Pixels from the Edge

Twitter v. Facebook – A Social Media Deathmatch

A long time ago I wrote a post that I’ve been meaning to counter for some time now but I just hadn’t known how to tackle it. But the other day I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who doesn’t use Twitter, and like just about everyone that doesn’t tweet he also thinks it’s kinda shit. He was saying stuff like “isn’t Twitter just the status message of Facebook?” (my second ever tweet!) and I was like “holy crap, I’m having a conversation with myself 8 months ago”, I was talking to the me that wrote that blog post. See I’ve come a long way since I started tweeting, a really long way, and I’d forgotten what the me like then was like, the thoughts that went through my head, so talking to him gave me the insight I needed to get this post written.

Twitter versus Facebook Status Message

This is important to explore, people need to understand this difference. Facebook is a social network whereas Twitter is a micro-blog. In a social network you interact with your pre-selected friends, in a blog you expose yourself to the entire world. I can’t explain it any more simpler than that. He ended up understanding Facebook as having your friends over for dinner whereas Twitter is like hanging out at a rave. I’d say that was pretty accurate regarding the dinner – it’s a closed occasion by invite only (and family members you don’t even like might come by and join in and there’s little you can do about it!), and spot on for the rave analogy and you can see a sideshow below to mirror this.

Still don’t understand why Twitter is different than Facebook Status

But he still didn’t get it. The thing is I happened to know from being friends with him on Facebook that he barely ever updates his status. And he doesn’t blog either. So if you don’t have a desire to talk to the masses then how can you get it? But look, Twitter isn’t just about micro-blogging, it’s also about micro-following…

Follow me, me no follow you

This I love about Twitter. See in Facebook if someone wants to be friends with you then you have to be friends back in order to be connected. And what ends up happening? Noise noise noise. You end up being friends with a shitload of people you don’t care to know about and they drown out everything that the people you are interested with hearing from are doing. But with Twitter someone can follow you and you don’t have to follow them back. This is super powerful.

Real-time Search

Even people that use Twitter don’t understand how powerful it is (so how can those who don’t stand a chance?). Twitter is pure information. Wow I love that so much I’ll say it again. Twitter is pure information. It’s what’s happening right now, and it’s searchable instantly in real-time. Forget TV news, news websites, newspapers, everything that happens these days is reported first on Twitter, instantly and unbiased (there’s very little room for bias in 140 characters, and there’s enough ‘reporters’ to allow to read between the lines of any bias that does come through), when the attacks in Mumbai happened we knew about it first via Twitter, we heard first on Twitter about the intimidation going on during the Afghanistan elections, and when Michael Jackson died no matter where you were or what you were doing, if you had a mobile device and you were on Twitter you knew about it that instant. I even remember during the big webcast for the iPhone OS 3.0 update we all went for lunch and used Twitter for news on the new features.

Hash Tag #help

This is pretty amazing. Twitter has many hidden gems most of which I won’t go into in this article, but something worth a mention is hash tags, and more specifically using them to help you solve a problem. If you are new to the iPhone and are wondering how to save a missed call to your contact list then tweet, or you want to know how to make rounded corners using CCS3. In both cases you would tweet your question with the #help tag, and add #iphone or #css respectively. The web is full of knowledgeable people that like nothing more than to let the world know this by answering your questions.

140 character limit is power

I hear this a lot from non Twitter users and those new to Twitter, wondering when the 140 character limit will be lifted, that’s when they’ll get into Twitter. I know where they’re coming from, I thought the same during my early days of Twitter, it’s seen as a hindrance by outsiders. But those who adopt also adapt and begin to realize how powerful it is. I already said how Twitter is pure information and that’s largely due to this fact, there’s no room to give your opinion when you’re reporting a fact, not space for chitchat when you’re relaying a message, and no squeezing gray between the black and white. When you get used to it you begin to realize how powerful the 140 character limit is, you appreciate how much you can say in 140 characters, and in return how much information you can learn from a handful of tweets.

