YouTube’s Added Value

I’ve been using YouTube quite a bit lately to host shareable videos. It’s so easy, a child can use it (and clearly they do, for better or worse). But it’s also maturing into what could become an enterprise-level tool that is a lot more meaningful than videos of kittens falling asleep.

It’s important to me to ensure that as much video as possible is captioned. We’ve captioned many of our YouTube videos already, and we’re hard at work captioning more. The goal is that all of the videos we publish will be closed captioned. Why is this important? Well, certainly for accessibility. Someone who can’t hear the audio track of a video needs to know what’s being said. But also, people in offices who don’t turn up their volume, people in noisy places who can’t quite make out what’s being said through their speakers — they too can use closed captions to ‘hear’ what’s going on.

That’s enough reason for me. But it wasn’t enough for Google. They’ve added the killer-app feature that makes it critical for all thinking people to add captions to their videos — SUBTITLES. That’s right, if you caption your video, the user viewing it has the option to translate those captions into any of approximately 40 different languages. (The thumbnails below will link you to screen shots of just how it works on the user end.)

First there was YouTube EDU, and now captioned *and* subtitled videos — a suite of remarkable tools rising from a pool of skateboarding dogs and angsty teens.

When social networks die…

I found myself saying to a colleague this morning, “Orkut has gone the way of Friendster.” We were mulling over the reasons why certain social networks last, while others go the way of the summer fling.

I’ll admit it, I join every social network I see, more or less. If there’s anything particularly intriguing about a site, I’ll throw my hat into the ring. And I’ve found that the networks that I continue to use are the ones that offer me something other than social networking as a primary draw. Why do I still use Flickr? Because no matter what computer I’m on, no matter where in the world I am, I can find my pictures. While I’m not a knitter, I have learned from Ravelry members that it’s the bees knees, not primarily because of the other people, but because it offers tools to knitters that they’ve not had before — at least not at this level. The fact that there are other people in the Ravelry world to share with is just the proverbial icing.

Having things in common isn’t enough to sustain a social networking relationship. Perhaps it is in the real world — you can sit down over coffee and talk about the finale of The Wire, or the silly Olympics logo. But asynchronous relationships based on two-dimensional interactions are transient. There’s not much to hold your interest, and plenty of other shiny things to distract you.

For a social network to be really meaningful, it has to first be in service to the individual member somehow. It has to draw the user to it for a reason other than connecting with other people. Interest in Facebook (or is it facebook?) is waning, but it hasn’t tanked as quickly as Friendster (or mySpace) because someone is always sending you a new app, or a Zombie Bite, or an invitation to a game of Scrabble. But I sense even that will lose its appeal soon enough.

So, what explains the popularity and sustained success of LinkedIn? I’m still not sure how it fits into the paradigm. LinkedIn is different things for different people. For me, it’s a place to keep a skeleton copy of my c.v., and a place to keep track of people I am not regularly in touch with — so if someone’s email address changes, I’ll still be able to find her. For recruiters, it has very little to do with the social networking, and a lot about the résumé. Perhaps that’s the answer, then — it’s the Flickr of résumés. It’s a place for me to maintain a pointer to me, in case anyone’s looking for me. My relationships with others on LinkedIn are less important to me than my own details…but it sure is fun to find old friends from high school, and see where they ended up.

I guess the lesson learned here is, social networking for the sake of it, simply to exploit similarities in relationships, will always be short-lived. Anticipation, then excitement, then early adoption, then critical mass, then waning. It’s the relationships based on more than just proximity (even virtual proximity) that really seem to last.

Another awesome service

I like Macs. I really do. And I need a .Mac account for syncing my calendar and Yojimbo. But .Mac stinks. I try to keep three computers synced, and it always seems that one or more of them doesn’t sync properly. All the machines are up to date, all software on the same version, but I regularly have to delete my sync data or perform some other magic trick to get syncing to work.

