Scott Mebberson

I’ve finally done it, I signed up for tumblr today. I’ve been aware of it for a while, but at the time I thought how on earth am I going to manage this along with my blog and the millions of other social networks I belong too. But, as we got talking about tumblr in the office, I thought I might as well give it a shot.

Today is my first day of tumblring, and I have to say, so far I really like it. It has a totally different feel to blogging. It feels, almost, more informal than my blog. I don’t have to write much about anything, simply link to something or embed the video or photo right there.

I really like the media focus that tumblr brings to blogging. It feels good to drop in a YouTube video, and write something short about it and that’s that! As they say, a picture (or video in this web 2.0 world) is worth a thousand words. I also like the focus on different types of posts you can make, i.e. a link, a photo, a video or even a quote. It displays each post type in a slightly different manner. Makes for quite a nice visual experience.

I wonder if tumblring will become a word? Like googling and blogging…

I’ve been thinking about web 2.0 a fair bit of late. I really like web 2.0 and the people-centric nature of its concept. I think it’s taking the web in a really great direction.

I wrote a post a week or so back about The Programmable Web, what I’ve been calling a byproduct of web 2.0. My post discusses the value of the web as a programmable environment itself (due to the growing number of APIs that are now available).

I think all the mashups people are creating in days (as opposed to months in traditional development) are fantastic. For me, this is one the key factors in why the web has grown so rapidly in the past 12 to 18 months.

However, many of these new breed of websites focus only on one task, for example, picnic and Snipshot focus solely on editing pictures online. In isolation, this isn’t a problem, in fact it allows developers to focus on one thing only, and make sure they do it well (as opposed to being a jack of all trades).

My question is, with so many cool, useful websites/services out there, are we missing something? What about the integration of these websites? For example, wouldn’t it be great to start building a mind map using MindMeister, then use picnik to crop an image to suit, and perhaps even cue point a video using YouTube and drop that into your mind map. At present, that’s damn hard to do!

Might this be the next version of the web? Building better integration between websites and immediately benefiting from the massive infrastructure of the web.

What about APIs?, you might say. Sure, they’re a great start, but you still need to glue the various APIs together with a programming language and a platform. I see the user interface as the major stumbling block for short term, better website integration. I think a change in the infrastructure of the web (or at least api programming) needs to take place, to allow the web to progress beyond web 2.0.

I’ve always had problems managing my contacts. Between email programs, Address Book.app, and all the web 2.0 websites I belong too, well, it’s a pain in the ass!

Tabber to the rescue! Maybe.

I signed up for Tabber today, which is a new service aimed at managing your address book. There are other websites/applications that provide online address book management, however, Tabber is focussed on keeping you up to date on all of your friend’s movements! When they make a new post on their blog, update their myspace website, or their flickr account, you can easily find out about it! The caveat; they must belong to Tabber too.

Hopefully it won’t take long for Tabber to grow it’s user base and become a worth while tool.

Tabber is in beta, and it is very new, as such I won’t start using it straight away unfortunately. It needs a couple of new features before I’ll consider it such as importing contacts via a Group vCard file (for MAC OS X, Address Book users) and the ability to export your contacts details (so that you can easily keep your desktop applications in-sync), at the very least!

It would be great to be able to access your contacts via LDAP (so you could subscribe to the LDAP server directly from Address Book.app or Outlook). RSS Export would also be a handy feature! If Tabber is going to become the primary place to manage your contacts, ideally it should work with Desktop applications, just as well as it does with web 2.0 websites.

As Tabber doesn’t offer Group vCard as a format (which is what Address Book.app exports users as) for importing users, I used this application to export my contacts from Address Book.app into csv format, but you might find this one worthwhile also.

I really like what Tabber is trying to achieve and I’ll be keeping an eye on it, hopefully it will mature with some more features soon.

In a response to my post comparing spambox.us to meltmail.com, “John” wrote a comment about another temporary mail service, Mint Email. From what I can gather, John owns Mint Email (he does at least have a proper email address at mintemail.com).

