Websites

I’ve had a really busy week this week, so busy that I didn’t notice it was the Business Startup show at Olympia yesterday and today, I debated getting on the road early this morning and coming back early but as I have family here for the weekend it seemed a little silly.. So a little blue yesterday I browsed the web for some startup information to make up for it.

That’s when I came across 24 Hour Startup, where a group of people from Nonsense have decided to build a web-based startup and launch it all in 24 hours.. I love this idea!!

At midday yesterday they didn’t even know what they would be building, as of this morning it has a name, a logo, code, and it’s own blog, AND it will launch in just 3 hours time! This is an amazing achievement and if Neil Cocker’s estimates are anything to go buy it could make a lot of money (hey why aren’t I doing this?!).

Now as I was feeling blue yesterday and they’ve brightened my day, I’m hoping they’ll let me have the Blue gift for writing this blog post and putting it out on Twitter! Plus I think was @dr_hue’s second friend!?

Now before I start this – I don’t want you to get me wrong, I like Facebook, I like it a lot:

• I’ve got in contact with people I haven’t seen in years!
• I don’t have to send an email round to tell people what a fantastic holiday I had (I just post it and the photos and they can choose to look at it when/if they want to).

I do have some gripes though…

1. The amount of time-wasting people do on it. I scoot on have a look and scoot off (but then I  do have a billion and one things to do around the net!).
2. The fact that people use it as the number one method of communication now. Even SMS seems to be going out of the window for people to contact each other with such things as new births etc.
3. The security, last but by no means least and probably the biggest of them all.
   I tend to keep what I put on there fairly compartmentalized I know what I want people to see and wouldn’t upload it unless I did! The security to limit people is kind of complicated though (as I found out trying to explain it to a friend last week).

Items 1 & 2 there’s very little Facebook can do anything bout, this is proof how “mainstream” Facebook has become and they’re probably quite pleased about it. The third however is a very different story.

The security is clever if you sit down and take the time to build your friend lists (and associated access properties for those lists) correctly it can really work well. The problem is people don’t take the time to do this!

I’m a fan of opt-out of privacy rather then opt-in. Your profile should be locked down so nobody can even see it from the outset and then you should be able to unlock certain parts (photo’s etc) to certain individuals or friend lists as you see fit. I guess this would make it an “anti-social networking site” but it would be safer!

Look at the national security issue that arose this morning:
Lady Shelley Sawyers (wife of the next head of MI6) posted details of their children, holiday photo’s and the location of their flat on the website. This is after vast sums have been spent in the past to ensure he and his family are protected from security compromises.

This is all happening in the wake of Facebook’s planned security “simplification”, that word “simplification” scares me. In general it means it makes it easier for the company doing the simplifying and more of a pain for those using it (Orange have been a prime example of this over the years!).

So instead of setting different preferences for your photo’s, your job history, your date of birth, you’ll now have one privacy setting to rule them all (In a Lord of The Rings “One Ring” kind of way). Now whilst I can hear you saying – that’s great – finally they’re making it easy. Think again!

You want to show a couple of friends your holiday snaps, so you open up photo’s to friends – wait a minute – you don’t want them going into work (you don’t want the blokes from work seeing you in a bikini do you girls and The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce movie boys?!?) so how do you do this. This sounds like it’s getting “complicated” not “simplified” to me?!

The above is an example you’ll “probably” be familiar with but the bigger one is probably your date of birth (used to generate Facebook birthdays and all those nice fuzzy messages from friends on your birthday!), how many sites have you entered your date of birth as a security question on recently? Do  you really want to open that up to friends, employers, ex’s, the bully from school that seems to have settled down now??

I’ll leave you with that thought, and we’ll watch with interest as Facebook “simplifies”

photo credit: hyku

That’s a hunch, not a hump!

I’ve just signed up with Hunch.com after reading Lifehackers review I figure anything that can help me answer some questions might be useful!

The signup process seemed to take forever after I’d provided my details – though the site had just been mentioned in LifeHacker and had 283 views on there (that’s probably not including those on their Feed Reader that picked it up the same way I did!).

Eventually it crashed with a 500 error, but I seemed to be logged in and able to navigate around my profile, it was only when I clicked “home” it ground to a halt again.

So I navigated to You -> Tell Hunch about You, let the interrogation begin….

Q1. Where is your home located?
Q2. Alien abductions, are they real?
Q3. Are you Male or Female?
Q4. Do you like Bumper cars?

