Feedomania - the modern day stock ticker

So what to Twitter, Facebook, Blippy, Plancast, Foursquare, Playfire and nearly all the latest startups in the last 3 years have in common?

The feed

We seem to be stuck in some kind of parallel universe where information needs to be fed to us in a 1920s style stock ticker format. Vertical never ending lists that follow a thumbnail-text box with some useless information scattered along the edges.

Web services and real time web are partly to blame, they emphasise short concise messages that can easily be subscribed to but they fail to communicate any form of personality beyond the short text permitted.

Sure we had some web page atrocities created by MySpace where early attempts to personalise pages resulted in some truly buggy profiles, but we've moved so far into the sterile world of feeds that the web is rapidly becoming social stock market that impersonalises interaction and instead focuses on the boring extroverts we usually tend to avoid.

These list sites also seem to assume the only way to grow is to get more and more potential customers onto their lists without focusing on satisfying the existing base.

Take Facebook, I continually find myself getting requests from people I hardly know and possess no desire to. Eventually I capitulate and end up having someones boring updates i.e. "attending auditing lecture today, can't wait to see the gang" pushed through to my feed.

Since Facebook has my network, tracks my usage,  surely it realises that I'd rather see something more interesting from a close friend, say write-up on a music event they went to, a recipe, music they like, clothes they bought, a song they're learning, something happening at work with them. This kind of content generation should be encouraged rather than focusing on creating a web of people I grow less interested in day-by-day.

Look at blogging, relatively few people blog as use facebook but it is in essence a much more interesting way of communicating. It doesn't even have to be as dull as posting an article, you should be able to post email conversations to your blog, add IM conversations, recommend the place you went last night or say how shite it was.


So a plea to the real time web, stop making feeds, start making it interesting.

Innovate 100 - The good, the bad and the hungry

Innovate 100 event was held in Dublin on Monday at the Radisson Blue hotel.

Plush enough surroundings really and free food which was handy for the lesser-well off. Plenty of networking style walking around and passing business cards, no brown envelopes received. As we'd not a single outstanding idea for the event we did feel a bit early stage for it but was good to see people were supportive and freely giving advice.

The morning kicked off with the CEO of Revahealth. Now this to me is a database of doctors profiles but from what the lecture contained it seemed to be fairly heavy staffed. The ROI seemed pretty slow to materialise though so he didn't paint too pretty a picture on going through the business. Google adwords got a bit of a slaying.

Next up was the CEO of Getitkeepit.com, a bill aggregation site. Not a bad looking enterprise and currently just going live so it's fairly fresh. They talked about offshore development for startups and getting technology into service integrators (Accenture et al). Seemed like a good idea if not slightly "mint" orientated. Reckon they might find it hard to pull in revenue from a site like that considering they're hoping to charge service providers to host their bills on the site. No doubt a slew of services will be setup to replicate Patzers cash cow.

Next 2 lectures were some generic Microsoft stuff on partnering and going international. Boring stuff that was no pushing their software.

Ray Nolan, owner of Hostelworld.com  gave the "i'm loaded, don't talk shit to me" speech. He steamrolled through the presentation like primary school student through home time prayers. Making sure to throw in the odd "we stamped out them" and "expedia are bullshit" comments. Funny to watch and he did make some good points at the panel that followed.

He reckoned Ireland's too small to target anything other than a sweet shop at. Probably right but I'm sure there are lots of people with companies doing well (maybe not as well as the 500m hostelworld was sold for).

There was a dragons den style affair to top the evening off where 11 startups presented to the crowd. Honestly the startups were by in large shite (although better than what we have which is currently nada). Typical affairs with a mobile website builder, time managment software, network software, cloud computing analyser. Nothing really unique. The winner was the Sonru video interviewing software which seems to be taking steroids as it's picked up tons of awards around Ireland recently.

Decent event, met some good Po-lice and well worth a visit if just for the free food..

