Category: –

I love logos

Sometimes it happens when I find myself walking in a new neighborhood, or maybe when I watch business parks outside a town while passing on a train: I’m fascinated by all these shops and industrial sheds with small companies logos on them. All these logos…

Very rarely the graphic quality is any good, but I have designed enough logos in my career to remember the excitement when each one of mine was brand new. I had spent time thinking, drafting, drawing, testing… and then I was more or less happy. For a short moment that logo was beautiful enough to present to a client.

And then the design was enlarged, printed, cut out, hanged in front of a building. That was a great moment, when you would finally see months of work taking shape in a physical object.

It doesn’t matter that after some time you would start finding the flaws in your design, or that at some point you would find them completely embarrassing.

Every time I see a terrible logo on a wall, I think of that amazing moment of pride and joy.

Heat maps

Once upon a time there was the app Moves, which I used for a few years to track everywhere I was going. From Moves I could export data and generate heat maps of my movements. It was great, but then FB bought Moves, and the app died. Strava offers similar maps, which are not as detailed (I don’t track everything with Strava), but still I find all these maps absolutely fascinating. These are the most beaten paths around my two homes.

I hope this message finds you well

In the last couple of weeks I have been involved in multiple recruitment processes and I find fascinating how candidates have been using (presumably) ChatGPT to interact with possible employers.

In one case we are actually recruiting “Prompt engineers”, so it’s somewhat appropriate for them to seek AI help, but the standardisation and verbosity of the language generated is getting a bit annoying.

GPT-4 actually has amazing language capabilities, it can write in any style, any language, any dialect, as long as it is properly prompted or trained. This is not the case for the vast majority of messages we receive, one of the key sentences that I have started to notice is the “I hope this message finds you well” which ChatGPT seems to be using way more than the usual folks I usually exchange messages with.

I have also developed a certain sensibility in finding reused language: when tasked with responding to a “why should we hire you?” type of question, I could often read my own words from the company “About us” page, just slightly reshuffled to answer the question. I could easily reverse engineer the simple prompt used to generate the message.

I’m sure that we will look back at these early steps fondly, soon AIs will be so well integrated in our ecosystems that they will be able to generate language exactly in our style before we will have even started thinking about it.

In the meanwhile I’m considering setting up a filter to delete all email messages starting with “I hope this message finds you well”.

The new programming language

For years and years I have been telling people something along the lines of “it used to be that you had to write books to share ideas that change the world, now it’s time to write software”.

Well… we might be back to books after all.

I have been spending a lot of my time playing and working with OpenAI tools, both ChatGPT and their excellent API. The more I get comfortable with this technology, the more I appreciate the ability it has to interpret even the smaller nuances of human language.

I use ChatGPT a lot to generate Python code. I don’t have enough programming skills to write my own software, but I have been explaining to other people what I wanted for more than 30 years. The ability of GPT4 to understand my explanation and generate code that I can then run to solve whatever I’m trying to solve is just amazing.

The fact that at the end of my long chats I have to copy and paste the code to get it to run in my specific context is just a matter of applying some integration glue (ChatGPT already has a code interpreter built in), meaning that we are just a few steps away to be able to program computer in English (or Italian, Hindi, etc).

On top of this there’s the training part.

Recently I copied and pasted an API documentation page into ChatGPT and asked to write a script which would interact with those API and perform a simple task. The script didn’t run correctly at the first try, it took about 20 minutes to get there, but were are almost there. I don’t need to learn things, I can get GPT to understand them and then help me get to my goals.

It’s a bit more complicated than copy and paste, but the same can be done with whole books or entire libraries. You can turn books to training material for AI and then use the AI to apply the knowledge in the book.

So forget software… write books!

AI humor

For the last few days I have been playing with an silly idea for a joke, I wanted expand and write it down somewhere, but before doing so I decided to try to feed the core idea to ChatGPT, just to see what the fuss is all about.

This was my prompt:

Write a piece about Elon Musk bidding to buy the afterworld, god resigning from CEO, apple running heaven, google running purgatory, facebook running hell with their metaverse technology, with all current users getting a free account

This is the unedited output:

In a shocking turn of events, it was announced today that Elon Musk has made a bid to purchase the afterworld. The details of the deal have not been made public, but sources close to the situation have stated that Musk plans to use the afterworld as a destination for his Neuralink implants, allowing humans to experience eternal life within a virtual reality.

