Category: Social

Navizon Buddy Finder

Navizon was one of the pioneers of application development for the iPhone and as such I think we’re going to see something cool from them come February when the official iPhone SDK is released. The Navizon Buddy Finder is probably one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and something I’d be interested in a lot, … Continue reading “Navizon Buddy Finder”

Navizon was one of the pioneers of application development for the iPhone and as such I think we’re going to see something cool from them come February when the official iPhone SDK is released.

The Navizon Buddy Finder is probably one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen and something I’d be interested in a lot, however I think I’d work some on the UI before I would be happy with it. We’re going to see an explosion of IM and VoIP apps for the iPhone around then and I would really like to see location based information being available too.

I want to have lists of buddies, I want to be able to name locations and I want to be able to opt out of some updates easily.

As the iPhone is, in effect, always on, I’d like to be have it send updates to my ‘Status server’ so that instead of seeing

MJ
Love Minus Zero – Bob Dylan

in my chosen IM application – I’d have something like:

MJ
Unsent – Alanis Morissette
At Home

or

MJ
She’s so Lovely – Scouting for Girls
At the Daily Grind

or

MJ
You’re the First, The Last, My Everything – Barry White
Location Private

As I said, the UI of Buddy Finder isn’t to my taste but I think that’s more a question of polish and it’s amazing what they have achieved and an indication of what they could achieve with a documented SDK and no fear of a firmware update killing their release!

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I want FaceBook out of my face.

I want the updates from friends, I want their photos and little messages but I’m utterly bored of the little crappy apps that everyone wants me to install. I really don’t care for them. I install them to see the messages that friends send and 90% of the time it’s a video, it’s a SuperDuperWuperHug … Continue reading “I want FaceBook out of my face.”

I want the updates from friends, I want their photos and little messages but I’m utterly bored of the little crappy apps that everyone wants me to install. I really don’t care for them. I install them to see the messages that friends send and 90% of the time it’s a video, it’s a SuperDuperWuperHug or someone wants me to play a silly game of Vampire Slaying. This is the same sort of crap that people were sending on email a year ago and I was just as interested back then.

Get over it, I’m not interested and it’s that crap which is driving me away from FaceBook.

[Mood: Grumpy – as if that isn’t obvious. I was woken at 3:30 am by an emergency telephone call. Back in bed for 4:15 am. Sleep took me sometime around 4:50 am. I left the house at 6:45. Into the office at 6:58 am. And currently I’m uninstalling the cruft that people have sent me on FaceBook while waiting for “Outlook to retrieve information”. It’s a wonderful life really.]

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Shortcomings of our digital pals…

Robert Scoble was quietly raving about the Kindle for the last week but as he says, it’s easy to get geeks excited by new and shiny and much harder to excite the mass market. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this … Continue reading “Shortcomings of our digital pals…”

Robert Scoble was quietly raving about the Kindle for the last week but as he says, it’s easy to get geeks excited by new and shiny and much harder to excite the mass market.

  1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
  2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
  3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
  4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
  5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
  6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

It seems apparent to me that Kindle would have done a lot better if released one year ago but like the Nokia internet tablets, I’m betting that Amazon is trying to build a platform here.

The crazy thing is the comparison to the iPhone.

This gripe list reads to me like a iPhone wish list for OSX version 1.5. I’d expect that we’ll see some new features on the iPhone come February but anyone who’s Mac-development savvy should be getting up to speed with Leopard, Core Animation (LayerKit), Objective C 2.0 and starting to fill these gaps.

Build a Reader application which will hook into the dozens of online novel repositories, read PDF. Make a deal with O’Reilly to get their book into the new format (even if it is just reformatted PDF). Make the sharing thing real, make it like your book lending. Get Wil Shipley to make Delicious Library more than just what it does. What if it actually stored your books and allowed you to lend them in a reader format. How freaking cool would that be? Make it hook into the net to tell you when friends are online so you can send them your books directly over the net, rather than having to be in the same room.

Make sure the iPhone has capability of social networking. I’m not talking about MyFaceBeboSpaceBookster here, I’m talking about drawing the social network away from the big firms and where it belongs. Sure, there will be some rich apps for JaiTwitterMicroFaceBlogging (like my earlier mentioned Ghost) but realistically we really need to take back what is ours rather than waiting for big companies to provide it. Let’s see something from developers to fill that gap.

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