Oh Snap - MyPostButler 2.0 is back

Oh snap – look what just landed in my inbox from the developer, the latest revision of MyPostButler with oauth capabilities PLUS the ability to configure for any consumer key/secret/call back url.

I think we'll call this "Version 2.0 - the cockroach version".

Anyone want to send me an email with your twitter username and I'll send you a copy - i highly suggest it not be your main Twitter account..... lol.

I'm wondering what Twitters next step to block me is?

So people what do you think….keep the Flippa auction going and sell the source code or “slash and burn” and open source the code and let the chips fall where they may with 1000+ api applications?


I'll leave it up to commenters on my blog to let me know - open source the code OR keep selling it – play nice or play twitter at their own game – what do you think?

Cheers,

Dean

Twitter Officially Sux

So if you're a Twitter developer and you've been anywhere near me in the last month then i would have chewed your ear off about the travesty that Twitter are about to pull.

I'll keep it simple but basically Twitter are changing the way 3rd party developers applications work with the Twitter API, not content with just filling holes or buying out the competition they have implemented something called oAuth.

The way i'm going to describe it is technically not correct BUT it works something like this;

In the past the way MyPostButler used to connect to the Twitter API was using the end users Twitter account username and password.

If a specific user did something wrong then twitter had the option/ability of banning that user (which is the way it should be), not the accounts for every single user of the entire application installed base.

Now they are forcing ALL applications to use something called "Oauth" - what this does is that each application now has a "key", so when i use MyPostButler to connect to the API now i have to use the "Twitter username+the password+ the application key" (like i said technies, it's not entirely correct the way i'm explaining it BUT near enough).

So i guess about now you are thinking...so what.

Well here lies the rub, Twitter at any time can turn off the "Application key" so even if you an end user have purchased an application and did nothing wrong Twitter are able to with one single keyboard stroke turn off the applications entire user base.

So lets say Twitter purchased an Android client tomorrow, and then they decided no other android client should work with their API apart from theirs....no probs, just kill all of the "application keys" being used by the competing android clients and their entire userbase is switched off in one hit.

So why do i care?

Well about 9 months ago Twitter sent me a Cease and Desist notice (basically threatening to sue me) because they didn't like how i was letting end users access their API - at the time i said i'm using the API within your guidelines limits (eg you cant send more than 250 DM's a day, you cant follow or unfollow more people than twitter allow anyone using a common browser etc etc) so my reply to them was see you in court.

In the end they kind of ignored and stopped returning my phone calls after about 3 weeks of back and forth with the lawyers and i kept selling the MyPostButler application the same way i always did.

With oAuth - they wouldn't have even bothered, Twitter could just come in to the office in the morning and "turned my entire user base off" with a single key stroke by deleting my application key.

So herin lies the rub - if Twitter are going to put themselves out their as some great information super highway.... how can they pick and chose what kind of car i drive on that super highway?

I mean they are now "storing tweets in the library of congress" for peats sake - this is verging on a public utility almost.

How would you feel if Steve Jobs had the right to remotely destroy any Apple laptop with a keystroke because you wrote something bad about him he didn't like even though you paid good money for your laptop?

So as of this date i officially stop developing Twitter applications.

I officially herby proclaim Twitter Officially Sux and I'm moving to Friendster posts only (joke).


Cheers,
Dean

YouTube Rentals

Did YouTube leave their paid rental business too late?

Have you ever rented a video from YouTube? Do you know anyone who has paid to rent a video from YouTube?

I mean they are doing some really creative things with massively distributed live video these days (eg the IPL Cricket deal was a sensational win for them) but no one ever talks about what they are doing with paid video.

What do you think? What should they do from here?

Cheers,
Dean

Symantec buying PGP?

Could PGP make a comeback?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/29/symantec_buys_pgp/


Cheers,
Dean

ROFL - Remember peoples the internets is forever

Long circular story but it's a funny one.

This morning an email from Yelp about Brooklyn came in;

Now there is nothing better than fish and chips on the grass at Bondi Beach or similar and i miss the experience so i think cool will have to check out Park Slope Chip Shop

Which lead me to this review;

Which lead me to this article;

http://gawker.com/5341401/park-slope-mom-who-wants-to-ban-predatory-ice-cream-trucks-is-a-fried-pudding-pusher

lol - oh the irony but it gets funnier.

