So today was the Developer Day at Wembly Arean. There was a few good talks, but nothing really ground breaking. I kind of hoped they would talk a little more about innovation and where google is going the future with their services like Gears and App Engine. Instead it was pretty much demonstrations of how the google products work and how we can use them. Basically stuff we already know. Maybe I had my expectations set a little high but all in all, it was a very good day.

I regret I missed Dion Almaer's talk on AJAX. Highlights though were Kevin Marks talking about open social and viral vs organic growth.

If you behave like a disease, people will develop a imune system.

The Javascript APIs for geolocation information via Gears is also very interesting. I can't wait for this stuff to properly come to the mobile devices! Btw we were demoed a handset running Android, which kind of left me wanting to go buy the Iphone.

A bonus. The angry green man USB stick freebee.

Freebase is a bit like Wikipedia only with added semantics and concepts of context rather then just free floating words. When we search Google we search for documents containing a particular word of phrase. With Freebase on the other hand, you search documents on what they actually are about, rather then what they might happen to contain. Freebase Parallax is a new UI built on top of the Freebase database, and it is awesome. It's a faceted browser that with filters let's you drill down to the data you're interested in. And the really cool thing is that it let's you plot your data on top of a time graph or google maps. It's not really like the amazing graphs of Hans Rosling but definitely a step in the right direction.

Above is a graph rendering US presidents birth location. You can also embed live diagrams. Here's the same presidents birth date plotted on a time scale:

I've been using Cheetahmail to send out email newletters for years now. To be honest, the system isn't the greatest out there and there has been times when I truly wanted to tear my head off.

Today when I was importing some HTML email and something apparently went wrong, I got this message:

The wonderful message To give up, press Cancel just felt so compelling. (Sorry that the whole message got a bit cropped).

It's time again for A List Apart's Survey for people who make websites. They started this in 2007 and I really liked the findings they did then.

I never really saw the point of podcasts up until very recently. I kind of saw them as always outdated amateur radio shows. But I've actually started listening to a few now and I quite like it. So here's some of the geeky stuff I've got on my iPod.

Audible Ajax

Lots of web talk and trends. From the guys at ajaxian.com.

Jeff and Casey

Two game developers that talk about musicals, cars, microsoft and internet porn. It's funny and silly.

Pragmatic Podcast

Software development from Pragmatic Programmers with lots of interviews.

StackOverflow

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky creates a programming community and talks about it and lots of other things.

Software Engineering Radio

Pretty hard core computer sciency stuff.

TEDTalks

Brilliant and random talks about technology, entertainment and design.

There has been a lot of writing about how you should never give your email password to anyone. Usually it's the social networks that say they want to help you find your friends etc. I quite like OAuths restaurant analogy:

Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN code to the waiter when it’s time to pay.

I recently got an invitation for the location based social network Brightkite, and they had a quite elegant solution to this problem.

Since this is all publicly available information, I kind of think it's alright for them to do. (The question whether Twitter should expose this data about me is a different story.)

What Brightkite gets here is a map between their users and their Twitter accounts. And using the twitter API they can match my friends at twitter with other Brighkite users that has optionally supplied their twitter names.

This way I don't have to enter any password at all. Sure it only works for the networks that exposes my user friends lists publicly, but quite often this is the case anyways.

I think this idea could be pushed even further. Given that most users use the same usernames for all their social networks, Brightkite could actually just go to the Twitter API's and get see if there was a user named username and if it exists, ask me whether it was me. Here are some API's that could used:

• Twitter
• Last FM
• Flickr
• Digg

On the other hand, it is a bit creepy knowing that all this information about me is out there for anyone to read. I also think that anyone who uses these API's to get data about users need to make it in a transparent way so not to give the feeling that they are snooping around.

To make the game a bit more interesting and fun for the player in the balloonacy game we've now added twice as many boost canisters, stars and rainbows to the map.

Happy ballooning, and watch out for those rainbows!

The last couple of days has been amazing in the balloon race project. We've finally got this beast up and running and the response we've got has been fenomenal!

A few of my friends has become addicted to the game and the work productivity in their offices has dropped by magnitudes. Yay!

Anyhow, I though I'd share some tips and tricks that could make you a better balloonist in this game:

Aim for the rainbow transporters. They will make your balloon magically travell around 4 to 6 rows in the game. And you will pick up boost and star tokens as you go. So rainbows is definitly the best mapitem to go for if in doubt.

Pick up boost. A 100% boost will give you enough power to swish through 3 sites. Also if you have more than 100% boost, and a boost canister is in front of you, always boost into it, since you're not loosing anything.

Collect Prize Tokens. For every five you collect, your in for a daily draw to get free stuff that will be announced after the game has finished.

Plan your journey strategically. One good idea is to always have the map open in one browser window, and the race window in another so you always know what coming up ahead. For instance if you have the choice of a star on the current site, but there's a rainbow in the other next site, you might want to give the star a miss and aim for the rainbow site instead.

Get your friends to help out. When you've got five buddy boosts your boost level goes up 100%. You can only get this once per day. Also, it's a bad idea to get the 5th buddy boost when your boost level is above 100%, since the hard limit of boost is 200%.

Hope this helps and happy ballooning!