The Progress Bar

I’ve been following the DataPortability conversation over at Google Groups for a while now. When I read about Open Grid I got all excited.

The Open Grid Protocol is developed by the Architecture Working Group which was initiated by Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. The goal of the group is to define a standardized protocol which allows the above: Going from world to world without having an account everywhere.

I wrote: I remember talking with SGI and other vendors about a VRML-based network that linked to the HTML world back in 1996, the same year I sat in a musty hotel room after Internet World coding up parts of IBM.com in VRML. Consider connecting to platforms like Sony Home, which could have many users in a short period of time if they play their cards right. Look into stuff like Tahoe for data storage, they’re already doing distributed datastores.

I went to check out the new SecondLife Beta Test Grid but was denied until I joined a special group. So much for openness, but look how cool the splash screen is.

Great article at ReadWriteWeb about the Future of the Desktop. I disagree with a lot of the article but there are still many concepts worth thinking about, like how we will go from information to attention management.

If you get more than three emails a day you have to read this. Merlin Mann speaking at Google about managing your inbox. So many tremendously helpful hints and tips about processing your inbox to keep it to a low message count. Guaranteed it will help you spend at least a few minutes less dealing with email every day.

It took me 5 hours (multi-tasking) to finally jailbreak my old iphone. The primary reason I did it was to install Qik, the live video-streaming app. I will ignore the discussion about adding Qik to the iPhone store, plenty of people talking about that. Added bonus, Winterboard is cool, adds a few bells and whistles to the generic iPhone interface, and they seem to have done a good job making it separate from the core code and impervious? to upgrade woes.

My thoughts on the process. Please add yours as a comment. I’m ok with the five hours. Caveats include me making some stupid mistakes (RTFM), the documentation is so-so, the process is convoluted for mere mortals and it takes forever to build the app on my ancient powerbook (which will be replaced with whatever goodness Apple unleashes next month.)

Get rid of the external application. iphone dev team should create a plug-in for itunes if it’s possible.

Create a repository for the .ipsw files – you have to download files to build the application on your desktop, then install onto your iPhone. Remove this cumbersome step of having to download the files and link to a repository, behind the scenes. Protecting user from making bad decisions (props to Vince Vaughn).

Looks like something is in the works to simplify the process, Windows only, best named hack of the year so far, My little Pwnie.

I ended up with 25+ business cards at the Affiliate Summit in Boston this week. I am not going to buy another business card scanner, last one died on me. Tapulous’s Handshake for iPhone is going to be amazing, can’t wait try it.

There are a whole new ecosystem of iPhone application developers out there like Tapulous that are the equivalent of Slide and SNAP in the Facebook application market.

I’ve also been checking out Evernote, which is amazing on several levels. I snap a pic of a book on my phone or drag a screenshot of the book cover into the desktop version of Evernote and it indexes the photos and when I type the name of the book in the search box it displays the image of the book.

The first time you do this it blows your mind. Try it with cursive writing, wow. I would be interested to hear how Evernote compares to Yojimbo?

Finally got around to re-jailbreaking my “old” iPhone. Here are the links you need to follow

http://www.modmyifone.com/wiki/index.php/Pwnage_2.0_Guide http://www.macgeekblog.com/blog/archive/2008/07/19/pwnage-20-jailbreak-iphone-3g-now.html

First app I installed was Qik, many more to follow.

For years I’ve been lamenting the fact that I don’t like Big Corporations controlling my information. Chris Brogan’s post, When Google Owns You, is about someone who’s Google account was shut down with no reasonable explanation. Surfing around I found the following links related to getting our data our of corporate datacenters and back into the cloud where it belongs.

Distributed hash table
p2p hackers list
Tahoe Least-Authorative Filesystem
Allmydata.org Introduction

The Least-Authority Filesystem offers security and fault-tolerance properties far greater than those of other distributed filesystems — in addition to being protected against external attackers, users of Tahoe are protected from the servers themselves, even if some of the servers are malicious, and they are protected from other users, even though they can choose to share specific files or directories with specific users.

Read Welcome to Tahoe. Some of these links are pretty technical but you’ll get the idea that the underpinnings of a system to allow complete control and selectable access to our data is coming soon.

Something like Tahoe and a few thousand blog posts thrown in to sort out the details, is all we need to create a distributed filesystem across the net where we can store our stuff and do with it what we please. No more uploading your new party photo to Facebook, Myspace and Match one at a time. Imagine loading iPhoto and instead of the usual plugins for Facebook having conduits to every place on the net where you store data. Someone emails you a photo from the party last night you want to use as your profile pic? Throw it in iPhoto and push it out to one or more services at the same time.

Want to update your Myspace and Match dating information? Edit in, for example, iPhoto, and push it out to both sites. Simple, safe and secure.

You could even manage your blog comments across the blogosphere and see who is commenting on your comments. No more third party services taking your comments hostage, profiting off of them or blocking free speech. I have a feeling this is the start of something really big. I’m installing Tahoe right now, will report back on the experience.

Someone direct messaged me on Twitter about a way to add an infinite number of readers to the Feedburner chicklet. I wonder what will happen when Google/Feedburner figure out how to block this kind of manipulation.