The mother Vicki Sell jumps into the comments

which is when the riots begin including this classic;

Lol poor Katherine Sell is going to stumble over this in 10 years and wonder WTF? ROLF this is exactly what the internets is all about, forget ecommerce, online learning or voip - storing stuff online for eternity so future generations can find it years into the future and wonder WTF?

Remember peoples the internets is forever - do you really want to see that sexting MMS of yours from that weekend in Cabo in 10 years from now?


Cheers,
Dean

Kangaroo TV

So what do people think about the Kangaroo TV device and the deployment at not only Miami Dolphins but also across every NFL stadium ?



http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/article/138006
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2010-03-22-nfl-technology_N.htm

- Has anyone reading this used a Gen3 device (or even the older generation devices).
- What do you think of them?

- What other 'apps' apart from video and stats would you like to see on them?

-How much would you pay to use these (only available in vip boxes at the moment), and do you think you would prefer to rent or buy? (and buy probably means buy with annual subscription fee)

I know they are using localised broadcast for video but anyone know how the return path works or any limitations? (and yeh it's a shame they use OSBT for video, would rock if this was wifi enabled streaming).


Cheers,
Dean

Venture Capital

I was reading this article on venture capital - http://www.businessweek.com/print/smallbiz/content/apr2010/sb20100420_472554.htm and it hit me; Can you imagine a doctor coming into the surgery in the morning and saying 9 out of 10 choices I make today are going to be wrong but don’t worry 1 out of 10 will be hugely successful – any other industry apart from venture capital would have seen these people/business practises bounced a long time ago.

I think what this means for the future is that whilst investors will be placing fewer bets their success ratio will go up as ‘dogs’ are going to be weeded out earlier (eg bright idea X with no rev model).

I’m a founder of a startup but even I when I look at some of my competitors I think some founders are “turning the business of raising money” into their end goal instead of building a successful business that is self supporting without investment.

There are a lot of dogs that should never have received funding and this isn’t good for either founders OR investors.

Cheers,

Dean

Iron Man 2 rocks QR codes

Another WarbasseDesign movie QR code, super slick design use of the QR location too.
Phillip really is on another level compared to most marketers competing with him out there.

Cheers,
Dean

P.S. Hey you, Yes you, Do you feel that you are a QR newbie and clueless? check out www.Cognation.net/QR and read the 60 second dummies guide and you'll be fine.

New York destoyed by 8bit

I love how talented some people are.

Thank you so much Patrick Jean, brought back so many great memories i almost wanted to break out my MAME software and dig out a Galaga rom.




Cheers,
Dean

The prevalence of mobile

I snapped this photo in the subway today, it's a perfect representation on the prevalence of mobile these days.

We should always remember that no matter what the current status of life, things can change sooner than you think.


Cheers,
Dean

FourSquare selling to Yahoo

Michael Arrington is saying FourSquare shouldn't sell out to Yahoo
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/18/dont-sell-out-foursquare-not-now-not-to-yahoo/


My advice would be;

Take the cash and move on.

Deliver a successful ROI for your investors and build another cool startup in 18-24 months from now after taking a fantastic holiday and some time off.

Ideas are easy and if Yahoo is the biggest cheque book at the table then they deserve to win the bidding war.


Cheers,
Dean

BarCampNYC5

BarCampNYC5 was this weekend.

http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com/ was a proud supporter of this event along with Microsoft, Palm and Blip.tv

Unfortunately i was having so much fun that i forgot to snap a photo until the very last session on Sunday but there were about 100-150 people on both days covering a variety of great topics.

It's great to see how many super smart people there are driving innovation here in NY. It's a fun time to be living here.


Cheers,
Dean

Why Australians are well placed in the "work smarter" economy

"It's an ability to go out and work harder, smarter and more efficiently. We will look at the person, we will look at what they've done in this recession, where they've come from and how motivated they are."


"The Australian-ness is a really interesting thing," said Shane Brennan, Executive Producer of NCIS . "It really is. It's something special, and it's not just the accent. The accent attracts their attention, but there's a bluntness and there's a frankness about Australians that Americans respond to."

"What I look for when I hire - I look for these qualities, I look for no bullshitting: Tell me what the problem is, and don't be scared to tell me what the problem is, because we'll fix it together."

http://www.advance.org/en/art/4633/
 
 
Couldn't have said it better myself; some people dont like me because I'm blunt but you'll always know where you stand with me.
 
