Twitter as an input for your service

Dopplr recently launched a new version called “Copenhagen” and amongst the new features there is this possibility to insert new trip to Dopplr directly via Twitter (and also by SMS or email). All you need to do is reply to Dopplr with the trip information (eg. “A trip to Helsinki on May 19 to May 23”). Mixin is also using Twitter to feed your social agenda. Problem is that every service requires to fit a given format (for Twitter: “mention a placename and two dates, including the month both times”) that 1) you have to remember, 2) is most likely not compatible with other service. Next step would be to feed those services with natural language…

Also it is interesting to see that Twitter is becoming the “de facto” status aggregator as it is used to feed other services (it is a bit surprising as well given the lack of reliability of this tool that keeps on crashing).

Blog4Mobile

Using the feed of a blog to generate a mobile friendly version of it is something we have tried when at Kaywa, and I still do believe one can make something nice of it. For various reasons we failed imho but wish all the best to Blog4Mobile :-)… good point to start with they plan to share revenue (and they provide access statistics):

After the beta phase, Blog4Mobile.com will start the central marketing of all mobile blogs. Each user gets up to 70% of the advertising incomes, generated via his mobile blog. Blog4Mobile.com is not only for free, you can even cash in by blogging!

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Festival guides

Remember the mobile guide for Paleo festival ? I found out that the same app exists for few other festivals in Switzerland. Neat. I found this out through my beloved carrier portal. Talking about it… a Google search field has appeared on top of the the main page… looks like they are “opening” their mobile web to the external world.

Mobile Guide Festival
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My Mobile Web (2): mobile.rsr.ch

I am going through my mobile bookmarks. First step: my “swiss” folder, or to put it another way: making good use of the mobile web without using useless and expensive services from Swisscom Mobile and its “Vodafone” Portal.

I found it only very recently about the mobile website of the swiss radio. Really neat! It has some iPhone look and feel, it is clean and does a good job at informing on a concise manner… what else asking ?
It even provides some show to be downloaded as MP3 (depends on the connection and make sure you have a good data plan if you are on your carrier network).

mobile.rsr.ch

URL: mobile.rsr.ch or via the QR Code below
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Smaller is better

New York Times: On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff

[…] Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays […]

[…] By stripping down the Web site interface to the most basic functions, site designers can focus the user’s attention and offer relevant information without distractions. […]

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Le Matin ne gère pas son espace numérique

Typique des médias traditionnels. Sentant le vent tourner les médias dits “traditionnels” investissent dans internet, souvent avec du retard mais en plus sans stratégie. Créer une communauté numérique autour d’un quotidien c’est très bien c’est louable, mais il faut alors se donner les moyens de le faire bien! Je suis prêt à parier que l’ensemble de la communauté numérique n’est modéré/geré que par une seule personne à 10% de son temps ou éventuellement même le département IT à temps perdu…

Upgrades

The blog software has been upgraded and it is now running WordPress 2.5.1. Once again the upgrade went without any problem. Was a good time to change very slightly the theme to remove all references to “categories”. Choosing a categoy is often a problem for me so I decided to get rid of it and deal only with tags…

I have also upgraded Firfox on one computer @work… quite promising! It seems managing memory much better…