The folks over at Qik were kind enough to outfit me with a Nokia N95, so I could test out their service. I’ve been quasi-resistant to lifecasting of any kind, for a few reasons:

1. My days are typically very boring.
2. I feel bad shoving a camera into people’s faces and streaming them.
3. You wouldn’t like me anymore if you knew just how frequently I speak to my cats.

Jason and Scoble seem to find no end to the things they want to share with the Qik (and by proxy, Twitter communities), but I find myself hesitant to turn on the camera. After some brainstorming, here are some applications that I could see Qik being useful for:

1. Clothes shopping — If I’m out shopping, and I can’t decide which shirt or shoes to pick, why not let the live audience help? I mean, they’re the ones that have to look at the outfit on camera later anyway, right?
2. Company on public transportation — As if there aren’t enough crazies on SF Muni, let’s add one more (me) talking AT my phone (instead of on it) during my commute.
3. Instant support group — If one of my girlfriends is having man trouble, it would be nice to have another hundred or so people to back me up at any given moment to say “Dump the loser!”

I’m only half kidding on some of those. What value do you guys get out of lifecasting? Why is it so popular? Maybe because it’s like reality TV, but without all the convinient editing? I’ve tried a few other services, and none of them have been compelling enough for me to continue to use them. The mobility factor with Qik is a definite plus, so maybe that will help.

Share this!

A few weeks ago I received an email from the girlfriend of a member of the band, The Carps. In the letter, she told me that they had written a song called “Veronica Belmont,” and that it was based on Internet culture and feeling like you know the people you meet online. She linked me to their MySpace page, and there it was! It’s a fun song, and some of the lyrics definitely made me chuckle:

Dark light as we expire,
But go ahead, just dance, dance, dance

He pwned in that disco,
When they played chocolate rain, rain, rain.

Apparently the band is really starting to blow up, because I’ve been getting emails every day from people telling me they’ve heard it on XM, indie stations, and even on RCRD LBL (where you can download the track for free!). It’s awesome (and humbling) that they thought of me, so I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to those guys. I hope they tour in SF sometime!

Waves and Shambles, the EP with the single on it is coming out this Tuesday, the 8th! I can’t wait to pick it up. But of course, all bets are off if they steal my Google juice. (I kid, I kid!)

Share this!

I noticed today that Thomas Hawk (and later TechCrunch) are writing about a service called TagCow, which apparently can tag large batches of photos at a time. Anyone who takes a lot of pictures can attest to the immense annoyance of tagging tons of photos, especially when you want to be very specific about them. Sure, you can batch tag when you upload, but then you still have to go back and add whatever other tags are needed depending on the individual photo (like batch tagging all my SXSW photos “sxsw” “austin” “conference” and then going back and adding someone’s name, etc). Pain in the butt, right? Some people (like Tantek) bow to the wisdom of crowds and simply add a “needs tags” note to the photos, but it would be nice to have a service or program that could actually recognize the content of the photo and do it for you.

Is TagCow that much-needed service? Thomas seems to think so, although he admits that he’s not quite sure how the technology works. TechCrunch says that it’s got to be people actually viewing each photo and giving it the appropriate tags, although how someone could go through that many photos is beyond me (says the girl who works for a “people-powered search engine“). Arrington says:

The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo - he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.

But this makes me concerned about privacy. If I’m uploading 200 photos from my vacation, do I really want a bunch of dudes sitting around an office picking apart each one? No, obviously not. Therefore, I probably wouldn’t use the service. However, since TagCow is being a little vague about how everything works, I’m worried that people will walk into a situation where their privacy could be at stake. Does TagCow keep copies of the photos you send them? Do they live on some server there, even though you’re only tagging them for, say, your personal collection (as opposed to being on Flickr or Zooomr)? TC also writes:

And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.

Yikes. Anyhow, I’m aware that I’m putting on my tinfoil hat a little early, considering we hardly know anything about TagCow. It could be the answer to our tagging prayers, or it could be a huge privacy-sucking black hole. For now I think I’ll continue adding my metadata by hand.

However, their tagline is hilarious.

Share this!

I’ve long been a fan of Twitter, and despite the many naysayers it has become an integral part of many peoples web existence. Since Twitter shares their API with developers, it opens up a whole world of mashups and sites that take advantage of the huge network that Twitter is accumulating. This subject has been covered by people before, but I thought it would be fun to share a few of my personal favorites.

The best search tool for Twitter that I’ve found. One of my biggest annoyances about Twitter is that the Replies tab only shows responses with your username as the first word in the tweet (e.g., “@veronica talks about her cats too much”) and not responses with the username any where else (e.g., “sick of hearing about @veronica’s cats”). Tweetscan solves this by finding any instance of the word. It’s also really helpful for tracking hashtags, like #sxsw.

Takes the Tweetscan idea one step further by tracking entire conversation threads. You can see the divergent paths as the topic morphs and changes, and you can also see where comments of yours fit in with conversations already in progress. A new site on the scene, but one of the most useful.

This would be insanely helpful to me if I had a car. Alas, I do not, but I think this site kills two birds with one stone: you get instant traffic info, as well as the ability to vent your gridlocked frustrations.

Too lazy to read the news? You can read the outrage and support for the candidates here. Clicking on the individual candidates names will show you other ways to follow them online (i.e., Flickr, Facebook, MySpace) as well as their most recent tweets.

I’m not entirely sure how much of the Twitter API Ze Frank is using, but it’s gotta be worked in there somehow! When I first heard of Colorwars, I was not impressed. However, once I set aside my childhood fears of being chosen last for everything, I realized that it was a fun and interactive way to use Twitter. Not only that, Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV promised us presents if we joined veryGreenTeam.

Of course, there are many others that are fun but don’t really have much purpose other than to be entertaining: TwitterVision, TwitterPoster and Twitterholic come to mind. Tweetmeme is another one that has potential, but it almost always features non-English tweets, which makes it difficult for my monolingual brain.

Do you have any personal favorites that I missed? For a huge list of other sites and for more API info, head over to the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Share this!