In response to the news, God has announced that they will be stepping down as CEO of the afterworld, citing the new ownership as a conflict of interest. It is unclear who will take over as CEO in God’s place.

In related news, it has been reported that Apple will be running heaven, with Tim Cook taking on the role of celestial CEO. Google will be in charge of purgatory, with Sundar Pichai at the helm, and Facebook will be running hell using their new metaverse technology. All current users will be given free accounts in the afterlife of their choice.

This news has caused a stir among religious communities, with many questioning the ethics of privatizing the afterlife. However, supporters of the move argue that it will bring much-needed innovation and efficiency to the eternal world. Only time will tell how this unprecedented change will play out.

😳

The end of photos

A friend this morning pointed me to an interesting article critical of the current trend of using AI to colorize and restore old photos.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, I like old photos, they are like time travel, I have spent quite some time browsing collections of old photos, and I find old restored photos or videos absolutely fascinating.

But I am very mindful of the fact that when we use AI to treat images, we are actually putting into images information that wasn’t there to begin with. And this doesn’t only apply to old photos: every image we capture with a modern phone is heavily processed by AI.

What we are storing in our phones and sharing on social media is a mix of reality and what a computer thinks reality should look like.

This made me think of a Marques Brownlee’s video I watched recently about DALL·E 2, a project by OpenAI that generates images from a text description.

For example, this is what he got asking for “a blue apple in a bowl of oranges”:

You can see more examples on MKBHD Twitter post.

What is striking is how photo-realistic this computer generated image is.

Forget about AI fixing existing photos, soon we won’t need to take photos, we will just tell a computer to generate one for us.

At that point reality will stop making sense. I will be able to ask for a photo of me, the pope and Fidel Castro riding a pony, and will get a perfectly credible image.

I think that this will change our relationship with photography.

20 Years

Last weekend was the 20th anniversary of my first posts on this blog.

Well, it’s not really this blog. It wasn’t a blog back then, it was a weblog. And it wasn’t running on WordPress, it was running on Radio Userland. And I wasn’t even using this domain name.

It’s a bit like that idea that all our cells change every few years, but we stay ourselves. We just get older.

“20 years” is something I find myself saying more and more often these days. I’ve been blogging for 20 years. I’ve had that pair of shoes for 20 years. I’ve known that person for 20 years.

There isn’t anything special with “20 years”, it’s just that it suddenly went from meaning “a lot of time” to meaning “just recently”.

So, this is it, I don’t have much else to say about this, but I didn’t want the date to just drift by. I guess that something that changed recently is that I feel much less compulsion to broadcast what I think, and I don’t miss it at all.

Well… maybe not just recently… more in the last 20 years.

On the way to normal

I’m free!

I’ve done my 10 days of self-isolation, I took my tests, answered all the government phone calls, and now I’m free to do… well, not exactly everything, but at least I can leave my flat.

As of today some of the restriction have been removed in England (we can eat inside restaurants, yay), but a few are still in place. According to the roadmap, more restrictions will be lifted in June. Every time they give back some freedom there’s so much enthusiasm that I wouldn’t be surprised if by July they will make smoking in bars legal again ;)

Last week I’ve been to our office. There were just two of us and I can’t say it felt in any way special. I don’t really see myself doing the every day like we used to. It feels strange to think we ever did.

Office life.

I also went to Central London over the weekend. It was a bit sad to notice all the empty shops on Oxford and Regent streets. I didn’t really care about most of them, the only shop that I did visit and I won’t be able to visit anymore is T.M. Lewin, it looks like they have gone on-line only.

In other news, the weather sucks, nothing like the beautiful spring we had last year, but I should get my first dose of vaccine this week. Exciting stuff!

Be good. Or don’t get caught.

Quarantined again

Last Sunday I flew back to London, so now I’m on day #5 of my 10 days compulsory quarantine for people travelling back to the UK. It’s strange to be back in my flat, lots of memories of the last quarantine. I’m also getting daily calls from UK government track and tracing team, reminding me every day of the rules to follow (I do wonder if this is the best way to user their time).

I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again.

The trip was quite good. Almost no people at the airport in Venice, plenty of room on the flight, I got from landing at Heathrow to walking into my flat in about 50 minutes. Never had it so good.

My groceries were delivered perfectly on time, I have booked both my vaccine shots, and I’m adding actual in person meetings to my calendar. As smooth as China silk.