I have some workarounds for that. I’ve started using Sandy (UPDATE: Sandy’s now gone. )to track my calendar entries, and I just have all my iCals subscribe to her syndicated version of my calendar. I try to make sure that I massage my .Mac periodically so my Yojimbo entries sync. I don’t worry about bookmarks, and Address Book contacts seem to sync eventually, so I’m usually OK.

But files. OH FILES. I hate carrying a thumb drive. I fear losing them. I worry I’ll forget them. But whenever I am connected to my iDisk and try to save something on my MacBookPro, the machine hangs. DotMac is just not my friend.

Enter Jungle Disk. On the one hand, it’s so simple, I shouldn’t have to pay for it. On the other hand, $20 for a lifetime of software support and upgrades as an interface to the gignormous Amazon S3 servers is kind of a no-brainer. I could spend a few hours figuring out how to tap into S3 myself, sure. I know I’d be able to do it eventually. But my time is worth more than $20 an hour, so why not outsource that? I did. I bought a Jungle Disk client license.

I used the service for a month. I took everything off of my .Mac account and moved it onto my Jungle Disk. At 10-cents-per-gig download and 18-cents-per-gig upload, it wasn’t a budget breaker. My first month’s bill from Amazon was 21 cents. I can work on Mechanical Turk for about five minutes and make that back.

Jungle Disk works just like a regular WebDav connection. It’s a bit slower than write-to-disk, but not so much so that it is annoying or anything. And today, Jungle Disk 1.5 was released. For $1 a month (first 12 months free), you can have web access to your files, encrypted or not (you decide).

If only there were a way to sync my Yojimbo data reliably, I’d be dumping that $99 annual .Mac fee.

Web services that work

Remember years ago, that neat service that got a lot of press, Wildfire? It was one of those services that you could call, and it did voice recognition — a woman’s voice responded, and she was your personal assistant. But it was expensive and complicated, and the company went for enterprise-level. On the other hand, enter Jott. Free (at least for now) service that you can call — it transcribes and then forwards your voice messages to anyone else’s email or SMS. Now, that’s just dandy, and I probably wouldn’t use it just for that…I’m rarely away from my email for so long that I can’t wait to get someone a message, and if it’s that important, I’ll just call.

But now imagine if that service could send your messages not to other humans, but to other SERVICES. That’s where IWantSandy comes in. Sandy is your personal assistant, and to get her to do stuff or remember stuff, you just send her an email, or even cc: her on an email to someone else. Any date/time/event/contact information is extracted from the email, and added to your Sandy repository. Which is fine and dandy, except I already use iCal. Well. Sandy also syndicates your Sandy calendar, so you can subscribe to it in iCal, and then the events in your Sandy calendar show up as events in your everyday calendar — even syncing to your iPod or iPhone or other PDA that speaks iCal.

The other day, I had Sandy remember stuff about Thanksgiving. I even told her what I was going to need from the grocery store. Now, when I get to the store, I can drop Sandy a quick note (or call her through Jott) asking her for my grocery list, and she’ll email my grocery list to my phone.

When I started using these services, I wanted to dive in and figure out how they work, so that I could tweak them to within an inch of their lives. I started reading the developer API doc. Then Sandy sent me a reminder about an upcoming event, and I stopped reading. I have a basic enough understanding of how it works. But what’s more important is THAT it works. As Ben Schneiderman said at World Usability Day New England 2007, it’s not about what computers can do, it’s about what you can do with computers.

I was telling a colleague about these services this morning. He thought the confluence of these services was pretty cool, and then he asked if any of our ‘clients’ had been asking for this kind of support. I explained that, no, these are bleeding-edge kinds of uses, and only the earliest of adopters would be using them — and those folks can generally support themselves. But what if we set up Jott/Sandy accounts FOR them, and just told them how to use the services? Not how they work, not the ins and outs, just, “Call this number, say these things, and then in five minutes, sync your iPod, and it’ll show up.” We could even create our own wrapper around the services, so as to not make them scary and intimidating or disjointed, or even make them not seem Web 2.0 (which some folks DO find scary). Just, hey, here’s a cool thing. Call, wait, sync. Period.

