Sol Young

Twicecream - a fake service to demonstrate a point about single sign-on…
In web 2.0 there is a determination to screw up potentially great services. It’s my number #1 pet peeve with software development these days. Here’s a fictitious example of a service you might create…
You’ve built a service that automatically Twitters your geo-position and the [...]

[Read more →]

On Twitter, the numbers for friends (people you follow) and followers (people who follow you) are being misreported. The most common tweet today is about one’s follower count dropping off. This is telling of your personality, and not in a good way.
If you’re complaining about your follower count dropping off without your realizing your friend [...]

[Read more →]

Link to today’s run
I love running. I skip wearing headphones or listening to music because I love hearing the world race past me. Things that interfere with the actual experience of being there aren’t interesting to me.
Nike+ on an iPod (a music player first and foremost) thankfully has the option to do a workout without [...]

[Read more →]

…
I picked up the Nokia N82 yesterday from Import GSM, a great hybrid brick-and-mortage / online store. Think Dynamism for phones. It was my first visit, right at closing, and despite trying to get stuff out the door for the evening shipment the guys helped out with descriptions and subtle nuances between the [...]

[Read more →]

Ross Miller at FriendFeed responded to my question about FriendFeed del.icio.us feeds not updating. It seems del.icio.us is blocking mass spidering of their site.
Ross’s email:
“Hi Sol, del.icio.us places restraints on our ability to crawl their site. So if for some reason the item is missed, it becomes very hard for us to retrieve the del.icio.us [...]

[Read more →]

Steven Hodson, in a post over on Mashable, describes security risks and the waste of information that mobile phone GPS use brings (when pinpointing and announcing our locations). He poses some extremely valid points in regards to announcing one’s geolocation via Twitter, Brightkite, or FriendFeed being useless noise.
Telling people via a highly conversational medium such [...]

[Read more →]

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense
Just a couple ideas on GPS, tied to proximity of a mobile phone…

Proximity based ads (walk by Banana Republic and get a coupon via SMS)
Location based music (Last.fm channels playing artists from your location)
Mobile OnStar

Think of your favorite services on the net and add a GPS component… It probably enhances [...]

[Read more →]