I turned 50 last week. While I appreciate that it’s just a day like any other, I have the feeling that I’m at the beginning of something new. We’ll see how it goes 🙃.

Stay safe. If you can, go get a beer.

Serendipity

The B&B where we stayed in Venice was called Bianca Cappello House.

Possibly Bianca Capello de’Medici.*oil on canvas .*68.9 x 57.2 cm

Turns out that Bianca Cappello is not the name of the nice lady who owns the place, but that of a Venetian noblewoman born in 1548, who according to wikipedia, was the mistress and afterward the second wife of Francesco I de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

She was very beautiful and several portraits were made. A couple of centuries later, English writer Horace Walpole would fall in love with one of these portraits and, in a letter to a friend about one of these paintings, for the first time he used the word serendipity.

Horace was loosely related to Spencer Walpole, after whom is named the park at the end of my street in London.

SotN #17

And here’s the first 2020 episode of our podcast, get it while it’s still fresh on Apple, Spotify, Luminary or just click “play” in the box below! This time talk about viruses, behaviour change, narrating human experience, learning from podcast and YouTube.

This is the first time I used Ferrite to edit the show on my iPad Pro, and what a pleasure! Editing using the pencil and gestures has been the best new user experience I had in the last 10 years. Absolutely fantastic!

While Euan had recommended the app before, what pushed me to abandon Garage Band has been this video:

Now I can’t wait to edit the next episode!

It's a wrap

And this is the last episode of our little series. I’m quite happy with the results: I met interesting new people, learned a lot and created some content that can be useful both to startup founders and to investors. The next challenge is to spread the word, get feedback and start preparing for the next season.

State Of The Net Podcast

Last show of 2019! We start by chatting about my other podcast, then Sacha Baron Cohen’s ADL speech and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s new Contract for the web. We move on conversing about millennials, what is right or wrong, we wonder if we would be better off without any rules and we discuss a bit about journalism and its future.

You can listen clicking on the link above, or subscribing on Apple Podcast, on Spotify or even on Google!

State of the Net Podcast – s01e15

Here’s a new episode Euan and I recorded last week. It felt like a good one while we were recording it. As usual, as soon as I finished editing it a whole bunch of things happened which are related and I would have liked to talk about. Oh well… they will be in the next episode. Stay tuned.

Investor series: behind the scenes

If we are in any way connected on social media it’s likely that you have already heard this: I’m co-hosting a new podcast/video series titled “Investor Series“, where we meet different kinds of early stage startup investors and try get useful information for founders trying to raise capital and for new investors on the exciting London investment scene.

I have some great partners in this adventure.

I’m hosting the show with Stephanie Forrest, founder of T/F/D, the marketing agency I have been working with for several years both with Activate and State of the Net (the best agency I have worked with).

Behind the scenes the awesome Victoria Medina and Sofia Pelúcio are in charge of pre-production work, social media management and most importantly are keeping all of us on schedule. Bhavesh Gorasia operates behind the cameras as director, camera man and best boy.

I’m having a lot of fun on the technicalities. After trying some other cameras, we are now shooting everything on iPhones and iPads. I am learning to use Final Cut Pro (it has been 25 years since I worked in video production, things have changed a bit), and I even played with a few loops on Garage Band to create the titles music. It’s incredible how much can be done with the tools available today.

We are still figuring out how to make the best of the dual distribution: the podcast containing the full interview (the length is between 20 and 40 minutes) and the shorter videos on YouTube containing bite-sized advice. I think that both formats are useful and they scratch two different types of itches, I’m curious to see how they will perform in time, once a few episodes start to stack up.

For this first “season” we have recorded five interviews, which will be releasing until the end of the year. As you can imagine I have had the opportunity to listen to all of them multiple times, at first hosting, then editing them, and I’m quite happy with the results: I found a number of interesting ideas, observations and stories in each and every one of them.

This week’s episode is a bit special: Greg Rice is the founder of Activate. This was the first interview we recorded, and at points we are clearly still trying to find our pace, but Greg did a great job as our first guest and there are quite a few good bits. Have a look and let me know what you think.

State of the Net Podcast – Episode 14

Since blogging is one of the key topics of this episode, I’m posting this here first.

In this episode we chat about the 50th anniversary of UNIX, problems at Google, the stories that we tell ourselves and how the world thinks. We hear about Euan’s intention to leave Facebook and how attractive the idea of going back to blogging is, preparing for a blogging renaissance.  

