Join us at the MySpace Developer Platform Launch

At Pollenizer we have created this concept of The Conference Chaser. It’s like the TV show here in Australia called The Chaser, except we rock up to conferences, open the lid of our laptops and start a combined broadcast and live blog of the event using a mashup of uStream and Tangler.

Tomorrow night is the Australian launch of the MySpace Developer Platform. If you can’t get there, join us via the chaser and we will relay the fun to you.

Check-in on Wednesday 9th April @ 6pm (Official Kickoff @ 6.30pm AU-EST).

Before that, please pop in and throw in all things you want to know from the MySpace team and we’ll be sure to ask. Or just throw them into the live discussion below.

HOWTO: Add a Live Forum Roll to Your Wordpress Blog

Over at Tangler we are busy finding ways for live discussions to reside where the users want them to. For example, if you have a  blog post that would benefit from swarming readers into a live discussion, you can now do that using the new ‘Share’ tool to embed the topic in your blog post.

Taking this idea further, we are slowly revealing the Tangler API and this is something of a sneak peak.

Itching to give it a go, I have added a dynamic list of all my live forums to this blog’s sidebar and giving you what you need to try the same.

Instructions 

If you haven’t done so already, get yourself an account on Tangler.

Download WP Tangler Live Discussion Roll and unpack it into the root of your current WP theme.

Edit tangler-sidebar.php at the top to your user-id and to the number of forums you would like to display.

Get your user-id by viewing your profile in Tangler and looking at the URL which will be http://www.tangler.com/people/id/12324. Grab the number off the end.

// Widget settings
$user_id = 1454; // Your id
$top = 20; // The number of forums you wanna display

In your template somewhere (mine is in sidebar template) I have then added the following:

<h5>Live Forum Roll (<a href="http://www.tangler.com">Tangler Power</a>)</h5>
<ul>
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH."/tangler-sidebar.php");?>
</ul>

That’s all there is to it. It’s a quick and dirty hack but it gets the job done. Next task is to turn this into a WP Plug-in.
API Methods Available Today

If you want to do more, feel free to explore the first three methods released and let me know how you go.

Example: Get a User’s Public Forums

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/user/1454/forums/

Example: Get a Forum’s Topics

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/forum/20801/topics/

Example: Get a Topic’s Messages

 http://www.tangler.com/services/1.0/topic/34074/

Have fun!

Tangler 2 Go (Updated “Nokia at Mobile World Congress”)

Tangler is working on some delicious features so that users can put live discussions where they want them to be. There’s an API coming up (read-only to begin with write in the pipes) and embed is now here. In any Tangler topic, select ‘Share’ in the top right and paste the code into your site, blog or social networking application.

Nokia’s doing it… check out the discussion below for real live blogging of Nokia’s season launch at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• Main event page
• Tangler - Unconference - More Topics
  
• Symbian World coverage

Help Required with Wikipedia: Big Prize!

Friends. Please. I need your help.

I am very lucky to be described in Wikipedia but no one has touched it since my time at Kazaa. It’s completely uncool to update your own page, so can you have a look and add something that you think is important? It can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I’m not looking for a group-hug.

The best contribution can chose any MP3 download on Amazon as a prize! Deadline: Friday, 8th February.

Web App Goal #2: Don’t Try to Change the World

If your first goal when building web applications is ‘Change the World’. Stop, take a deep breath and start again. On your blog, wiki or whiteboard, write:

“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to give users something they need/love/want.”

or

“We are not trying to change the world, we are trying to make more money than we spend.”

Probably most of the products I have worked on have been in the ‘Change the World’ category. They are over burdened with features, confusing to users, really difficult to maintain and often fail to ship at all.

Why do we do this to ourselves when there are plenty of un-built, simple products that can be built and released in a few months and give users exactly what they need/love/want?

Focus on a known use-case, keep it simple and release as soon as possible to test against real people.

Oh, and I also agree with Web App Goal #1 .

Dataportability: Defined

Many thanks to Michael Pick & Smashcut Media for a blindingly clear explaination of what data portability is. Awesome work guys. Everyone that’s been asking me for more information… press play, then get active.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.We’re discussing it here.

Rebooting with Wordpress

Phil’s blog is back and now with super power, zingnatious, Wordpress juice. I have been a loyal, devoted Movabletype evangelist since 2003 until now when I must declare it… broken. Movabletype 4 is just trying too hard to be Wordpress and it plain isn’t, no matter how hard it’s dressed up…  and these days its just impossible to use. Wordpress, on the other hand, is simple… light and fun and a real pleasure getting this new site setup.

If you are subscribed to my RSS feed then you shouldn’t need to change anything. The URL of the RSS is the same. You can also find me on various social sites:

• Add me on Facebook
• Add me on Twitter
• Add me on LinkedIn
• Add me on Delicious

Let the blogging begin… again…

Phil 3.0: A User's Guide (I Joined Omnidrive)

Phil 3.0 is coming out of beta as the new Chief Technology Officer for Omnidrive.

What is Omnidrive

Omnidrive makes a terrific online storage solution. Here’s some info:

Omnidrive’s development began almost three years ago by one person with the goal of building an application that would make it incredibly easy to get content on and off the web. Since then, Omnidrive has grown to become a full-scale web aggregation solution that can be accessed from a web browser, Windows or Mac desktop and in the near future, a mobile devices.

Currently headquartered in Menlo Park, CA, Omnidrive has development offices in Wollongong, Australia and Trivandrum, India.

Why I Made This Decision

There is a secret sauce to companies which needs the right blend of ingredients to taste yummy. I’m always hunting for a balanced concoction of solid technology, dilligent work ethic, inspiring people, big vision and healthy sense of reality. Omnidrive has that.

One idea really caught my attention and the vision is huge and important. When I met Nik Cubrilovic (Omnidrive’s CEO) in the Darling Harbour Starbucks he told me about his idea for WebFS - a standard for exchanging files on the web. Sounds a bit dull at first doesn’t it But when you start to think about it for a little while it comes alive because it is one of those big ideas that has a profound effect on things.

I see WebFS as an important missing link in the software-as-services concept. As soon as services can start moving files around as easy as they do data today, some interesting new things will become possible and I am excited about being a part of that.

I am particularly interested in the idea that the user in a WebFS world owns their own files again. So if I sign up for the latest online document editing service, I am not having to lock myself in by storing my files with them also. Future apps like Google Docs and Flickr will become interfaces to our files and data, not the repository itself for our stuff.

Why Not My Own Startup

Many of you may be wondering why I chose not to launch my own startup. Well, I’m an ideas man, not so much a business man. I like to have an idea and then start building business models around it. I’m quite good at that. I struggle a bit when I try to do it the other way round and ‘think of something’ that I can build a business around. When I left Kazaa, I had an idea for a video content business that I called Chatabox. But investment to make it happen took soooo looong that its time came and went. Other ideas will come and there’s no rush.

Time to Begin

Watch this space.

Yoick: Playground Building

Yoick was in the Sydney Morning Herald with an early glimpse of Outback Online. The first of many headlines to begin with “Yoicks!” me thinks.

Yoicks! It’s another virtual world

3D P2P: Playing Outback

These days I am having lots of fun with some very talented people at a startup called Yoick. We are developing a new 3D product called Outback. It’s a huge engineering task, but it is something completely new and that’s exciting. Scoble has the goss.