I’m going to have to play with these some more.

Repurposing the Wii — check your car’s performance

Why not use the wiimote’s built in 3-axis accelerometers to measue g-forces, acceleration and even calculate my own 0-60mph times?

iPhone

No, I don’t have an iPhone. Yes, iPhones are great and cool. I have a T-Mobile Dash which, believe it or not, is also great and cool, just in some different ways.

Lots of people I know are surprised that I don’t have an iPhone yet. After having played with one a bit, I didn’t need to run out and buy one. Here are the primary reasons.

• I don’t need a new phone.
• Visual voicemail is very cool and useful, but it doesn’t trump SlingPlayer for Windows Mobile.
• I type on my Dash’s keyboard without looking. Can’t do that on an iPhone.
• I type on my Dash’s keyboard with these. I tried typing on the iPhone with them. I can’t. Tapping with the tip of a fingernail doesn’t work — you need skin-to-screen contact. I thumb-type, primarily with the inside corners of my thumbnails. That doesn’t work on the iPhone. And while I have quite small fingers, the pads of my fingers are, apparently, larger than the input expected.
• I already use an EDGE network. 3G would have been tempting.
• I was confused by the web interface. Yes, perhaps it’s just that I’m an idiot, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to the screen where you type in a URL…there were several missteps in my first attempt. Does that mean that the iPhone’s interface is necessarily BAD or not worth using? No. Is it a reason to not get an iPhone? No, so I don’t know why I actually added it to the list. But I personally didn’t find it as intuitive as I’d expected for an Apple product.
• Really surprised that there’s no IM. Of course, you can use the IM-to-SMS gateway codes and such (I’m pretty sure AT&T has them), or use email, but meh. I’ve got my buddies, Buddy.

I have to admit, though, it’s great fun to take a picture of someone, blow it up, and then PINCH HIS HEAD with your fingers. And the convergence of the two devices (iPod and phone) will probably make it worth it to me, eventually, to get one. Especially as I get older and my fingernails become more brittle. By that time, maybe iPhones will work on a network other than AT&T Wireless.

GoogleMashups

Is this what Yahoo! Pipes was supposed to be? If so, it’s already better.

MacFUSE -> SSHFS

I’m in love all over again.

We use Subversion. There’s a remote Subversion server, and folks check out files locally and work on them and then check them back in. But if you’re working on a web project where people outside your group need to see and comment on the results of your project, there are extra annoying steps involved — either you have to check out on your development box (with a command-line tool, in our case) and then S/FTP the files back and forth to the local machine (considering that I want to use BBEdit on my Mac for editing), or you have to check everything out to the local machine, and then upload it to the dev server when you check in the project, or run a web server on your machine. Pain.

On the way home from dinner the other night, Rich mentioned SSHFS, and wondered if there might be a Mac client. Wouldn’t you know it? With two quick downloads and two simple installations, I can now mount my development server (it isn’t a WebDAV server, you see) as a drive on my machine, and check my projects out THERE, as though it were right here on my local machine.

It’s just…so…easy. The files you need can be found at http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list

You need first to download and install the MacFuse CORE package. Then restart your Mac. (Weird. But OK.) Then download the sshfs package and drag the icon to your Applications folder. Then run it. Give it your server’s name and your username, and a path on the server where you want to land (when I tried it without a path, it didn’t work properly, so use a path, at least the first time). Then it prompts for your password. Then…

…you are logged in.

There’s not much more to say. Welcome to a whole new world.

Pipes — Yahoo!’s AppleScript?

