I'm perfectly aware of what all my twitter friends are doing.

I would like to know what my business partners are doing (without necessarily broadcasting work stuff to the rest of the world).

I want my own twitter server.

Technorati Tags: twitter

Since talking with Marc and Dave about identities and open standards last week, I cannot stop thinking about how relationships are managed by current social networking standard and how this could evolve.

In some cases relationships are just binary: you are either a "friend" or not on services like Twitter or MySpace.

Sometimes it's binary with some added metadata, like Facebook, where you can describe how you met a "friend" choosing from a limited list; or Flickr, where you can decide that a "contact" is also a "friend" and/or "family".

In other cases it can be more refined, for example within PeopleAggregator we let users pick one from a list of relationship types defined by the network administrator (i.e.: from "never met" to "best friend") plus a "family" flag.

Then there are different methods to make connections reciprocal.

But in all cases it's the definition of the different kinds of relationship is set by the network within which you are creating these relationship, and until recently I was convinced that this had to be the case because otherwise the complexity would be too high.

But maybe I was wrong, maybe it would be possible to manage a much more granular and personalized relationships system.

In an unbundled social environment, where I would be managing my relationships on my own tools and use them across the different networks I would belong to, I could be defining my own type of relationships, exposing them to the people in my personal networks and to the content management systems I would be using in order to let them distribute various elements of my digital lifestyle.

Hmm... it's still somewhat fuzzy, but I think there might be something interesting down here...

Tags: relationships, Social Networks

I know that Apple is not calling MacBooks "laptop" anymore, still I like to use my MacBook Pro... well... on my lap. As you know the problem is that these fast computers are very hot, and while having a warm computer on your lap is nice in winter, it's quite annoying in an hot summer.

Today I installed smcFanControl, a little app that overrides the default fan speed and allows you, for example, to get both cooling fans to run at 2000rpm instead of 1000 (they can go up to 6000rpm). I wasn't expecting much, and I was wrong: it makes a huge difference! The processor is running at a significantly lower temperature and the whole computer is significantly cooler, to the point that it's not uncomfortable anymore. I think that Apple should add a "Lap mode" vs. "Desktop mode" to the system preferences..

Highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: MacBook, smcFanControl

The Canters came visiting from Trieste tonight and Marc cooked for us his world famous Cashew Chicken (note about thre recipe: in the case of an emergency cashew nuts can be replaced with almonds with pretty good results).

Grazie, Marc. It's great to have the Canters leaving nearby :-)

A long, long time ago I used to work in a video production agency doing computer animation, back when you needed to put on tape one frame at a time in order to get a smooth animation, and 3D rendering of anything was always matter of days or weeks.

I've not been doing any video stuff for a long time, but recently a client asked if we could help them with a short animated intro. I had just met joung 3D artist Henry Bonamigo, so we teamed up and after I spent a lot of time figuring out where the simplest tools have been hidden within the sleek FinalCut UI, here's the result. I must say I'm pretty happy with it (and the client is too).

Matt is still unhappy with the way blog comments work.

This conversation started a long time ago and from time to time it comes back to surface. Looking at the post below this one you will find 10 comments saved on my blog's comments and 2 blog reactions coming from Technorati (they appeared with some delay this morning). As far as I know most of what has been written directly related to this post is linked below, maybe except for a couple of twitter posts.

Apparently the system seems to work, or at least we think it works because we are used to it and apparently there are no better alternatives. Quite often I've heard from newbies saying that "comments and trackback are broken", because it's hard to keep track of ongoing conversations and because often bits and pieces get lost in the tangle of standards, protocols and formats.

As the web is exploding into small pieces loosely joined it might be time for a new commenting infrastructure, but I'm afraid that it will be hard to reach the level of collaboration required between the big players for such a project to really take off anytime soon.

Tags: Blog, Comments, Matt Mower

Marco Massarotto is wondering what opinion does the rest of the world have about us Italians and our country.

In my experience we are either viewed as some not very serious country, thanks largely to the way Italian politicians have represented us around the world, or simply totally ignored.

At the same time, the feeling I got from with Dave Winer, while he was visiting a couple of weeks ago, is that our country doesn't look any worse than most western countries, and while we Italians tend to harshly criticize our own country, most stuff seem to be working pretty regularly to an outsider.

Then there is ignorance. Most of the world has a very fuzzy idea about us, in part thanks to popular but not very Italian imagery (the Sopranos, for example), and while I agree that Italy should not be put in the same league as India and Korea (I wish we had their resources and growth rate!), I don't think that with his remark Robert was expressing an opinion about our Country.

It would be interesting to hear a comment from Marc Canter, who is spending a couple of months in Trieste with his family and apparently is enjoying the experience (also if it's not clear if it's just about the food...).

It might not be exactly the podcast player Dave has been thinking about recently, but since I installed Nokia's podcasting client on my N95 (well, actually it's the N95 Nokia is letting me play with for some time), I find podcasts much more usable. This little app helps finding podcasts (not sure where it's getting its listing from), manages the RSS subscription and downloads MP3 attachments over a wifi or 3G connection (a pretty expensive trick if you don't have a flat rate contract, but these are starting to appear across Europe).

It's going to be interesting to see how Apple will handle podcasts on the iPhone, which should come equipped with its own little iTunes.

Tags: podcast, iPhone

A long time ago, working with Matt, we developed an enterprise news aggregator that was using tags (which back then we were innocently calling topics) to aggregate and distribute information within a company.

The latest incarnation of what was called K-Collector is Nòva100, which we opened today in total beta mode and that we have been developing for the financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ORE. Nòva100 is using RSS feeds and tags to dynamically collect and layout posts from 100 TypePad Business class blogs.

Content is presented in 3 views:

• Newspaper
• River of news
• Tag cloud

Among the little features I like there's the tag cloud which uses related tags metadata (each time two tags appear in the same post we make their relationship stronger) to highlight other tags while you use it, and a dynamically resized iframe in the river of news view, which keeps the reading space as large and usable as possible as you resize and scroll around the window.

Everytime a friend lists the difference between Europe and America I must read the dialog from Pulp Fiction:

Vincent Vega: [Y]ou know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules Winnfield: What?
Vincent Vega: It's the little differences. I mean they got the same sh** over there that they got here, but it's just, just there it's a little different.
Jules Winnfield: Example.
Vincent Vega: Alright, well you can walk into a movie theater and buy a beer. And, I don't mean just like a paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And, in Paris, you can buy a beer in McDonald's. You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules Winnfield: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
Vincent Vega: No, man, they got the metric system, they don't know what the fu** a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules Winnfield: What do they call it?
Vincent Vega: They call it a Royal with Cheese.
Jules Winnfield: Royal with Cheese.
Vincent Vega: That's right.
Jules Winnfield: What do they call a Big Mac?
Vincent Vega: Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.
Jules Winnfield: Le Big Mac. What do they call a Whopper?
Vincent Vega: I don't know. I didn't go into Burger King.

Btw: we do the same when we go in the US.