Mint Email is a very different service to spambox.us and meltmail.com. Although it does provide you with a temporary email address, it achieves it in a very different way. Mint Email provides you with an email address with no setup whatsoever. You simply visit www.mintemail.com and you’ve got yourself a temporary email address. It works too.

I sent an email to my temporary email address, and within a few seconds, the email showed up in my web page. It’s quite a unique service, and even updates the title tag of the page so that you can see when an email has arrived when using a tabbed browser.

Which, is very important in this case, because every time you visit the page or refresh the page you’ll have a new, different email address. This is both good and bad. It is bad for longer term email addresses which you might need for a day or so (because you’ll have to keep the browser window open), but, if you know that you’ll be receiving the email in an hour or so this is definetly the service of choice. It is so simple and easy to use!  You can even pick the email address yourself, which is a nice touch.

In summary, I’ll probably be using spambox.us for longer term email addresses. But, if I need an email address quick, and will only need it for an hour or so, I’d definitely use Mint Email.

I’ve been playing around with Last.fm lately. I quite like the service so far, it’s nice and simple to use and allows me to record my listening history, with the aim being to discover new bands that I might like based on the tracks I listen too.

I liked the information it provided to me via my Dashboard, especially the Recently Listened Tracks (which I’ve added to my blog via RSS). I thought I might like to add my Top Tracks to my blog, so I checked out the Audioscrobbler Web Services (which took me ages to find!). The Top Tracks by user was the one I wanted, but it wasn’t in RSS (which means I couldn’t easily add it using the RSS Sidebar Widget on my WordPress blog).

So, I decided to turn it into RSS using Yahoo! Pipes. The Last.fm Audioscrobbler Top Tracks RSS pipe will take any Last.fm users Top Track XML (via Audioscrobbler) and spit out some RSS (like mine).

technorati tags:lastfm, audioscrobbler, yahoopipes

A comment from Susan on my post about spambox.us lead me to investigate another temporary email forwarding service, Melt Mail.

I had already tried out spambox.us, which worked quite well, so I decided to give Melt Mail ago and compare the two services. It turns out there wasn’t much to compare, they both worked equally well. The only thing I can use to seperate the two services is that the temporary email addresses that spambox.us generates can last from 1 hour up to 1 year; as far as I could tell Melt Mail temporary email addresses only last for a maximum of 24 hours.

In short: spambox.us wins!

Out of curiosty, I performed a search on Google for temporary email forwarding, it turns out there are quite a few of these services around. Personally, I think spambox.us and Melt Mail are better services, and that decision was based purely on the design and UI of the websites!

I still couldn’t bring myself to give them my REAL email address however (just incase they pass it on, despite both services explaining they don’t). I used my gmail account instead.

technorati tags:spambox, meltmail

I’ve been wanting to add links to my RIAForge projects, I was aware of the RIAForge project list file (in XML) and thought that was a good option to easily add list of my projects to my blog (using the RSS Sidebar Widget in WordPress).

So, I checked out the project list file, and found that it wasn’t in RSS format; the RSS Sidebar Widget in WordPress only allows valid RSS or ATOM to be displayed, so it presented me with a small problem. Thanks to Yahoo! Pipes however, that problem was solved in no time!

I created the RIAForge Project List Pipe. It takes the URL to an RIAForge project list XML file, such as mine, and converts it into a valid RSS Feed!

technorati tags:yahoopipes, riaforge, rss

Have you ever wanted to evaluate a piece of software, go to download it and you’re required to provide an email address? Of course you have, we all have.

Nobody likes spam, and as such, we’re all wary of providing email addresses in these situations, not knowing how much spam we’re going to receive. However, spambox is a nifty website/idea in which you can quickly and easily create an email address (which will forward all emails to your real email address) for a limited time.

You can have this email account active from as little as 1 hour, right up to one year. We just have to hope they won’t provide our real email addresses to the spammers!

An excerpt from the spambox.us page:

“But.. You could be collecting my e-mail address!
Yes, we could be, but we’re not doing it. We’ve got an automaticcleanup agent that wipes out every n-minutes the expired spamboxe-mails. Don’t worry, we won’t sell your e-mail to spammers.”

I hope that’s enough reassurance for you?!

technorati tags:web2.0