And here’s a link to Euan’s brand new blog!

You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, using the good ol’ feed, or you can just click play below.

Sotn Podcast, episode 10

First Euan said: “Social media isn’t broken, people are.” And then we started discussing about the most recent news, how social media shapes conversations and conversations shape social media, how Filipinos influence everything we see, how India and Africa are evolving, and we finish by revealing the way to happiness.

SotN Podcast s01e09

First episode of 2019, recorded on the day of the Macintosh 35th anniversary, this episode is all about Euan and myself: the Apple fan boys. From experiences through this long stretch of history of computing, to the usual complaining about how things could be better, to the incredibly still fresh amazement for how technology changes our life every day.

SotN Podcast: episode 8

In this episode we wonder if podcasting really is the “intellectual dark web”, or if it’s just a good place for conversations (mostly because nobody can interrupt us). We also meditate on how we might have lowered the entry threshold of other tools too much, or if it’s just the natural cycle of digital tools. We reflect about amateurs vs. professionals and while we ponder on how we should do more things for love, we observe how love, competence and intent are the key to everything. We also mention Jordan Peterson, but we don’t necessarily agree with him.

Enjoy :)

Just testing something

This is just a test, nothing interesting to read here. Not that there’s anyone out there left reading any of this anyway. So what is the point of apologising? Well, there’s absolutely no point, it’s just that I’m testing something in the editor and I need to write something.

Some of you might say “well: couldn’t you just paste some lorem ipsum?”. But you should consider that first: none of you is out there; and second: I told you not to read this at the very beginning, so what are you even doing down here?

Well, anyway, it was good to hear from me after all this time. Thank you for your help.

 

Hello, old friends.

Recently I realised that the plug-in which was routing all my Instagram photos to this blog had stopped working. I didn’t have time to figure out how to fix it until this morning, now images will be flowing again. Thought I would leave a message here, even if I think no one will read it. Anyway, who knows? Maybe I will start writing in this space again. After all I have started podcasting again! Cheers :)

Early stage startup checklist

It’s a known fact: the vast majority of startups fail, most of them fail making the same mistakes again and again.

If you are crazy enough to be trying to beat the odds, we salute you.

At Activate Capital we have put together a programme designed to help founders like you to avoid the most common pitfalls and significantly improve your chances of success.

Here’s what we will explore with founders who will join us:

  1. Get Your Strategy Straight. Understand why you are doing this. Really. Not a strapline, why are you doing this, how do you want to have an impact,what concrete goals do you want to reach in the short, medium and long term.
  2. Business Model Design. Get clarity on how you are going to make money. How you are going to spend money. Who is going to help you doing both and how you are going to make sure that the business model will support the growth of your company.
  3. Your Value Proposition. Let’s understand your product or service. How does it touch people. Why would they want to use it. Why would they want to spend money for it.
  4. Your Market. Who are your customers? What problems do they have? What gains are they trying to get? How do you verify your assumptions?
  5. Impact mapping. Let’s start designing your product by creating a map of what tools are going to be needed to perform which jobs by who in order to obtain what specific goal. This will be the main guide for all your design efforts.
  6. Understanding the software business. Creating software is hard work, if you don’t have a background in software development it is completely different from anything you have experienced before. It’s extremely important that you understand how. And yes, there will be bugs. Lots of them.
  7. Prioritising for your MVP. The importance of “Minimum” in your Minimum Viable Product. It has to be embarrassing, otherwise you have spent too much time or money on it.
  8. Prototyping and testing. Before you start investing in a huge development project, let’s test your assumptions by building prototypes of the key moving parts of your products.
  9. Legal and accounting advice. It’s not only a matter of product. There are many other things that can kill you.
  10. Marketing & Branding. Once you will have a product you will need to get the whole world to notice. There are some key elements to keep in mind while building your marketing plan.
  11. Pitching. Convincing people to invest in your company is tough. We will train you to pitch your product and answer difficult questions.
  12. Hiring the right people. Who will be your first hire? And the second? The success of your enterprise depends on your ability to form an awesome group.

Let me know what you think about this list. And if you are one of the crazy ones: at Activate Capital applications are open for the April 2016 programme.

A cure for the “tech co-founder syndrome”

One of the issues that we are trying to address at Activate Capital is the “tech co-founder syndrome” which seems to afflict so many business people trying to start their new companies.