Conclusion

Twitter is immensely powerful and equally as useful. Most of Twitters power actually lies in its API and the third party apps and services that are built around it, this is something I haven’t really touched on in this article as I looked just to explore the similarities it has with the Facebook status. It isn’t better or worse than Facebook, it’s a very different product built to accomplish a different goal, to fill a very different void. In fact a quote I’ve read before, and I apologize I don’t know who first said it so I choose to credit it to no one, sums it up nicely:

Facebook is for people I went to school with, LinkedIn is for people I’ve worked with, and Twitter is for people I want to know

The point is there’s a place and a need for both Twitter and Facebook.

And finally, below is a very nice deck put together by Iain Taite from Poke which sums up the Twitter party theory:

Posted September 14th, 2009

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | 3 Comments »

Changing your Twitter name? Watch out!

It’s cool that Twitter lets you change your Twitter name, there’s not a lot of apps that I can think of that allow that. But at the same time there should be a big fat warning sign when you do. It’s no biggie, I’m not trying to scare you away from doing it or anything, I had to change mine fairly recently (basically my old name sucked) and I’m glad I did, Twitter switches over all your friends and followers automatically so no issues there, but there are a few things that you should bear in mind before you do:

Links -Any links that exist to your Twitter page will no longer have any relationship to you – comments you have made in posts, retweets others have made of your tweets, search results linking to your twitter page – these will all be dead, there is no grace period, your old profile is instantly killed.
TwitPic – I imagine this applies to all the Twitter photo services out there but in my case I was using TwitPic. The service depends on your Twitter username and as you are no longer that user then you have no control over that account. And the new TwitPic account you will create will have no images in it (or in my case it had some – see below).
Resurrection – You might find, as I did, that your new name is an old one that someone gave up. Just as the account you give up might one day be picked up by someone else, your new account might be someones old account. Therefore you must understand that there might already be a relationship out there with your account – there may already be links to your new account, you may have photos that aren’t yours in TwitPic or another Twitter related service.
Statistics -There are a lot of statistically driven third party apps out there and you may be using some of them. And just like TwitPic it is highly likely they are tied to your account via your username, so when the switch is made the statistics will be lost. And also,if you are resurrecting an old account you may find that these third party apps will be holding information for your new account that date back to the previous owner.

Like I say it’s probably not that big of a deal. If someone gave up the Twitter username that you are inheriting then it probably didn’t have much usage anyways – there’s probably not a whole lot linking to it, the TwitPic and other 3rd party accounts are probably barely if at all used. But you might want to do the following:

Research

But don’t take switching Twitter username lightly. It may be a move that you think is important enough to do but you only want to have to do it once, so take a moment to research the new name you are picking. Do a search on it to make sure it’s not associated with anything bad (make sure it’s available first!). Like maybe the user changed their name or closed their account because they’d got into some silly negative situations out there on the big bad web. So take a moment to do some searches on the account in Google to see what pre established relationships it already has so you can decide if you want to inherit them or not.

Save, Purge, and Update

Before you make the switch and give up your old Twitter username, which essentially means you are giving up access to your own third party accounts, take the time to save any old data you want to keep – for example make sure you save your Twitpic photos locally, they may be your only copies. And you will probably want to delete everything from these accounts – you will no longer have a relationship with these accounts so you wont want personal photos or information attached to them. And when you have made the switch, if your new name is resurrected from an old user, make sure you go into TwitPic and such accounts and purge any old photos or data the previous user may have left behind. And unless you want to start from scratch you could upload your old photos and data to your new third party accounts.

Secondary Account

I didn’t do this, my Twitter presence wasn’t huge and I was being followed mainly by friends (and I just didn’t think of it at the time!) but if you have a big following you may want to take this step. As explained on this link after you change your name open a second account with your old name and place a simple tweet explaining that you have switched to a new name. This will help with the issue of links to your old account, allowing the users who followed those links to find your new one.

Profile Picture

You might find you want to change your profile picture when you change your Twitter name, in my case it was part of a rebrand so I definitely did, but it’s worth hanging onto your old picture for a week or two to give your followers the chance to associate your old picture with your new name before you do.

First Tweet

And finally, you may find it useful to send out a first tweet under your new account name to let your followers know about the change.