 
Cheers,
Dean

content creation versus consumption

Great post on content consumption versus content creation / ipad at

http://vergenewmedia.com/2010/04/11/open-vs-closed-media-and-why-its-ok-to-just-be-a-content-consumer

Although people on ipads can participate at http://www.livebaseballchat.com/ i'd much prefer to have people using a laptop who are there to add value than just consume.

+ 1


Cheers,
Dean

Chinese (shanghai) F1 this Sunday

Open invitation for anyone watching the Chinese Formula one race live this Sunday to join us for Live "in the race" Chat.

The local time for your location is located at - http://www.livef1chat.com/CHurl/04-15-2010/2956/2516

Or 'fan' us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/LiveF1chat  to get regular updates on F1 chat times.

 
Cheers,
Dean

ISP Tells Heavy Users: Pay More Or Lose Service

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=126177#comments

The Internet service provider Frontier has informed some broadband subscribers that they could be disconnected unless they agree to new $99-a-month rates. The reason? Those subscribers previously consumed more bandwidth than the company deemed reasonable.
"A reasonable amount of usage is defined as 5GB combined upload and download consumption during the course of a 30-day billing period,"


In Australia because dsl is the primary mode of delivery there is a lot of competition (albeit prices are higher than usa because of costs for international etc).

I was stunned when i moved to NY to find that i had a choice of only 2; Time Warner with cable, Verizon with DSL or freaking dialup.

Are you kidding me?

How many politicians do the cable and carrier companies keep in their pocket for that sweet deal?


Cheers,
Dean

Have you been down to the DMV lately?

So Ross Dawson has just posted an article on location dating being hot hot hot;
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/04/locationbased_d.html


My comments were;
Sorry, but i just dont see it happening.

I know i may be picky and whilst Grindr is proving a huge success amongst gay males...finding commonaility with this group has generally only been a 50/50 decision.

The density of appropriate matches just isn't there in real life. To quote Sienfeld "Have you been down to the DMV lately?"

So what do you think? am i wrong in my thinking?

Cheers,
Dean

remote mobile cpu

Mashable askes the question "What other shifts in Mobile Internet do you expect by 2015"?  as part of this article.


The answer for me is easy;

Mobile handsets that finally use off-handset for cpu processing (eg your handset is only a "viewer" to a cloud based processor handling all the real heavy lifting). Lose connection with the cloud you have 'some' functionality but most of it requires 24 x 7 connectivity. It's the only way to get compact, fast and battery life.



Cheers,
Dean

http://starwarsuncut.com movie completed

I blogged about this http://starwarsuncut.com/  back in 2009. http://blog.collins.net.pr/2009/07/wwwstarwarsuncutcom-post-2.html

looks like it's finished and will be shown on the big screen here in NY - cant wait, I think this will be a riot :)



Star Wars Uncut "The Escape"




Cheers,
Dean

World Air Traffic 24 Hour Period

Hat-tip Nate Warner


It is a 24 hour observation of all of the large aircraft flights in the
world, condensed down to about 2 minutes.
Notice that as evening approaches, the traffic is predominantly from the US
to Europe and when daylight comes, the traffic switches and it
is predominantly from Europe to the US.

Neat :)


Cheers,
Dean

Welcome to the future. FTW.

IceT and Aimee Mann going at it on Twitter - classic, made my day. Welcome to the future. FTW.

 Lol Digg rocks - http://digg.com/celebrity/If_you_can_t_say_something_nice_about_Ice_T_PIC


Cheers,
Dean

Oh My God - I'm going to a Social Distortion concert :) !!!!!

I love love love living in New York.

I take back all the bad things i have ever said about how shitty living here is with the grime and the dirt, about how crappily small the apartments are and how bad the restaurants are.

There is one upside that living in New York has over Australia in spades, music and fantastic live gigs.

I only recently found out that Social distortion are still touring http://blog.collins.net.pr/2010/01/social-distortion-can-you-believe-it.html (it seems they now live in Brazil).

This morning i opened my email to find out, in 60 minutes time, tickets for their North America tour were going on sale (doing lollapalooza) but also a few local gigs here in New York.

I woke Jodie up to tell her but not sure if it was too early in the morning but she didn't seem excited so i'm either going to have to convert her to being a fan OR someone else gets to use my second ticket.

