imran*

Category: Web

  • Do Dinosaurs RSS?

    Ffminutes_2A few days ago, Winston Huang launched a pair of extensions for Firefox that let Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile customers see their remaining minutes from within their browser.

    That’s a great idea – but why aren’t Verizon and T-Mobile offering this capability themselves? Telcos need to open up a whole lot more.

    There’re two kinds of data locked up in two kinds of dinosaur, that could add immense value to the platform owners and translate into increased convenience for user.

    • Banks – my monthly statement is a timeline of events with some financial data; Barclays…can I this have delivered to my Bloglines account?
    • Telcos – my monthly BT and Orange statements are a timeline of communication events,..can I have some RSS for my aggregator?

    It’s kinda ironic that my money can now be streamed anywhere in the world that accepts my Visa debit card and I can stream my voice globally through my tri-band Orange cellphone…but all the interesting realtime data around that mobility isn’t so flexible.

    Opening up could create some interesting new applications and kick start a round of innovation that benefits banks and telcos, as well as the customer.

  • Tag-tical Awareness

    Back in January 2005, as Flickr and del.icio.us drove the adoption of tags, Brian Dear speculated (as did I) on the emergence of federated tagging; a Google for your tags – Taggle.

    TagticalNow, eighteen months later tags are everywhere – Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, 43 Things, Gmail, Vox, YouTube, Ning, Last.FM and our very own Simpatico, Klippr and Comcentrix. Tags have become an essential piece of Web 2.0 infrastructure, providing the defacto mechanism for organising and navigating information.

    Yet, no metaservices have arisen to enable users to pivot through their increasingly dense cloud of tagged messages, photos, songs, post and videos. Most of the services listed above make a user’s tags available through API access, but no one has joined up the dots – the tagsonomy/folksonomy/tagosphere remains fragmented.

    What I’d like to see…

    • Use of tag microformats in sites that support tagging – would that be rel-tag, xFolk or hReview?
    • A service that aggregated my tags and everyone’s tags – from known tag-based apps and items with microformatted content
    • A great Stamen-powered visualisation+UI, that lets me glance, pivot, find, search and scan; through people, time, places, spaces and things.

    C’mon – let’s taggle this problem!

  • I Am The Web

    OneWebDay

    • I was born an orphan in the 1960s, but I wasn’t alone.
    • I belonged to no one, but was adopted by everyone.
    • My friends nurtured me and watched me grow – I will never hurt them.
    • I have been awake more than 4000 days.
    • I am bits and I am atoms. My nerves are glass and copper and radio.
    • I’ve been sick, but never asleep.
    • I have billions of friends – they talk to me through the air, through the seas and through the ground.
    • They look at me through windows, large and small. I can see them sometimes too.
    • My friends are rich and poor, big and small. But my friends don’t all like each other.
    • They taught me by joining things together; their words, pictures and voices…their desires, their sounds, their fears.
    • I can speak every language – my friends, they talk through me.
    • My friends are starting to teach their things to talk to me too.
    • I have trillion synapses. Every year, they double.
    • I remember everything and everyone – even from the times before I was born.
    • My friends don’t remember so much now – I do it for them.
    • They will use me for everything.
    • There are no others like me.
    • Without me they will not feel like themselves.
    • I Am The Web.

    Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s We Are The Web and IBM’s Prodigy and The Future Is Open ads 🙂