Posted September 9th, 2009

Tags: Branding, Twitter | 7 Comments »

Running jQuery alongside MooTools

For my latest project I was given the fun task of having to build a microsite modal layer for a third party website that I had no access to, not even to a dev environment. I figured the best way to do it would be to do everything in a JS file that would inject all the html and such, so there’d no need for the mess of sending over instructions to add multiple chunks of html/css/js into various spots on the page, just the one JS call. And jQuery was perfect for this, so I set on my merry way and coded the whole thing into a nice neat JS file, had it all working great locally, and sent it over to the clients hosting company with the simple instructions of just calling in the two JS files (the jQuery JS file and the one I’d written) into their page. Of course rookie mistake number one – they were already using MooTools in their site, and the syntax of the jQuery and MooTools libraries totally clash.

I have no problem using MooTools and it wasn’t a lot of code so I downloaded the latest version and adjusted the syntax to match that of the MooTools library. Of course that was rookie mistake number two – when I was done and it was all working again I remembered to check their version and it was then that I realized that they are using a fairly old version of MooTools, and the syntax was all different and I couldn’t find decent documentation to switch it out. Of course I probably could’ve worked it out but my code was going backwards – I was all proud of my nice clean jQuery, and then it became MooTools which was okay, but now it was some funky old version of MooTools. So I decided to switch gears and figure out how to run the two alongside eachother.

It didn’t take me long, jQuery is badass and they’ve thought of everything, there is a built-in way to run it alongside other libraries that use the same $() syntax (Prototype is another library that I can think of as well as MooTools that has this same syntax). So consider the following:

<html>
  <head>
    <script src="mootools.js"></script>
    <script src="jquery.js"></script>
    <script>
      //mootools document ready function
      window.addEvent('domready',function() {
        //disable classic jQuery
        jQuery.noConflict();

        //do something with jQuery
        alert(jQuery(document).height());

        //do something with MooTools
        alert($(document).getSize().y);
      }
     </script>
  </head>
  <body></body>
</html>

As you can see once you run jQuery.noConflict() you can still use $() for MooTools but for jQuery you use jQuery() instead. Pretty cool huh?

That’s basically it but there are a couple more tricks. For example if you load in the jQuery library before the MooTools library apparently there’s no need to call the jQuery.noConflict() method. And also you could assign jQuery.noConflict() to a short variable name for less code. Read more here.

Posted September 1st, 2009

Tags: Javascript, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Moving a Wordpress install cleanly

This is a real simple process and but if you don’t take the right steps it can get ugly quick. In my case I staged the site in one spot then moved it to deploy, and these are the steps I took.

1. In the admin interface at the current blog location navigate to the Settings->General section. You’ll want to be here so that when you have moved everything over to it’s new location you can change the ‘Wordpress address (URL)’ to it’s new address.

2. Copy over the whole files structure to its new location (leave a copy in it’s current location for the time being).

3. If you have moved the database also, or it’s staying where it is but the file structure is moving server, basically if you need to change the host name then update the entry in the wp-config.php file. In my case I didn’t need to make this change.

4. Now you should be able to navigate to your new blog in a browser window.

5. Go back to the admin interface that you went to in step 1 above and change the ‘Wordpress address (URL)’ to its new location, hit save and it should make the change and redirect you to the admin interface at the new location. This step is necessary (along with step 1) as Wordpress does a redirect after every interaction and you could find yourself locked out and having to make this change directly in the database.

6. The final step is to navigate in the admin interface to Settings->Miscellaneous and change the ‘Store uploads in this folder’. I already blogged about this step here.

That’s it. The site should be fully migrated to it’s new spot and the old location ready to purge.

Posted August 27th, 2009

Tags: WordPress | No Comments »

Overriding The Default Text Selection Color With CSS3

Finally getting round to testing out some CCS3 techniques I’ve been reading about and drooling over for the past year. Noticed a site I swung by thats text selection color wasn’t the browser default so I looked it up and found out how to change the background and font colors. It’s nothing new, people have been doing it for a while, just this is the first chance I’ve had to start playing:

::selection {/* Safari */
	background: #FF5200;
	color: #FFFFF3;
	}
::-moz-selection {/* Firefox */
	background: #FF5200;
	color: #FFFFF3;
}

Guess each browser needs it’s own declaration which is kind of annoying, oh well. And I imagine it only works in Safari and Firefox. You can check it working by selecting some text on this page if you are using one of those browsers, otherwise there’s an example below. Don’t mind the colors, I didn’t think much about it, just wanted to make sure it worked.

