stevewilde.com

I was trying out various Google Wave features with Rob at the beginning of the week - Adding gadgets/extensions and seeing if I can get them to achieve what I'm after, with mixed results. Tweety appeared to tweet my posts as Rob for instance*. I have added Bloggy too but not tried it yet. it didn't work for Rob. Why do they have such "sappy" names? What Wave does make you realise is how bloody awful your typing skills are when you know the person you are "Waving" to is watching. Disappointingly the RSSY extension was down when I installed it and that looks as though it is going to offer the most versatility to me. Especially if I can find a way of feed all the aggregated info back out again. But as I was out for the rest of the week the tests have so far been inconclusive! I shall report back at a later date. In their defense Google do admit that it won't work entirely successfully yet.

As I said in the comments of my last post - Twidroid released version 3.1 and we now have a Google maps plug-in too - I'm not sure my eyesight will allow me to see the tweets that have geo-info without my glasses unless they increase the size of their icon though. But at least I have managed to get the GPS/Latitude stuff working on my G1 now. I'm even considering paying for the Premium version! Steady!

I'm about to look at some other things for the Android; the Dolphin Browser, which I'm not sure is suited to the G1 or to later models but as I haven't successfully been able to get it to log me in to Google yet I may never know. Also WaveSecure, which, by logging on to the WaveSecure website, users can lock the phone to prevent use, track it’s location within a general area, backup SMS/contacts/call logs/media, wipe phone data, and restore data if the phone is found. I'm not convinced that it'll be much use for stolen phones, what happens once the SIM is removed? But the back-up facility might be useful.There was a Layar update this week too but I have been using Aloqa lately which may have more uses than Layar at the moment.

What with all this Wave excitement I thought it would be timely to take another look at Google Chrome and run all my Google stuff in there. So when I launch it I get a Wave tab, GMail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Blogger, Google Docs and iGoogle [which just shows Latitude]. I've even gone mad and changed the themes of a few pages! I'm not convinced Chrome opens any quicker than anything else but that may be my multiple bookmarked homepages. I may need to reconsider those tabs!

* I think they have since added the following disclaimer. "Note: Any participant on this wave can tweet on behalf of the authenticated Twitter user".

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I want to be able to aggregate all of my geo-locational stuff to one Google Map. If I geo tag photos in Flickr, bookmarks in Delicious, add a calendar entry in Google Calendar or tweets from my phone I should be able to see them all on one map. I might even have Google Docs tagged with geo-locational information that might be pertinent to somewhere.

I guess I am going to have to try Yahoo Pipes to acheive this... Or will Google Wave be up to the task?

Rob sent me an invite for Wave and I have duly started looking at the features it has to offer. Unfortunately not all of those features mentioned in the videos that accompany it are available to try yet. For instance the robots that can draw your tweets into Wave or send your completed Waves to Blogger. Hopefully a Posterous equivalent of that will appear too? I'm hoping/assuming Wave will tuen out to be some sort of hybrid of Twitter, Office Communicator/Windows Messenger and GMail but with the addition of features that have been available in iGoogle, such as widgets for RSS Feeds, embedding Maps, Calendars and Google Docs. What we get depends whether they're aiming it to a more Corporate tool or have more Creative uses? It certainly looks to be a Collaborative tool alright but it all depends on what you can eventually feed into it. Given the amount of information it is now possible to keep up to date with via Twitter the poor old RSS feed needs a new sense of purpose and feeding into various mashed-up apps has to be it.

I think I need to wait until more options are available within Wave before judging it but I'll keep tinkering with it. In the meantime I need to take the plunge and start looking at the API's to these things. But first I need to get a few other things sorted.

Firstly, I'm not over convinced that the GPS feature within Twidroid on my G1 is actually adding any geo-information to my tweets yet any way! But the fact that it takes ages to get a location in Brightkite and Latitude as well suggest that that maybe living in a city for you! The G1 camera is too poor for any practical use as well so I don't use that for geo-tagged photos and therefore still need to add geo-locational info manually to any shots I take with my 400D or Cybershot. I haven't even looked at adding geo-location details to Delicious bookmarks although I know it's possible. It's obviously possible to feed Google Calendar entries into Google Maps too as this GoogleSystem Blog demonstrates.

I like geo-locational stuff. I like it as a way of merging our analogue and digital lives, as a step towards an Augmented Reality. I like Layar. But I have issues with waving my phone around, to lock onto locational information, inviting any unscrupulous passer-by to swipe it off of me. I don't necessarily want to advertise my position in real-time as Google Latitude or Brightkite does but they could have their uses if fed the right information.

For instance If I tag restaurants, places of interest or shops that I find online, in a particular area that I think I might be visiting in the future, in Delicious; and events that are going to take me to that area are in my Google Calendar then when the GPS on my phone detects that I am in that area my Google Map [or Latitude] should be able to remind me to check these places out. I can then Tweet comments on these places and see them appear beside the original entries. And tweets mentioning the shop/restaurant/etc concerned can be fed into a Twitter List that I can see fed in situ on the Map. This is the sort of thing that I believe Brightkite was created for but it has limited users and seems to me to be more of a photoblogging site now. It certainly appears to have become more people rather than place orientated and there are more than enough Social Networking sites for that sort of behaviour!

Still maybe the fabled GPhone will appear one day and answer all these wishes? Or is the Google Chrome OS going to end up on a netbook instead? In the meantime I better make sure I have some API/Mash-Up books on my Amazon Wishlist. Before long I hope to be able to produce music/artwork with locational properties, but more about that in a later post.

Zemanta refuses to work in GMail today so there may not be the amount of links here that I'd hoped as I had to add them all manually.

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Well, I said I'd start posting here and here I go,..

I'm just configuring my new Dell Latitude e6400 for a browser based existence. It's not really mine to install any apps on so I'm going to see how much I can acheive with nothing but Firefox and a few plug-ins installed.

I'm also testing to see how long the battery lasts. Looks like 4.5 hours. Wireless is good on it though, I must say. Most things can't cope with the walls in our flat. Shame about this Vista thing though!

Hopefully this will make it easier for me to blog, arrange music, edit photos and generally get stuff done on the go! mind you, anything would be better than my cronky old laptop, with its 30 minute battery life.

I might have to invest in one of those little 3G dongle gadgies too. And I think I might slyly install my Wacom Bamboo Tablet that was never happy on my XP machines. Assuming its happier with VIsta [something has to be!].

So, what am I doing it all with?

• Twitter - with the Power Twitter plug-in.
• RSS Feeds - Netvibes
• e-Mail - GMail [with GTDInbox]...And of course, there will be Google Maps, Calendar and Docs.
• Music and Photo editing - Aviary Suite.
• Bookmarks - Delicious.
• GTD - Remember The Milk
• Notes - 3Banana [trying this in place of Evernote as the web version creates script errors in Firefox that Evernote seem disinclined to fix]
• Mind Mapping from Mind Meister.
• Blogging - Posterous, via Google Mail with Zemanta Firefox Plug-In

What else would anyone suggest?

• Are You Using Google Reader and Delicious? (jrduffy09.edublogs.org)
• 10 Browser Based Research Tools (imakethingswork.com)
• Mobile App Blogging Thanks to Posterous: Regator vs MeeHive vs Byline (newcommbiz.com)
• Zemanta Launches Balloons (joedawsons.com)
• What does Zemanta have to do with Freebase and Balloons? (socialmediatoday.com)
• My Thoughts on Posterous as a Lifestreaming Platform (lifestreamblog.com)

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