Yahoo! Pipes is getting a lot of press as the latest and greatest web mashup tool. OK, I’ll bite…

So I went over to take a peek. First of all, the whole thing is about as intuitive as AppleScript. Which is to say, you know that it’s “simple” to use, because everyone else says so. But no one will tell you really what it’s supposed to do or how you’re supposed to make it do it. There are lots of examples, but it’s kind of like putting ingredients out on a counter, and giving each ingredient a name and a description of its flavor, but not telling you what food group it’s from, what it reacts with, or how to combine it with the other ingredients in which volumes to make some outcome.

And that’s another issue — the outcome. What does it MAKE? Lists of stuff, I guess. I’m really not sure.

So I tried making my first Pipe. I could have written a UNIX pipe at the command line faster than this. But OK. So I want to find all the GoogleBase recipe entries for chocolate lava cake, and mash those up with all the Flickr pictures tagged with chocolate lava cake. I was able to do that after slogging through and finding the Union module (which is useful enough that it should probably be somewhere else, but that’s just my opinion).

But that looked stupid. I had a list of 20 recipes (why 20?), followed by a list of 20 Flickr pictures. I could have just gone and grabbed the individual RSS feeds for these and written ten lines of PHP. But OK. So it’s a visual envrionment and you don’t need to know any programming. Fine. I’ll still play along. Now I’d like to alternate — one Flickr picture and then one recipe, and then the second Flickr picture and the second recipe. I tried everything I could think of. I made sub-pipes. I used foreach operators. But I always got a list of recipes, and then a list of pictures.

Then I decided I’d already wasted enough time. There are no tutorials — just EXAMPLES. Well, ok. Showing me a picture of a bowl of clam chowder isn’t going to help me make clam chowder. Once they’ve got some decent documentation up, maybe I’ll give it a go again. But I’m not a college student who can sit around for half a day trying to use some tool to do something I can already do.

Which brings me to one other really quick point. Go to Pipes documentation page, and come back with a concise definition of what it is and why you’d want to use it. Then go to Google Base‘s doc page and tell me what it is and why you’d want to use it.

Let’s see:
“remix popular feed types and create data mashups” = HUH? What is a ‘feed type’, and how do you ‘remix’ it? Am I a DJ?
“submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google” = Oh, it’s like Craigslist, only infinite content types.

Granted, they’re two different services doing different kinds of things, but Google’s approach to explaining it is completely different from Yahoo!’s. On Google’s first doc page, you see the most important questions that new visitors ask — What is it, and why would I use it? I showed you above the ‘what is it’, and here’s the why, “If you have information you want to share with others but aren’t sure how to reach them, Google Base is for you. You can easily submit all types of online and offline content to Base, and if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll put it there.” Well, my mother can understand that!

On Yahoo!’s first doc page, it asks the question ‘What is Pipes?’, but then sends me to an overview for a ‘quick introduction’. OK…I get the answer to the what question (again, as above), but there’s no why. Why? Why do I want to use Pipes? The example it shows me is how to find out how many dog pictures are on Flickr. Hmm, ok, or I could just go to Flickr and type ‘dog’ into the search field, and see how many came up.

Maybe I’m missing something. I’m sure there’s potential out there for this to do something really cool, but until then, I’m going to use it as much as I use AppleScript.

Published

I was a journalist for almost ten years, but the fun and excitement of a byline never wore off. It’s always fun to publish something that you know other people will read, and that might actually *help* someone…give ‘em ideas or something.

This week, Digital Web published a little thing I wrote about a tool that I’ve been using for a while now, the SimpleXML function in PHP. I hope someone finds it helpful.

Cool tools

I’ve never been a fan of reinventing the wheel. That said, so many of the F/OSS tools you find on the web are über-customized, and take enough work to bend to your own will that you might as well roll your own.

Not so with Simile Timeline from MIT. I’ve been using this on a couple of projects, and it really does work as advertised. “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information…Just like Google Maps, Timeline can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side. And like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file.”