Bother No More - A Weblog By Mattias Gunneras

There must be millions of these cases, but it's just so boring when spammers don't even try. I got this message sent to my Last FM profile.

"heyyy nice taste in music! i also like Robbie Williams alot..."

I've never liked Robbie Williams! This person has taken the time and effort of writing some kind of spider code, that goes through Last FM users pages and submit these messages.

Normally I couldn't care less about this stuff, but when they do it this badly, it just hurts. So first of all, let's ignore the bad choise of username (VITA77226) and the fact they're talking about free ringtones. What really makes this suck, is the first line of copy that is supposed to capture my attention. (I know, they succeeded in a twisted kind of way).

But my point is, it is so easy, using the Last FM API, to with just a username extract pretty much any information about users, including the type of music they like!

If you can guess where Winston the bull will be at 3pm, you've got a spot at winning a pair of Glastonbury festival tickets for this summer.

Last time around the bull was tracked with GPS, this year it's all done with cameras. Especially one mounted high above the field that always keeps track of where Winston is.

Some of the bands at the festival are Kings of Leon, Massive Attack, Hot Chip and The Kills which I'd really like to see.

So come on Winston, be at square 23 at 3pm please!

Play Spot The Bull

This ingenious project was made by POKE for Orange UK

Have you ever been annoyed that you can't reach a website and you're wondering if the problem is at your end or if the website is actually down? Well I have, and so has the people at downforeveryoneorjustme.com. On their website you can check if the site is down for other people too.

I thought it was a really cool, simple idea, but I figured it would be even better if you didn't have to copy URL, got to downforeveryoneorjustme.com paste it back in and then hit submit, so I made a little bookmarklet to do the job instantly for you.

Bookmarklet: Down for everyone?

Drag the above link to your toolbar to create a bookmarklet out of it. Should be working for Firefox and Safari.

There's a lot of blog posts out there that talks about apps on social networks. I've been involved in a few agent-client related facebook applications and I've started to see a patterns amongst them. So here's a few issues where I see, from a developers point of view, room for possible improvements.

Design 

Most clients want to use their house type face, their own colours and preferably all the functionality we're used to deliver in your average microsite.

"Is it possible to make that blue facebook stuff in the top go away?"

Now, this is only things that makes the application look and feel bad, we can live with that, after all it's been proven many times before that a website doesn't need pretty design to be successful. But please remember, we're building an application, not a billboard or TV ad.

Integration 

It's very hard to build a useful application for a client that merely sees the app as a 'presence' and a link of to their main website. And isn't willing to offer their full services through the application.

"Can that link there go to our products page?" 

Make your application extend your current services, not beeing a limited version of them.

Maintenance 

Since these social network platforms are constantly evolving, then so should your app. Putting your brand on facebook seems to be the new microsite, the clients project managers are the same and the money comes from the same budget. Only microsites are something that can be planned, executed and forgotten about, social network applications can not.

The fact is, if you turn your back on it, your application will sooner or later stop working in the sense it was intended. These platforms change, functionality is added daily, features that your app relies on is removed, and your app will start breaking the platforms terms of service. Your apps discussion board is going to be full of disappointed users, bad-naming your brand. Creating an application is a commitment, would you for example still use Mac OSX if Apple stopped updating it? 

Wow, this is really cool. Quick Silver Screen has a large archive of user uploaded films, most of them full feature movies that are free for you to watch.  The picture quality is superb. This is the best use of stage9 DivX player I've seen so far. I'm sure we'll see more of these things in the future as Flash Player upgrades it's video support to H.264.

Wondering how long this will stay online though. I'm sure there are a few people out there who wants to spoil our fun. 

I'm solely working on mac nowadays, and usually I run Windows XP through Parallels Desktop to check my stylesheets in IE. There are however quite a few services that offers to show you what your web page looks like in different browsers on multiple systems. A couple of years ago tryed a few of them out and I came to the conclution that this is absolute crap.

Today I read a post on Web worker daily, testing a heap of these services and there was actually one that cought my eye. IE NetRenderer is a completely free service that renders your site in IE5.5, IE6 and IE7. It can also give you a mixed view ofIE6 and 7 which might come in handy. This is service is also rendering your page in realtime, which makes it far more faster than other similar sites.

So if you don't have access to a copy of Windows, this might be an option for crude css testing.

I don't often use Linked In, but I've got an account. Today I received an email and I had to write a reply, after sending the email, I got a message on the top of my screen reading 'Your request was successful'. This feels in my opinion both geeky and quite a bit lame coming from a social network these days. My request was successful? What does that really mean? That I successfully clicked a button? What I think they are trying to say is that they successfully processed my request, ok, I'm acting a bit stupid but only to prove my point. Too generic user feedback sounds bad and should probably be avoided.