Alcides Fonseca

Let’s start by big G, they’ve released the Google Contacts API. They’re second to Microsoft who have already did the same, in order to avoid situations where you have to give your email password to social networks, so they can import your contacts. A nice step, I just wish applications start to implement both of the APIs right away.

Now Apple, that has released the SDK for iPhone along with some news like exchange support and so. Like many noticed, they are targeting now the Business market with Air and this iPhone update (only possible to Microsoft new interoperability promise) and I guess they will make greater moves into that area in about one year or so. Regarding their store, they are being selfish and they are going to pay that price very soon. If they have hacked dotMac, won’t they be able to hack iPhone, and create a uTunes where you can get cracked software? And I bet a few developers will prefer this one!

Flock 1.1 was released. I have a bittersweet relationship with Flock. It used to be my main browser, but being an programmer I have some needs Flock doesn’t fulfill (not talking about Firebug). However if I only used the browser for social stuff like twittering, facebook, flickr, del.icio.us and have a wordpress blog, it would be perfect, just perfect.

With the release of Silverlight2b1, a few apps from partners are being shown up, and I really liked TextGlow, a online viewer of docx documents. That made me thing. Currently Office Online doesn’t have a collaborative tool. That makes ALL the difference when comparing to Google Apps. I believe the reason they’ve not released it yet is because they’re getting something really powerful built on Silverlight2. I can’t wait to try it out!

Na altura em que as redes sociais se estavam a erguer, o hi5 teve um sucesso estrondoso em Portugal graças aos convites automáticos para os contactos do hotmail/msn. Essa rede cresceu imenso tanto no nosso país como no Equador, Costa Rica, El Salvador e Guatemala, onde é a principal rede social. Isto fez com que há uns tempos, recebessem $2.000.000.

Ao que parece esse dinheiro foi bem investido, porque a rede social já adicionou inúmeras features desde que eu cancelei a minha conta. Desde vídeo a música, com álbum de recortes e uma interface mais personalizável e usável (e AJAX) surpreendeu-me realmente.

Mas a coisa que me fez escrever este post foi a notícia de que está disponível uma API ainda em beta baseada no Enunciate. Disponibilizar estas informação foi uma coisa boa no meu entender, desde que se façam as devias limitações para não ser usado para phishing. Estão cada vez mais realmente web2.0!

Microblogging is becoming more and more used by people in this new Social Web. Twitter arrived and made millions of fans. It was such a success they had problems escalating. Taking advantage of that downtimes, Jaiku got many users to switch over to them, giving them more features. IMO, jaiku is my personal aggregator, not a microblogging service. I sticked to twitter, but had its feed in my jaiku webpage. Only if the feed was updated more frequently…

Some time ago Kevin Rose, the kid from Digg, and his team (including my dream girl) came up with this microblogging system with Messages, Files, Links and Events that I find very interesting. Only one disadvantage: It only works from the web or the AIR app that cannot be minimized to tray. Thankfully they are getting a public API avaiable soon. In the meanwhile, some guys managed to hack the API used by the desktop app and made a python module.

Well, using this and Python-Twitter, I made a small script that updates both your Twitter and Pownce status at the same time. And a plus: if you enter a url in the message, it will add it as a link in Pownce ;)

Give it a try and comment with feedback please. If it has some success, I’ll probably do some graphical interface, a jabber/msn bot and in the future add the combined list from both your Twitter and Pownce friends.

In the between of my paid projects, I managed to get a time to work on my Pungi ultramicrowebframework. Thanks to Nuno Mariz and his dispatcher I managed to get it working on a MVC way that is so hype right now.

I like to develop my frameworks while doing some project that uses it, so I can evaluate it’s strengths and weaknesses better. So I started on an idea that haven’t left my head until then: How much hype does a word have?

With services like Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and so many others, information is being tagged and available for everyone. Well, BUZZwords just gets the results from that word in all of those services, and applies my special formula (not quite just summing them all :P) and returns the hype value for that word.

I later made the page more pretty and added the bars that can make the information more readable at first sight. However there is still a todo: Make a page for each word with it’s evolution through time and the top results from the services used. Oh, and I’m thinking of adding another services, but for example Digg doesn’t uses tags, but I can still perform a search for a word. Would that be a reliable value to consider?

Ok, I assume everyone knows Last.FM and audioScrobbler ( the software that tells Last.FM what you are hearing to.)

After Take Off, I've been in touch with João Carvalho, Project Manager of PalcoPrincipal and among other things, we've been talking about a similar software but with extra capabilities. There is a small problem though: there are a lot of players and each one has its own way of exporting "Now Playing" info. A plugin is needed in almost all of them.

Wouldn't be nice if there is a standart for exporting in XML the library and currently playing music? It's frustrating to have to code a plugin for each player and, in the end, there will be always unsupported ones.