As it’s a selector class you can apply different overrides to different elements within the page, so something like the following should work (haven’t tested):

p.sidebar::selection {/* Safari */
	background:#2E2E2E;
	color:#FFFFF3;
	}
p.sidebar::-moz-selection {/* Firefox */
	background:#2E2E2E;
	color:#FFFFF3;
}

Anyways this is just a taste of CSS3, it has some really amazing features and I need to jump in and play around soon!

Posted August 26th, 2009

Tags: CSS3, Web Apps, Web Design | 1 Comment »

Converting Blogger (blogspot) to Wordpress

I just recently made this switch for a number of reasons but for this post I want to concentrate on the exact steps taken. I thought the switch was going to be a huge task but in the end I found out that most of it is automated and the whole switch took less than a couple of hours (creating a custom theme and tweaking all the settings and plugins much much longer). I had some pretty good page rankings with Google and a week later I can now confirm that my blogs search rankings converted over cleanly.

Step 0 – Blogger Custom Domain

I call this step zero because I had already been running my Blogger blog with a custom domain. If you do not have a custom domain setup with your Blogger account then some of these steps won’t apply (3,9) and you will lose your page rankings.

Step 1 – Install Wordpress

I installed Wordpress myself on my own hosting account. I can’t guarantee these steps will work for an account hosted at wordpress.com or with something like a one-click install your hosting company may provide.

Step 2 – Import Blogger

Wordpress has a great import tool built-in. In your Wordpress admin interface navigate to Tools->Import->Blogger and follow the steps. It uses openauth to connect with your Blogger account. Follow the steps and you should be all set. You can read more about it here.

Step 3 – URL Names

This is the most complicated step, but it’s still easy. In your Wordpress admin interface go to Settings->Permalinks and select ‘Month and name’ . As Blogger creates URL names slightly differently from Wordpress (for example Blogger limits the number of words allowed in a URL where as Wordpress doesn’t) you’ll need to make sure both URL names match in all cases. Installing this plugin should do the trick (I did it manually so I can’t vouch for it). This article also talks about how to fix the ‘.html’ extension that Blogger adds. As it says you can go back into your permalinks settings and alter how your posts are published to end with the ‘.html’ extension, however I preferred to stick with the Wordpress default setup and opted to add the mod_rewrite entry to my .htaccess file. I also added the archive entry to convert those old links to the new system. Make sure you add the block outside of the Wordpress section (if you add it to the Wordpress section it will eventually get deleted), my .htaccess file now looks like:

# BEGIN Blogger URL RewriteRewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)\.html$ $1/$2/$3/ [QSA,R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{1,2})_([0-9]{1,2})_archive.html$ $1/$2/ [QSA,R=301,L]
# END Blogger URL Rewrite

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
# END WordPress

Step 4 – Your comments

This is probably the toughest loss during the conversion. Whilst the import tool works really nicely and maintains all the comments it doesn’t maintain their email association, effectively leaving every comment your blog has ever had as anonymous, so if your blog is super active and has tons of comments going back years this might be a deal breaker. I didn’t have a ton of comments so it didn’t bother me much, what I did do was go through the comments in the admin interface and update all the comments I had posted myself so at least they were re-associated with me.

Step 5 – Links linking back to blog

This step is only relevant if your domain name or file path will change. I myself did this step manually as I was working with a fairly small blog and I knew I hadn’t inter-linked too many times throughout my posts, so it didn’t take me long. However for a large blog I’m sure there is a plugin out there already, or you could probably write a plugin to accomplish this in a few lines of code.

Step 6 – Categories to Tags

In Blogger we had “Categories” but we didn’t have “Tags”, or at least I didn’t use them, after the import I only had categories not tags. As I wanted to use the tag cloud widget I needed to convert my categories to tags. There may be a plugin to do this automatically but I just went ahead and did it manually, I went through all my posts and copied and pasted the categories into the tags field within the Posts->Quick Edit in the admin interface. Couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes once I was in the flow, but then I was moving a smaller blog. If your blog is huge you may wanna try and find a plugin to do this or write one yourself.

