC site:

It picks out distinctive features in each image and cross-references them against the other photographs, checking for similarities.

As a final note (a bit off topic), I would like to apologize to one of my readers who asked about using the POSIT object with OpenCV. I have only looked into this a few times but never actually used it more than for a few quick test runs, but since your question made me think a bit I decided to have a look as soon as I can after moving (I am actually in the process of packing and preparing for an ineresting move to an interesting move to a new country, which is the main reason I haven’t been able to answer the question). Until then, I recommend the Yahoo OpenCV group. I would be interested in reading/hearing about any findings you make, and wish you the best of luck in finding the answer you seek.

As mentioned before, I’ve been looking a bit at “GTD mentality” (GTD means “Getting Things Done”, basically it’s about ways to be more efficient) lately, and even though I was already effective and doing many of the actions I found recommended, I decided to try a few more. This basically means I’m currently trying out a few different online apps to help de-clutter my mind. Besides starting to note more in my calendar, I’m trying out Remember The Milk (RTM) and Vitalist as task management systems, while also easily integrating them in my Google Calendar to see deadlines for current tasks.

RTM is a system I see as focused on todo lists, more than a complete task management. I enjoy being able to tag each task without having to define the tag before, the integration with other tools (GMail, Google Calendar) is good and simple, which is also the case when adding tasks to the predefined categories. That is, the addition of tasks is simple, but I find it a bit lacking when wanting to specify more about a task I added - when moving my mouse over the list I find that I’m suddenly on another task, instead of simply highlighting the latest task and let me edit date and tags, write notes, share the task, specify a url etc - in other words, the basics. A big plus for RTM is that it’s a free service. I’ve used RTM for work tasks, where most projects have a similar theme, meaning it’s easy to simply keep them in the work tasks and separate by using tags.

Vitalist let’s you specify your own projects and sub-project, ticklers, tasks for “some day”, add new tasks by Jott (speech to text service, seems only to be working in US though) besides giving the possibility to show your tasks in your online calendar, although with the downside of not being able to edit or add tasks through the calendar (at least not as far as I’ve seen, using Google Calendar). As a side note, I’ve been using Vitalist for my home tasks, having multiple projects which are not similar - here I can differ between various projects and contexts, besides the handy multi-level project interface.

The verdict between those two system is relatively equal, leading me to give 3/5 as a rating for each of the services. I will probably try one or two others soon, such as Toodledo, Ta-da List or Todoist, although I’m taking the Todoist warning seriously: “High usage of Todoist may result in an organized life”. All the five mentioned systems seem to have good integration with other online app’s which help you getting things done, such as online calendars, email and other, and in true “Web 2.0″ spirit, of course most have an API if you want to do something in your own way, for example by mashing them all up together with the calendar of your choice, an email system (or a few) and of course put it all together with a good context interpreter (”if you are going to do this, maybe you should remember to do that other thing first”) - we all know from ProgrammableWeb’s 600 API:s that the possibilities are vast, and few categories are missing…

While on the subject of being productive and efficient, three of my favorite blogs often have articles on the subject, with lifehack.org’s “50 Simple Ways To Stay Productive“, Zen Habits “10 steps to becoming an email ninja” and Lifehacker’s “Newsreader showdown” as examples from this and last week. I find reading articles from those three blogs a nice start of the day, and would recommend subscribing to anyone.

I found a great video with perfect music a few days ago, and simply can’t stop watching and listening! The video is made by shooting photos with 2 hour intervals at the same location for a year - giving us a video showing battery park day and night, autumn, winter, spring and summer; an incredible result IMHO. I found the video at Photojojo

Photojojo’s Time Lapse Video of Bryant Park from Photojojo on Vimeo.

In the summer I spent an afternoon on the balcony, reading a book while shooting a photo approximately once every second minute, just to see the effect of those photos when flipping through them fast (and of course, I some days have a difficulty in doing only one thing at a time). Now I feel inspired not only to make a short video with that set of photos, but also set up my good old webcam to create a jpg every 30 minutes and make a video from that…

Lately, I’ve been enjoying my mornings with reading ‘lifehacking blogs’, such as the popular Lifehacker, lifehack.org and Zen Habits, which give short and tips and tricks for living your life to the fullest. I can recommend reading about for example ‘How not to Multi-task‘, ‘Live the life of a Champion‘ and how to ‘Clean your home in 19 minutes‘. It seems like they have tips for anything in your offline life, and often also for getting more productive online.

Some of the best tips I’ve found in there are to find goals for your life to help motivating the changes you need, never bring work to home, but work on creating your future, and get rid of things that clutter your life. So find or remember your goals now, and find the way to practice them, and use them to create or do something productive you can show - if you don’t have any ideas of what to do in the area there’s always sites online you can look at to help you with simply getting ideas or to brainstorm by yourself or in groups, there’s tools for everything.. You can find tips for that in other posts on this blog, or at the Lifehacking blogs I linked to at the start of this.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about improving my Spanish, so when I stumbled upon the site SpanishSense, which contains lessons with voice dialogs, podcasts and help material I became pretty excited. One thing I really like about the site is how they allow you to embed lessons in your own site, to spread the word and build a community where everyone can help eachother in the learning process. According to the site, they also have Chinese lessons, but I’ll wait with looking into that for now - after all, it’s easy getting those new languages confused with the five I already know (six if you count beginner spanish that I didn’t practice for 2-3 years). You can try one of the SpanishSense lessons (introductions) by using the player I put in this post…

Another thing I did to find ways of improving my Spanish was to add a tab called Spanish to my iGoogle page - which of course gave quite a few widgets to use, including a dictionary, Babelfish and news in Spanish.

In other news, I’m looking around at a lot of Web 2.0 sites lately, getting some invites here and there (often found through Mashable), getting updated on new web API:s through ProgrammableWeb while in the process of starting one new site and one new blog. Meanwhile I’ve learned more about Google maps API (including the AJAX version), tiny mce (there must be ways of doing it better, but since it’s popular I guess they’re on to something), Community Server (I’m not very impressed), Dapper, Yahoo! pipes, Google trends and some add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Next is to learn some more about the Google Mashup Editor and perhaps OpenKapow for the site I’m creating. Together with Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes I believe those tools can make wonders…

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