Data centres to off-centre opinion

With the explosion of blogs and social networking sites over the last few years, its apparent (at least to me) that whoever creates a compelling aggregation service will be onto a winner. Facebook is getting there, you can already integrate it with Twitter, but what about all the other information sources we each use?

I consider aggregation from two perspectives; the publisher (me as an individual and my internet persona) and reader (me seeing everything my freinds & colleagues are up to).

Why do I need a publisher?

• I have several blogs each focused on a particular theme
• I have Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and numerous other online profiles
• I publish photos on my Flickr account, in my Facebook profile and in my Windows Live Photo Gallery
• I scroble music on Last.FM and I have a Zune profile

Few of these are connected, and many now offer competing services. Should I be uploading photos to my Facebook profile, my Flickr account or my Windows Live gallery? For me, the answer is all of them because each offer somthing unique. Flickr is great for “just sharing photos”, Facebook is great for sharing photos relating to some event and Windows Live is just plain easy with the local client (Windows Live Photo Gallery) and I tend to use it for my climbing photos. I want all these connected so anyone can see all my photos, nicely organised irrespective of the service they’re hosted on. The same applies for blogs, tweets etc; it makes it easy for you to see what I’m doing or thinking about. The converse of this is my desire to see everything my friends are up to, in one place. Aka, the reader aspect.

Whoever is able to pull together a social graph/aggregator like this, whilst still allowing the uniqueness of each service to be exposed (i.e. not attempting to replace each service, just provide a launch pad) will be onto a winner. They may even be one of the first to make money from social networking.

After writing this blog entry and searching for a suitable image, I found that Google are ahead of me and already have an API which could help a would-be developer build a social aggregator.

Spotify, the new on-demand music streaming service is an interesting (and in my opinion, innevitable) evolution of internet radio. Its idea is simple, install the client, create an account, type the name of an atrist, enjoy. Unlike Last.FM, you’re not forced to listen to your chosen artist interspersed with others, its U2 all the way (or whoever you chose).

From a technology standpoint, they’ve done nothing clever: iTunes and Zune basically do the same thing, only they deliver you an MP3/WMA/AAC rather than stream. Oh, and you have to pay for tracks you download from iTunes and Zune Marketplace.

What makes Spotify interesting is their business model; either listen to the odd add or pay a monthly subscription for ad-free listening. No doubt most users (me included) will be opting for the ad-funded version, it will be interesting to see how many tracks per ad Spotify settle on to make money. In other words, Spotify is to Music what Google is to search from a business perspective.

Now the clever part; if they’re able to profile their users, they will be able to target us with more relevant ads, which turns into revenue for them. If I were them, I’d be partnering with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to obtain user profile information. Which leads me to think they’ll be bought pretty soon. It may not be one of those three, I could see a media company picking them up, but rest assured, if they’re able to prove the business model works they’ll be bought, and soon.

Can Last.FM evolve to compete? Will MySpace, iTunes or Zune offer something similar? I don’t know, but I’m sure they’re watching, very closely.

I’ve known about Twittervision for a while; basically it plots twits on a map of the world in near real-time. Its fun to sit and watch for a minute or so, but I can’t help but think it needs some filtering and aggregation to make it truely useful.

For example, a filter/search box allowing you to enter a term would show you the relevant twits relating to that subject from around the world. Watching this for a few minutes (or even better, some ability to record and see a timeline) would show you what different parts of the world thought about the subject.

 I installed Windows 7 build 7000 about a month back and was impressed from day 1. OK, so I work for the company so I’m going to be a bit biased however Win7 is fast, the preview when you hover over a window on the taskbar is really intuitive and getting to network settings is a lot quicker. I miss the sidebar, and find the default Windows Key+E has change to display Library which is annoying. My Tosh Tecra M4 ran Vista like complete dog but Win7 is completely usable with no annoying pauses, it boots fast and sleeps quickly. The only bug I’ve experienced is when resuming from sleep the machine claims it cannot contact the default gateway on the Wifi network. The Troubleshoot Network wizard fixes this (basically by releasing and renewing the IP address lease), lets hope its gone in the final build.

Even running Windows 7 in a VM (Virtual PC or Hyper-V) is fast and totally usable, so it looks like all the optimisation and removal of some Vista features has paid dividens. Of course, Windows 7 benefits from all the Vista drivers that have been released over the last two years, something which Vista struggled with early on. I’ve even installed Win7 on my Media Centre and like the updated UI and greater configuration options which are available.