In January 2007, I wrote about what I wanted out of software and mobile devices. I called it my Ghost

My Ghost has communication to the core. It reflects my status and copies that to all of my applications. When I’m busy, I set it to BUSY and it handles all of my email, voicemail and instant messages. When I am available it allows them to come through. When talking on the phone, it changes my status to “on the phone” and when I’m busy playing “Jet Set Willy for GHOST”, it rightfully changes my status to “In a meeting”. When I’m available, I want it to retrieve my GPS co-ordinates and use them as a tag so that my buddies and colleagues can see where I am. For when I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, I want to be able to switch that off too

Of course, a few days later Apple announced the iPhone, which began to seem relatively prescient. It would take another 18 months for iPhone to have GPS or third party software which would enable all of this, but I can see it on the horizon for the first time.

Half a year ago, Chris Brogan wrote some science fiction:

Chris’s context engine has 3 favorite orders for this particular coffeeshop chain. He clicks the second option on his phone, and waits to collect it, making smalltalk with the server. Meanwhile, the context engine has noticed that 14 friends within 5 minutes distance of the coffeeshop have revealed status and location information favorable for a visit. The engine offers up a “meetup” option, with checkboxes next to each person’s name. Chris selects 3 of the 5 and invites them by for coffee and a chat.

When you see demos like Loopt which was on stage at WWDC coming to iPhone soon, you realise how close to the real world this all is.

I need software that will allow me to manage my attention, retain my memory, enhance my judgement:

More than just minding my eBay (I don’t use eBay) but telling me when friends are nearby and when their status isn’t set to ‘Do Not Disturb’, reminding me at opportune times (like when I’m in town or at a mall) that I need to buy a birthday present for someone, allowing me to set thresholds which are contextual (like telling me that I’m “twenty minutes at 30 mph” away from the next meeting and I really should get my skates on.)

We have persistent network links, we have GPS, we have social networks, we have electronic funds transfer and we have location-based mashups of all of this. Everyone is throwing in their little bits and it absolutely gobsmacks me that GAMY haven’t jumped on this. Especially Yahoo.

We do have to consider the security and privacy aspects:

Some people don’t want this. Yeah, well, don’t turn it on. It’s a bit like complaining about privacy breaches on FaceBook. If you’re worried at all about your privacy, don’t put your data in there because your friends are the liability here and will likely give out all sorts of personal information.

I’m not worried about services which show my location to friends because, if they’re on my friends list then I don’t mind them knowing and as long as I’m where I’m meant to be, what’s the problem?

As for security, again - don’t use the service if you’re nervous about your security being compromised. Don’t put your birthday, the names of your kids and dog and other personal information on the net if you’re unsure about the safety, that’s just asking to have your identity compromised.

Now, we just need someone to build it.

BarcampBelfast 2008 is planned for Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm. Last year I had other commitments and couldn’t make it but I intend to turn up this year. Mac-Sys did sponsor it last year and will be doing so again. I think we need more of these events.

There’s already a set of speakers lined up but they’re looking out for more if you’re interested. I would like to speak on something but fear that my areas of knowledge are sufficiently shallow that there’d be nothing I could really teach anyone, especially when faced with the people speaking there.

The subjects do tend to be tech-heavy but that’s the problem. The subjects I know well enough to talk about (or could brush up on) would be of little relevance to the audience (unless people really want to know about OSPF or MLTs…I know I don’t!) and I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my epic failure at becoming a programmer (it’s code night tonight in Bangor, oh yes…)

Make the effort to turn up.

NiMUG are having another meeting!.

They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.

Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?

James, the EirePreneur, is maintaining a map of Free (or cheap) WiFi hotspots in Ireland. Log into GMail and then you can add extras. I’ve added a few in the North, mostly centred around McDonalds (which explains why I look like I’ve been Supersized).

Add some more in? What about your own?