Step 7 – Styling old posts

If you have switched designs during the switch you might find that a lot elements within older posts now clash with that theme. For example my old theme had a light background whereas my new theme has a dark one, so as I looked through old posts I found styled content that totally clashed or was even unreadable. If you have done a good job with using CSS classes to style your Blogger posts then this step will be very easy as it just involves bring over those class declarations into your Wordpress styleguide and altering their properties to match your new theme, otherwise you’ll have to go through your old posts and find those elements and style them (now will be a good time to create those CSS classes so you can get this step done much quicker and have those styles for your new posts moving forward). For this step I also went through all my posts with code examples and converted them to use the amazing SyntaxHighlighter.

Step 8 – Feedburner and Google Analytics

It’s almost easy to forget but these steps are hugely important. In the case of Feedburner I was disappointed to find that I’d named my feed something very closely tied to the name of my old blog, but as part of the switch I was coming up with a fresh name and domain. So what I decided to do was create completely new feeds that point to the new site (use the Wordpress Feedburner plugin) and leave the old feed intact but point it to my new feed, hopefully eventually Feedburner will tell me the old feed is no longer followed at all and then I can delete it. For Google Analtyics I decided to create a new profile, but I guess you could just change the domain in your current profile (if necessary I suggest you do this immediately after you have flipped the switch), then use this plugin that will take care of adding the google code to your template footer (but not when in preview mode for example).

Step 9 – 301 redirect

This is the final step and once you take it your old blog is dead! Actually not quite true, your blog will live on in Blogger until you delete your account. I had my own custom domain setup and thinking about it now I don’t know how you’d complete this step without it, I had a subdomain dns cname entry pointing at the google dns server. So I did the following (all very quickly as once started your blog is down until you finish): logged into blogger and switched back to blogspot.com hosting, in my dns settings I deleted the cname entry, I then created the hosted domain of the cname I just deleted so I could serve up the following .htaccess file:

redirect 301 / http://www.richie-p.com/blog

Now I have this lovely Wordpress blog!

Posted August 24th, 2009

Tags: WordPress | No Comments »

TweetDeck iPhone app #fail

All the hype around the TweetDeck iPhone app lately has been kind of bugging me, and the last straw is this article I read yesterday, frankly it’s bothered me. It’s not up to me to decide what they think is a badass iPhone app, but they include TweetDeck in the list and the only thing they say about it is “obviously”. Obviously what exactly?

Ordinarily I wouldn’t even say anything, TweetDeck is free after all. Aesthetically it’s beautiful, and as an iPhone app in many ways it stands out as brilliant, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies the iPhone offers, where as with other apps it can be apparent the developers haven’t quite been able to step away from traditional mobile app development and harness the power of the iPhone. But it’s not just an iPhone app, it’s actually a Twitter client, and in that I believe it severely fails.

Yes it has some sweet features – manage multiple accounts (I think it’s the only free iPhone Twitter client to offer this), create multiple views (this is very cool), group those you follow together, and synching with the desktop client. But I think it runs before it can walk, those features are way cool but it lacks the basics of what I need from a Twitter client. It doesn’t scroll down to your oldest new tweet, what’s the deal there? And the color difference between the new and old tweet state is barely visible to the naked eye. A designer friend who has the app didn’t even realize there are different color states, and this is a guy that can spot an off pixel on a screen from across the room and one floor up. The two colors are so the same it reminds me of that scene in American Psycho when they are all sitting around comparing how different their business cards are when they all appear to be the same off-white color. So I have to actually remember the last tweet I read? And even if I do remember I have to manually scroll down the 146 new tweets I’ve just recieved. And all this applies again and again for the multiple columns.

And another area where the app fails is its direct message interface. As far as I can tell it doesn’t even show your sent messages. What’s the thinking behind that? It should take lead from Twitterfon who does it perfectly and displays both sides of the conversation in speech bubbles with avatars just like an IM app.

I dunno why I’m choosing to be so negative about a free app, I guess that whole “obviously” thing really wound me up. The desktop version is definitely badass, and they’ve put a lot of work into their iPhone app so why have such serious usability issues? Maybe I don’t need a tool as powerful as TweetDeck on-the-go so I don’t appreciate it, I don’t have multiple twitter accounts and I don’t follow hundreds of tweeple so I can live without the grouping functionality away from my desk. Personally I just use Twitterfon, it might not be as beautiful but I think it’s badass, obviously.