It’s what most accelerators and investors put as a condition to their involvement when the founder of a company doesn’t have a technical background: the startup must have a tech co-founder.

This request has created an environment where founders are constantly hunting for any dude who can write a few lines of code and is available to get involved in some undefined project.

It’s not that I don’t understand why savvy investors would want that: a company based on a digital platform which doesn’t “own” its own technology is in a very shaky position.

But looking for any tech co-founder is not the solution either. In most cases an unexperienced business person just wonders off and after a long search ends up finding the wrong person.

This is one of the reasons that lead us to form Activate Capital: our intention is to invest in early stage companies and become their “tech co-founder”, but with the weight of a full team of professionals who have been developing digital platforms for a long time.

Because it’s not just about tech. These days to build a competitive digital platform you need UX designers, software architects, project managers, front-end developers, back-end developers, and the list goes on and on.

So, if you know anybody with a great business idea and the crazy impulse to start a new business, please send her or him to Activate Capital: we need to talk!

Introducing Activate Capital

ac

Okay, this is the new thing I’m doing: investing in early stage startups.

I think that the methodology that we have developed both with Activate Media and M/V over the last few years is incredibly effective to maximise the chances of success of new companies.

So this is the plan: find ideas and companies that we like, put them through an intense 12 days over 6 weeks programme, then invest ourselves and/or help them rise capital to launch their product.

Further thoughts and considerations soon.

Make sure your iPhone backup is encrypted (if you want to save your health data)

Siri was misbehaving on my iPhone 6 plus (it would understand my requests but always fail perform the task), after reading a few articles here and there I decided that the only solution was to restore my phone.
 
Yesterday I backed it up on my Mac, wiped it clean and the restored it from the fresh back up.
 
Several hours later (after the restore it had to get back in synch with all the photos, the music, the apps, etc.) everything was back to normal, except that all my health and activity data was gone.
 
Turns out that health and activity data is only backed up when you are encrypting your backup on your Mac or when you are using iCloud for backups, while I had unencrypted backup on my Mac.
 
Now: I do appreciate the fact that Apple doesn’t want my potentially sensitive health data to sit unencrypted on any disk, but I can think several different options which would have saved my data.
 
Not cool Apple, not cool.

WordPress.com, the desktop app

Here it is: the new WordPress.com desktop app.

There was a time when desktop apps to edit web sites were needed because editing in the browser was such a lousy experience.

But then Dave started adding buttons to the pages of his sites that read “Edit this page”. I have always thought that this was an extremely powerful tool: rather than having to dig in the bowels of the back-end of a content management system every time you needed to change something, you just went to the bit you needed to edit and hit a button. There and then.

With today browsers you can do even better: you can just click on a bit of text and, if you have the priviledges, you can edit it.

For the last couple of years we tried to use this “edit in the front end” approach for most of our projects (for example La Libreria dei Ragazzi and AgriProFocus are all edited in the front-end).

So, what do I think of a desktop app to edit a web site? Is it even more removed from the site than the back-end? Hard to say. So far I enjoyed writing this post on my blog. It has been a long time.

I don’t think anyone is reading this anymore…

Good days

There are no bad days for great walks. I have enjoyed myself quite a lot under some very miserable weathers (as long as I had the right attire).

And then there are days like today: with better colours.

Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele
Monte San Michele

iPhone magic

I dropped by the Apple Store last week in London to see the new iPhones. I was hoping for the “instant lust” that usually goes with Apple’s new gadgets, but it didn’t happen.

Now, to be fair we should admit that smartphones are becoming a commodity and we can’t expect to be amazed with every new iteration. The iPhone 6 is a perfectly nice phone, most likely it’s going to be my next phone when my contract on the current 5 will expire (not the Plus, it’s just ridiculously huge imho), but I’ll just sit and wait for the upgrade without any exceptionally big expectation.

I’m just hoping that the Apple Watch will provide that little bit of extra excitement that keep all of us going ;)

PS: while I think that most of those “Steve would have not done this” posts are pure BS, I must admit that the bulging camera lenses are a bit odd.

Know where I’m going

Screen Shot 2014-05-14 at 09.17.01

This map shows all my movements from January 1st 2014 to right now. The data were collected by the app Moves and the map generated by Move-O-Scope.

To me this is absolutely awesome.

Running Moves significantly reduces the battery life on my iPhone 5, but it’s something I have been willing to live with because I just love the data that gets collected and the way Moves displays it.