For those of you who dont know the andrenalin pumping joy of Social Distortion  imagine finding out that Bon Scott and Kurt Cobain were doing a gig at your local pub next friday and thats how excited i am at the moment.

For anyone that wants to score tickets to The Webster and hook up with me on Saturday night the 31st of July in Hartford the link is here http://www.socialdistortion.com/tours and http://www.tickets.com/browseother.cgi?minpid=6748275


Cheers,
Dean

Gigi D'Agostino - The Way

Make it home, don't care
Oh no they don't care       (repeat)

Ever knowing the way...


They made up their minds and they started packing.
They left before the sun came up that day.
An exit to eternal summer slacking.
But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

They drank up the wine and they got to talking.
They now had more important things to say.
And when the car broke down the started walking.
Where were they going without ever knowing the way?


Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved with gold.
It's always summer they'll never get cold, they'll never get hungry, they'll never get old and grey.
You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere,
they won't make it home but they really don't care,
they wanted the highway they're happier there today..Today.

Make it home, don't care
Oh no they don't care
Make it home, don't care
Ever knowing the way....


Their children woke up and they couldn't find them.
They left before the sun came up that day.
They just drove off and left it all behind them.
But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved with gold.
It's always summer they'll never get cold, they'll never get hungry, they'll never get old and grey.
You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
they won't make it home but they really don't care.
They wanted the highway they're happier there today..Today.

Make it home, don't care

Oh no they don't care
Make it home, don't care
Ever knowing the way....




 
:)    I feel sorry for the children of today..... it's going to be crowded out there with aging peter pans and wendys who never grow old  :)
 
Sounds like a hell of a retirement plan to me ..... come join me in eternal play  :)
 
 
Cheers,
Dean

Spamhaus sucks

Spamhaus sucks !!

It's supposed to be some kind of "web services to prevent spam" but they are unresponsive, offer no email contacts/support to get your name off the list, and have now implemented something they call   PBL for all dynamic ip address internet users . So some emails i now send out are bouncing with the reply

"74.73.224.0/19 is listed on the Policy Block List (PBL)"

eg. for being a dynamic ip address. - No shit sherlock.

So whilst Spamhaus is not "blocking spam" they are now suggesting that all email from all Time Warner dynamic ip address customers be blocked by default. This isn't emails that are being sent from a mail server to the internet via DNS directly but emails sent from my home office sbs 2003 exchange server to Time Warners SMTP then on to the recipients server the way it always has.

So if you are a sys admin and you turned this PBL feature on you wont be getting any email from me (or the other 400,000 time warner users).

Spamhause sucks !!


Cheers,
Dean

iPad subscription prices

So we now have the official price for the WSJ iPad app subscription: $3.99 per week with a monthly credit card charge of $17.29
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/02/wsj-ipad-subscription-officially-17-29-per-month-is-murdoch-in


I dont get why people think this is wrong, i think the ipad with it's additional functionality should always cost more than the print version.

You're trying to compare an apple with a rocket ship. Paper SHOULD be perceived as a "Tier 2" cheaper/inferior product.

I wont be buying one but thats because i dont own an ipod or buy mp3's either (i have a boatload of cd's though and buy at least one or two a week but then i rip my own mp3's and store on my own media server..... no one can pull my digital license and prevent me using content the way i want, but thats another story.


Cheers,
Dean

www.LiveBaseballChat.com

I've been contacted by a few people over the last 12 hours about embedding our http://www.livebaseballchat.com/ chat functionality into their websites.

You cant "drop and drag" a piece of html code the way you can with a $400 flash chat application. You also cant do a lot of the functionality we have built with a $400 flash application either.

You can however iFrame http://www.livebaseballchat.com/ into your current baseball fan site - all that we ask is that you make it large enough so our full chat panel and site title can be seen, i think your users would appreciate the largest setting your UI can allow for.

I've mocked up a sample at http://www.LiveChatConcepts.com/BBAtest

Like i said in the last email, our desire isn't to do anything apart from live chat. We are not competing with anyones blogs or fan sites, our main focus isn't even really baseball.

We're also open to suggestions so if there is something you want to see on this site reach out to let me know and we'll add it to the dev list.


Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.livechatconcepts.com/

Lisa Loeb

just found out Lisa Loeb is playing City Winery :)

realised it's on the 2nd of June and I'm still in France :(

http://www.citywinery.com/events/58717