see a puffin eat a fish

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.

I’m going to echo Shawn’s prediction that this is the year of the no-laptop. Although the jesus phone has innumerable annoyances (how about letting me run more than one app at once without voiding my warranty?) the ushering in of the “real web” on mobile devices now makes using a mobile device the primary options not the fallback. There’s a shift from “oh you’re on your laptop? i’ll use my phone then” to “I’ll look it up using my phone even if there is a laptop around”. I’m having disorientating moments where I expect Safari on my laptop to auto complete a url when in fact I used my iPhone to look something up. I have a mental model that certain sites can only be visited with a laptop based browser but that’s all changing now.

Is now on my blog (look to the right), in (mostly) real time. For real. I’ve actually incorporated Fire Eagle into my daily activity. A while ago I wiped out my N95 and decided that the extra hoops ZoneTag wants me to jump through to upload my images to Flickr weren’t really worth it. It was much simpler for me to use the native photo app and send MMS photos to Flickr.

Well I was right, without ZoneTag my photo uploading interaction was simplified, but I really missed having a photo’s location on Flickr. And I would get ‘where are you?’ comments on my photos, so my friends must have gotten used to ZoneTag too. Today I reinstalled ZoneTag and noticed the Fire Eagle integration. Well since i’m uploading photos w/location info on a daily basis, why not keep my location current? All I have to do to get that working is authenticate ZoneTag against Fire Eagle. No problem.

So far so good, but then how do I display my location? The Fire Eagle application gallery has a number of integration points (Loki, Dopplr, Outside.in) but all I wanted to do was display my location on a blog, not have to deal with yet another service. There is no Wordpress integration in the Fire Eagle application gallery, but I did track down a Wordpress widget Klaus Komenda wrote appropriately titled ‘I am Here’. After hacking at it for a bit (incorrect paths, outdated versions of the Fire Eagle libraries, adding support for older wordpress versions, etc.) I got it to work with my blog.

My integration is still a little busted up, the map isn’t showing just yet, but it’s a great start. Now all I have to do is go somewhere else, take a photo and see if my location badge updates. If anyone is interested in how I got this thing going, let me know. Maybe i’ll even write up a WordPress plugin of my own.

After spending a few days in San Fransisco, Anna and I are driving back east. We are currently in Nevada, where even the slots have slots. On the drive out to Seattle, I kept diligent track of our mileage. Once we got to Seattle, I fired up Google’s ‘My Maps’ and put push pins in every location that we were creating a map of our path that I could share with friends and family.

On the way home i’m going to try something different, a real time generative map using YRB’s ZoneTag. I have the ability to report from anywhere with my cell phone, but without some custom hacking I don’t have the ability to report my location. I’ve used ZoneTag to take photos when my digital camera isn’t handy, but lately i’ve noticed that i’m using it more and more to report my location to my Flickr friends.

To create my real time map with photos, all I have to do is ZoneTag more and put all my photos in a set. I then get my map for free. The photos may not be that great, they’re taken with my beat up Nokia, but they are only one piece of the full story I am able to tell. The other is location.

My version of ZoneTag doesn’t allow me to add the photo to a set directly from the phone. So that still needs to be done manually.

I’ve been a big fan of Zurfer from YRB. It’s a low cost way of passively staying in touch with my Flickr friends through visuals on my mobile. Now that school is over and everyone has dispersed, it’s a nice way of seeing where people are in their lives through the Flickr photos they decide to make public. Although my cell data connection is pretty bad, Zurfer is quick enough that I get some good use out of it. I know writing an application like that can be tough since I tried to do something similar earlier this year. I also use Zurfer to annotate stories I tell people in RL. Sometimes a really good story has an accompanying photo for it on Flickr.

I logged into Zurfer yesterday and found myself solicited for user feedback via a temporary Zurfer channel and dummy images (see image). I thought this was a fun and unobtrusive way of asking users for feedback via the core mechanisms of the application. Usually I have a very low threshold for solicitation but the request came to me through the interface that I am using daily. I couldn’t help but say yes.