see a puffin eat a fish

After moving to the hidden hills, I lost interest in RunKeeper since there just isn’t a great place to run around here. I’m surrounded by steep, rolling hills. But I recently started using the RunKeeper app again for my rides to the office and a) the mobile software/server side has come a long way and b) the data it generates is awesome and more importantly really useful. Here’s my ride from this morning.

You can see max speeds, where the elevation is, trends, really useful stuff. I’m going to be using this information on the ride home. It’s rare that things are so useful so quickly. The full activity log can be viewed here.

Here’s what is going on here. The lamp has a Smart Plug connected to it. The plug can be controller from any WebKit compatible interface. Demetrie, out in Santa Cruz, is toggling the lights remotely. The laptop is pointed at the light with Skype Video so that he can see that the lights are in fact being toggled.

Twitter has personal/social/networking uses but lately i’ve been really digging its real time news and information capabilities. Simply put, if I want to know what is happening I type it into Twitter. Very quickly, with low overhead or commitment on my part, I find out what’s going on.

Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

In developing a new service that uses data from Twitter, I got a chance to use Switch a Bit. The service is the anti-FriendFeed. Instead of pulling all your data together (that would be aggregate-a-bit), switch a bit routes your traffic to your preferred services via rules you set up.

In my setup, when I take a photo with ZoneTag i automatically add a tag that switch a bit picks up. Switch a bit then routes my photo to Twitter where my app picks it up. A little convoluted (ok, really convoluted) but it works! That’s the important part.

I know it’s a different team and a different game, but the last time the Cs were in the finals I was ten years old, my bedroom covered with Celtics posters I had collected from the Sunday Boston Globe. Not only are they in the finals, but they are playing the Lakers! I can almost hear Johnny Most getting worked up. Remember when he set himself on fire in the broadcast booth with his cigarettes and just kept on going?