After each question it told me the number of other respondents that had agreed with me. Most of them didn’t believe in Alien abductions I can tell you!

I abandoned it at this point as I was just getting too many delays and errors, I have a hunch that it’s because of their LifeHacker mention – maybe I’ll come back when they’re less busy!

• Military Intelligence and You! hd

Maradona by Kusturica dvd

I’ve never turned on Twitter syncing my Facebook status, I’ll be honest half of what I tweet I wouldn’t want as my Facebook status! Plus it would result in 20-30 status-updates a day!

• Alpha Dog move
  
  Diary of the Dead move

Devakishor posted (and tweeted) today a great solution to this, after asking his Twitter followers for a solution.

The solution to this appears to be Selective Twitter Status Application

• Final Voyage psp

! With this installed, when I tweet something that I want to appear on Facebook, all I need to do is add #fb to the tweet!

Uh-oh! Mum’s at it again with yet another meme! This time she wants to know seven weird facts about me, I’m not so sure about this… I don’t class any facts about me to be “weird”…

Here are the rules:

1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog. (iRamble) – Check
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog – some random, some weird – Well I’ll see what I can manage!
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog – 7? You’re having a giraffe aren’t you?
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog – oh heck that’ll confuse some of of this lot!!!

Here we go…..

1. I like the cold side of a pillow
   Come on now, that’s not odd, that should be downright normal for absolutely everyone!!!
2. Automation
   I love it, I’m a real geek for it. I’d automate everything if I could. I’ve practically got Emma convinced on the remote control light switches, and the entire house sound system now! Woohoo!
3. Blogging
   Unlike almost everyone else I don’t know why I write this blog… Other blogs have a specific purpose like making money, or self expression (or therapy in some cases). I’m not sure why I started Skillett.com I just did! It barely makes anything off the adverts, and is full of content.
4. Rain makes me nervous
   I have good reason…. Very good reason! I got married in the Great Floods of 2007 in Gloucester.We were getting married on the 21st July 2007, and on the 20th July 2007 the heavens opened, surrounding the village we were due to get married in!

   Needless to say some people almost didn’t make it to the wedding (myself included), my flat tyre on the morning of the wedding just continued the saga. However all but 4 people made it I think, and guess what – the most amazing day ever – made all the more special by the stories of how people had got there:
   The Girl Next Door move
   - Army Trucks
   - Nights in Crisis Centres
   - 21 Hours in a car from Newcastle.
   (Believe me – some of the photo’s are hilarious!!!)

   I somehow forgot about my nerves on the night before watching the Sea king helicopter land people in the hotel car park – as I rewrote my wedding speech from start to finish!

   I’m allowed to get nervous alright – it’s not “just a bit of a rain!“

5. Jim Carey
   I’m saying nothing more, just typing his name has made me cringe – I can’t stand him.
6. Trash TV
   Luckily I’m not alone on this one, the X-Factor makes me laugh, I think Strictly is brilliant and people wonder about my mental state, however Emma likes them as much as I do!
7. Weird Fact #7
   The reason it’s taken me weeks to post this is because I couldn’t think of #7, the rest of this was written before I went on holiday! As such I’m classing Weird Fact #7 writers block as my weird fact #7!

Oh I can’t think of anyone who might not have done it already…. I haven’t read enough blogs recently (see my last post!)

Update: I’ve actually had a request to be tagged! Here you go Tim.

The Express hd

I was raving about BackType only last week both on Twitter and on this blog – It’s a great idea and the list of features they sent me this morning in their newsletter looked great!

FriendFeed
Not something I use, but I know a few people who do that will be pleased about this.

Alerts
I love my Google Alerts so this should be really useful for keeping up on what people are commenting on.

Twitter
Not sure I fancy every comment I make anywhere showing up in my twitter feed though!!

Widgets
Something Matt and I discussed, getting places where we’re commenting to show up on our blogs.

Developers
Aha an API, not that I’ll have time to use it but I know it’s there if I want it.

Trends
This will be interesting, Analytics for comments

This post nearly started off as rant, until I went and did a little digging – it seemed BackType wasn’t updating and had at least a week old comments for me! Then I remembered I had moderation of comments switched on!!!

I don’t get notification’s that there are comments for me to moderate there… Maybe I should turn off moderation for comments?

I registered with backtype the other day. I quite like it as a way of seeing where I’m commenting and on what!

Speed movie Matt pointed out that he couldn’t see the point of it, but I quite like the idea of using their widget to show other people what I’m commenting on and what I’ve said (beats a blogroll any day in my opinion!).