Today at work

Today at work I was at a meeting where we discussed facebook, twitter and secondlife among other things. These where not fleeting mentions but real discussion on things that are going to affect us. A couple of weeks ago we had one the programmers from secondlife come and give a talk to those that where interested. I did watch some of it on the live feed but could not attend. Since that point I think that there is a plan to buy our own island or sum such. It was also interesting to hear about other people in the university already exploring and using these technologies.

While my day job at it's core is just system admin again the areas that I am now involved in are a shed load more interesting.

Media Masters of the Universe

I came across a site called mediamaster while watching a podtech podcast the other day. Basically its an online site to store your music. There is a webapp, currently in Java, that allows you to upload your music and even supports direct import from iTunes if you use it. Then you can make playlist and do all the usual music management stuff. Then no matter where you are you can just lauch the player, in a browser, and get to all your music.

I have just started using it, uploaded a few files, and played with it on the PC. Seems to work okay with Linux so that is good and if nothing else acts as a nice backup of your music collection!

Now to the Internet Tablet but. The web player is written in flash but it does not seem to work with the current browsers on the n800 so that's a bit of a shame. There is however a mobile version of mediamaster, http://www.mediamaster.com/mobile/, that lists all your playlist. Click on one of the links and it loads it straight up into media player. So now I can play my entire music collection whereever I am, as long as I have wi-fi :-)

There is apparently a new version of the interface coming out in the next few weeks so this may all change but for now it looks okay.

The podcast that I watched is available here as well if you want: http://www.podtech.net/home/4429/the-future-of-home-entertainment-mediamaster

That'll be the pownce

Get your latest web2.0 fix with pownce. You already have a twitter account and are probably updating every 20 seconds or so. Now you can add in the ability to share files and links. Whoopee. Like all these sites it relies on you inviting all your friends so check your inboxes now.

There are already a spate of sites giving you less than ideal solutions for posting to all your microBlogging sites. Now we have another landgrab situation with all these sites starting up their own sites and protocols getting their own bunch of sites. What we need are more standards for this type of thing and a bit more openness. Most of these sites are built on open standards such as http, TCP/IP and javascript but they all want to lock you in and totally miss the point of the heratiage of what has got them to this point.

The jabber.org site was dedicated from the start to define the XMPP protocal for open instant messaging with one of the fundementals being server to server communication and so as people like google and gizmodo start to adopt this they instanly get that compatiablilty and the barriers to truley open instant messaging are slowly worn down. Think back to the time of Compuserve and AOL where you could not even send an email between the networks and this is how we are progressing with the current spate of online applications.

There is some light as some sites open up thier API and also provide RSS feeds but this is only part of the picture. If they had specified a protocol between themselves then from my twitter account I could also add in contacts from other services simply by adding names such as [email protected] or [email protected] and everything would be easy.

Add in OpenID to this and you could have a simple method for making contacts. I add you to my openID account as a contact and set you up to be able to contact me by electroinc forms, read my personal posts or photos and post to my public spaces then as I add more services you automatically get access to those.