Direct Link Here

David Brin writes for EDGE on their 2008 question:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

I agree that social networks are trivialising communication, the quality of the human species which really sets us apart. Our ability to formulate ideas would be wasted without the ability to share them. It’s therefore unfortunate that the vast majority of FaceBook conversation seems to be in comparing trivia knowledge, attacking each other with virtual werewolves or using the platform to spread the latest YouTube hit about some girl baring her breasts on webcam when her dad walks in (and I certainly believe that each and every one of those was staged).

I ache for meaning in conversation. Some old fashioned conversation about The Selfish Gene or the Null Hypothesis of Alien Life. Conversation where my preconceptions might be challenged, firing my imagination and igniting something in my poor brain long thought dormant.

Funwall? Fuck off.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about “Going Bedouin”, an idea of working that I adore and which I have tried to do for several years, while working for a large telecoms company and also while working for my own company. I feel it helped the company pay for my productivity because as I embraced the flexibility to work from home, the company also received the benefits of me being available possibly 24×7 because I didn’t begrudge the call at 2 am (unlike the call at 2 am I got last night which I certainly did begrudge). It meant I was happy to help people out and most importantly I didn’t feel the need to demand extra money for the privilege.

Chris Brogan’s blog has an interesting post on how to become a digital nomad which is as much a marketing term as “Bedouin”.

1. Smartphone
   

   It’s important to stay in contact if you’re going to be Bedouin. This means choosing your technology carefully. It’s no longer good enough to carry a pager and mobile phone. The expectation now is that you’ll get your email too and with the release of the iPhone comes the first mature implementation of a browser in a handheld device. It’s relegated my laptop for a lot of the day to the laptop bag.

2. Online apps
   

   While I recognise that online apps do provide a lot of power and sometimes a lot more potential for collaboration, I’m still very much a fan of rich clients. I don’t want to use primitive web app user interfaces which haven’t really changed recently. For what they offer, it’s a lowest common denominator model. It works, but it ain’t pretty.

3. Centralising
   

   This makes a lot of sense and I’d clarify by saying that as well as centralising some of your services it’s worth considering outsourcing those which don’t add value. Get everyone accounts on the same domain with the same reliable provider and keep these production services separate from your development servers and off your own machines. The economies of scale make it worthwhile.

4. Online/Offline Storage
   

   Just do backups. Don’t mess around with your data. That’s one of the beauties of laptops and PDAs, for the most part they have insuffient storage for keeping all of your data. My laptop has a 160 GB drive in it which is a tenth of what I need for storage. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage which really isn’t enough for anything other than current email. And the odd movie. Keep regular backups and consider keeping your data in the cloud - so you can access it from anywhere.

5. Messaging/Presence management
   

   If you’re not using instant messenger applications in business then you’re behind the times. I have no doubts that Skype and iChat will make it onto the iPhone which will make my phone the hub of my communications network rather than my laptop. I don’t believe for a second that Twitter and similar wanky apps are going to to be the core of the semantic web. They’re missing everything to do with context. I don’t wast to know only a short message about someone. I want to know where they are, how they are and whether they want to meet for coffee. FaceBook or Google would seem to be the contenders here for writing the meta-app which will fulfill your context needs. I just don’t really want content delivered as a side order to a main course of advertising.

6. Plan your gear
   

   This means not only making sure the kit you have is the right kit, but making sure you invest in ways and means to keep that gear running. I get a full day out of my always-on, incredibly busy iPhone. That means, if I’m planning ahead, always making sure I have at least got an iPod connection cable handy for a quick juice-up if I’m running low. For laptops you have to consider most have a battery life of 2-3 hours with some stretching it out to 5. So that’s more bulk to lug about. You’ll also have to get less shy about using power points in coffee shops and airports. The staff in the places I have been have never objected to me plugging in. Scope them out and make a beeline for them if they are free. Power is a more valuable commodity to a mobile worker than WiFi. Think about that.

For me it’s a waiting game. I’m waiting to see what will be possible with the iPhone when the SDK is released as I’m filled with ideas on how to manage this, how to add to what is already out there. I’m less and less keen on FaceBook and their constant barrages of crap but they are in the best position to start providing an implementation of the “digital shadow” (as PJ called it.

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!

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.