Using RSS feeds with Twitter

Slightly messed up way of doing this but here's how I got it to work. I use Tweetdeck usually for facebook/twitter so I don't have to login and go through the sites to read news. Lately though I've noticed most decent sites in Ireland don't use Twitter that much and keep blogs instead. Ideally I'd prefer to let everything flow through tweetdeck (and read stuff through small popups) so I tried setting up a twitterfeed account. This sounds like it should do the trick but it's pretty useless at explaining what it actually does.

What it actually does is post blog updates to your twitter feed which is rubbish if people actually follow you and your RSS is some useless company that only you are interested in.

Solution? Create another twitter account and post twitter updates using twitterfeed onto it, then follow your new user in Twitter. Stupid workaround but it does work! My twitterfeedRSS is @ilikerashersrss. Updates hourly and is new so don't expect anything useful from it for a week or two.

Innovate 100 tomorrow

Off to innovate 100 tomorrow. Disappointed to find out only 12 companies are presenting but will add a write up.

Bedroom development

Spot the difference...

One is a scene from Peep Show where recently unemployed Johnson sets up a consulting firm "consultius" from his bedroom. The other is the new workspace of an exciting and overconfident company currently making little progress.


Our first site was launched yesterday. Although not going to take over the world it was a good way of testing out what we can do.

Not a whole pile right now apparently but at least it sort-of works.

Possibly the best site ever created

http://trololololololololololo.com/

It's a unix system: Part 2 - Installing Django 1.1.1, Python 2.6.4 and MySQL 5.1.44

So this week I have mostly been configuring our VPS box. Although you'd think this would be an easy job, nothing in the IT world is ever easy.

Firstly getting back to grips with Unix took some time, getting used to the VI editor, chmod/chowd-ing, running shell and pearl scripts was a bit like attempting to remember leaving cert Irish. Unintuitive and slow.

So first I decided to put some server software onto the site. Cpanel cost 120 euro per year to install, a shit load of cash that didn't really need to be spent so I decided to battle with Webmin. Webmin uses port 10000 on the VPS and installed clean first time (from rpm). Trying to login though I kept getting 404s. I contacted the server admin and he said he can connect fine from his end. Queue a day or two of opening ports on routers, netstat-ing, opening ports on the firewall. I then tried to run Webmin through Apache, ambitious it turned out because Webmin was having none of it, the username/passwords weren't liked by the server and more time wasted. Eventually I sent an email of desperation to the server admin who discovered there was a firewall blocking the port his end. Nice. Once this was opened webmin was usable.

Now to the actual project part. I went with mod_wsgi to install Python as this is the faster and recommended plugin to get apache working with djgano/python. This installed fine, updated the httpd.conf to include the .so file. Few tweaks here and there. Python also installed clean as did Django.

Now to MySQLdb. This is a python MySQL plugin and causes problems everytime I try to install it. So I discovered a nicer way of doing it.

The first problem you encounter is setuptools missing. You could install setuptools into your python but I found it easier to edit the setup.py and enter

import distutils
from distutils.core import setup, Extension

This will add the libraries you need (this is for python 2.6 btw). You'll have to remove the setuptools reference.

Next the install will throw an error saying something about mysql_devel or mysql_config. This basically means you don't have the full MySQL install on your system. I made the mistake of just adding the client like you do for windows. Normally with MySQL I click the first download link and run the package but not so for unix.
It involves downloading the client, the server and the development package and running the rpms (rpm -i ) . Look down the download page and you'll see all the installations.

Once these are in rerun the install of MySQLdb and it'll work as it should.

Next is the problem of Apache and wsgi. The Django website will work fine for the scaffold code that goes around a wsgi installation. The biggest problem I had was with 403 errors appearing for all aliases and directories. Everything I tried didn't work and I've been to alot of sites on this. By some strange chance I got this to work and open my directories:
  
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny

This should get you up and running with Apache 2.2, Django 1.1.1, Python 2.6.4 and MySQL 5.1.44. My install was on a Linux RedHat CentOS server.