Posted August 21st, 2009

Tags: iPhone, Mobile Devices, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »

Fixing broken Wordpress image upload

Just a quick post on this cos I just went through it and eventually I worked it out but I lost a little piece of my sanity there for a while. This probably only applies if you have set your Wordpress up in one location and then moved it. I set mine up to stage it and then I moved it into a different directory to deploy live.

Basically in the admin interface you just have to go into Settings->Miscellaneous and change the ‘Store uploads in this folder’ setting to wherever the new path is, or just setting it to ‘wp-content/uploads’ which is the default seems to work good for me. I think this setting is kind of in a weird spot which is why it was hard to find, like doesn’t it belong in the Media settings? I actually read out there people saying to make the change directly in the database and I figured that there had to be a way to change that setting in the admin tool, which is the only reason I found it.

Also, make sure you set that folders permissions to give Apache write access (chmod 777 or whatever).

upload _settings

Posted August 19th, 2009

Tags: WordPress | 1 Comment »

Blog Relaunch

So I finally managed to find the time to relaunch this blog. When I first started the blog it was somewhat of an experiment so I didn’t spend much effort on its design, but unlike other failed blogs I’d started over the years I’ve really been enjoying writing these posts and I think this time around it’s got some staying power. This relaunch is really intertwined with my online rebrand I’ve been talking about lately, this blog plays a big part in my online image and it was important that I spend the time to focus on fixing its issues.

So the biggest areas I wanted to address were:

Domain Name

My old domain ‘blog.londonstreetlife.com’ had many things wrong with it, but mainly it was just too damn long. The hows and whys I picked this domain are obviously very closely related to my rebrand so I’ll talk about it in another post, but this new domain is half as long and I’m really liking how it looks in the browser address bar. In fact it’s so short i can pair it with my own URL shortener (instead of using bit.ly, for example) which will only help improve my online brand in the long run.

Switch from Blogger to Wordpress

For all the work I’ve been doing with Wordpress this past year and my subsequent posts on the subject, I’ve felt for a long time I really should be blogging on that platform. I have nothing against Blogger or any similar web tool, it’s been great to me and I don’t see the need to host the blog myself as long as it provides me with everything I need and doesn’t limit me in any way. However I have really been feeling the strain lately with Blogger, too many missing features, SEO failings, and little tweaks I am not able to make. Now I’m on Wordpress and am my own host and I can really go to town with this thing! Like a kid in a candy store I’m having a lot of fun practicing what I have been preaching and I even built my own plugin which I will be cleaning up and making publicly available soon.

Design

The new design is the most prevolent update as it really changes the whole feel of the blog. Whilst the switch from Blogger to Wordpress could be completely transparent to the user, and the domain name change might not even be noticed by a user coming in via a shortened link, there’s definitely no escape from noticing the redesign. I don’t want to get too into the color scheme I’ve gone with as it’s part of my brand color palette that I’ve been developing over the last month, and again I’ll be talking about that in another post. It’s not yet the finished product I’m sure, I’ll tweak as I go, but time is short for me these days and I’ve found that eventually there comes a point where I just have to pull the trigger or I’ll never get anything done. It is worth mentioning that whilst I do prefer dark text on a light background for readability purposes I really wanted to bring forth more of my personality into the design, so my words don’t just represent me, but also just by being here you already know a little bit of who I am. I’m really happy with the color scheme, it is totally me, and it works really well for my portfolio site (in development) where impression is as important as content, but for here where content is king I might find along the way that the sacrifice in readability is too great for a blog and switch it up and around a bit, make it a little easier on the eyes. I dunno, what do you think? It’s really up to you guys!

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about my old design and how in a way it was sort of an anti-design, I’m not referring to the art movement but the fact that it was meant to look like I hadn’t spent a lot of time designing it (cos I hadn’t). But also when I first started the blog I didn’t know where it was going to go or if it would even last so I really needed it to develop a personality before I could style it. So for old times sake, one last time and forever remembered here, RIP old blog:

Blog Title

And finally the blog title, I’ve been seeing some of my posts come up in Stumble Upon and they’ve been coming across kind of silly – Blogger published the blog name first and then the post title and I couldn’t figure out a way to reverse this setting, so every post of mine that made it into Stumble Upon just said my crap blog name and didn’t give a clue as to what the article was even about. That’s when I really started to realize that if I want the web to take my blog seriously then I’d better do it first myself. Before the the title was just ‘my name the blog’, as in ‘londonstreetlife the blog’, which basically ran along the same idea as my anti-design concept above, and again I didn’t know where it was gonna go or how long it would last so I didn’t spend the time thinking up a cool name, and in the end it never eally had one. The new name ‘Pixels from the Edge’ I think works really well, it kind of means a lot of things at once and they all apply. I wanted the name to reflect the creative-technology hybrid thing I got going on and is mainly what I talk about in this blog, and I think it does that very nicely. My lovely wife helped me come up with the name, so mad props to her! And the more I think about it the happier I am with it.

So what do you think folks, turned out any good?

Posted August 18th, 2009

Tags: Branding, CMS, Social Media, Web Design, WordPress | No Comments »

Will the real Augmented Reality please stand up?

People we gotta come up with a new name for augmented reality. That’s the real next big thing and it’s waaaay dope but it’s name has been hijacked by a flash technology called Papervision3D which has nothing more going for it than a first encounter gimmick factor (I’m not ripping on the papervision technology itself, just when it is used to implement AR). It’s not like I didn’t also fall pray to the sweet song of the papervision sirens myself during my odyssey towards a new digital reality. But papervision is wicked, tricksy, false. Because of it I feel like I’m already sick of AR and it doesn’t even really exist yet, at least it only exists in my mind and in cool video demos out on the web. But listen up folks that technology is not AR. The real augmented reality is mixing the digital realm with the real world, digitally enhancing what we see, and it’s seriously rad. Think back to the original Terminator movie when you’d see the world through Arnie’s eyes as he’s scanning the room and all kinds of information is digitally overlaid – he’d look at someone and a panel would appear next to them with information on height, weight, threat level, etc. – y’know the kinds of things a terminator needs to know.

Here’s what I’m talking about. The following video has been going around recently and is quite interesting:

It’s mixing AR with Twitter. It’s a sweet concept and as Twitter already geotags your tweets you’d think those tweets would appear digitally in the same spot where they were published. But it doesn’t necessarily seem to working that way, there’s no sound so I can’t figure out what’s really going on, but it appears that ghosts are tweeting from halfway up trees? Not to worry though it’s the thought that counts, just think about sitting in a bar and looking across the room and seeing the crowds tweets in speech bubbles above their heads. Neat huh?

I came across this guy earlier this week and he’s been giving me inspiration:

It’s Mr super sneaky invisible stealth dude. And I really like the fact that his art is analogue and yet it’s helped me to trigger a digital concept. It’s basically to combine the above AR Twitter app with TwitPic. So you’re walking through London and you see before you a huge collage of photos perfectly placed in their exact locations, sometimes even overlapping, the compass and gyroscope in our mobile devices enables the photo to appear in its exact location, angle, and dimensions. And with a city that big it probably wouldn’t be long until everything you see before you has completely become the alternative reality created by the Twittersphere, maybe transparently overlaying the actual reality. Yeah it’s kind of a cool idea but it’s a bit messy. But what happens if we throw in an extra dimension, that of time, the time of day to be exact? Now the photo will only appear at the exact time of the day it was taken, hang around for a few moments, then disappear. Imagine it, you stand there and watch a busy London street, Leicester Square even, and as you do photos fade in for a moment then vanish, hundreds of photos come and go every second, the ghosts of days and years long past are alive again for a brief moment every new day, forever changing our perception of reality and the very idea of space and time. Trippy.

Actually thinking about it this is probably something else I came across recently that greatly contributed to the inspiration for this idea.

So c’mon folks help me out, we gotta come up with a new name for this technology as the current term has already been killed by inferior technologies falsely claiming to be it. Maybe like ‘Super Vision’ or something, anything that’s different. Let’s just come up with a new name already so we can talk about it without throwing up in our mouths a little, so we can be really excited about this technology again.

Posted August 5th, 2009

Tags: Augmented Reality, iPhone, Mobile Devices, Social Media, Twitter | 1 Comment »