Walking patterns in our neighborhood
Walking patterns in our neighborhood

Then Moves was bought by Facebook.

When Facebook bought Instagram I thought: “Oh, well… the pictures I was posting to Instagram were public anyway”. I was a bit annoyed with how they treated the integration with Twitter, but this was pretty much it.

When Facebook bought Whatsapp I thought: “Oh, well… I have never used Whatsapp anyway”.

But I do feel uncomfortable about Facebook buying Moves and having access to their data. Strangely enough giving all the information about my moving around to a tiny and unknown Finnish company felt better than giving it to a huge American one.

My walking patterns in London
My walking patterns in London

I haven’t deleted the application yet, but I guess that I will do as soon as I will find a replacement which works as smoothly as Moves. Or maybe I will just live with it.

What is certain is that I will keep running a tracking application on my phone.

VIP dinner guests

After lengthy discussion over drinks last night, here’s the top ten list of people I’d like to invite to dinner and have a nice chat with (sorted, Sir Paul coming first).

  • Paul McCartney
  • BB King
  • Mikhail Gorbachev
  • Sting
  • Bill Clinton
  • Giorgio Armani
  • Jony Ive
  • Steven Fry
  • Madonna
  • Brad and Angelina (Monica kind of insisted on Brad coming along…)

Workspaces

On the second day the history of this very blog, more than 11 years ago, I posted a picture of my desk.

I like taking pictures of the places where I spend a lot of time. Even after all these years, they still feel very familiar (no idea why I needed 4 computers back then…).

To keep up with the tradition, here’s a fresh picture of my desk, at home, in San Martino. I love working here.

IMG_3549

Can’t but wonder where we will be in another 11 years.

iOS 7 – day one notes

I was ready to fall in love immediately with the new os, and I must admit it didn’t happen last night after upgrading my iPhone 5.

This morning I do like it a little better.

Sometimes I don’t like good design at first sight. There has been more than one occasion when my first reaction to projects that had been developed for me has been “meh”, yet I ended up loving it later and even much much much later. I guess that new design languages made to last for a long time require some time to adapt. Not saying that this is the case, just saying that it could be.

It’s clearly the first OS designed for post retina display devices, it does work on the old ipad, but the smaller symbols and thin lines are clearly designed to work well on high resolution screens.

It’s unstable, it did crash a few times since yesterday. No big deal, you get back to the application so fast that it’s just a glitch, but I do hope it won’t crash while I’m writing this, and the very fact that I’m thinking this is a bad sign.

I have more than 50 apps queued up for updates (it was 0 a couple of days ago), it looks like most developers are embracing it. It’s more than one third of the apps I have installed on my phone updated within 24 hours from the release of a new OS, quite amazing if you think about it!

Intensity of the mundane

This morning I spent 10 minutes reading this post: Our new extrusions are in – and they are AMAZING

I’m not interested in aluminum extrusions, and I don’t plan to buy any, yet the post is a brilliant example of what Euan Sample, quoting Rob Paterson, calls “the intensity of the mundane”:

In the right circumstances nerdiness and passion about even “boring” subjects can be really fascinating.

But it so hard to convince people in companies to speak with their own voice, and even when they try they often go all “adult” ending up sounding fake. Yet the very same people use their own voice with their buddies on Facebook.

It’s a long road…

Addictions

For the last seven days I have been fighting an unusually aggressive chest cold. No smoking. No drinking. No taste.

I hardly noticed not smoking my pipe or the occasional cigar. I have not missed a bit the usual glass of wine, or our Friday martini. It’s flavours I can’t live without! For the last week I have eaten all these fantastic and tasty dishes, but no matter how hard I tried, I could only perceive some very basic “salted-acidic-sweet-bitter”. Nothing more.

Can’t wait to go back to all mi vices, but it looks like I’m only addicted to one.

We are all superheroes

A couple of weeks ago my iPhone stopped vibrating, so yesterday I sent it in for replacement (no Apple Geniuses in this part of the world).

I could easily drop my SIM card in some other old phone lying around the house, but making and receiving calls is the feature I’m less interested into, so I thought I’ll just sit tight and wait for a new iPhone 3GS to arrive in a couple of days.

After about 24 hours I can tell you how that it feels just like Superman exposed to kryptonite: I have lost my super powers.

This is what having the whole web in your pocket is: superpower. Or super-senses if you like.

Anyway, the grater awareness offered by knowing all the time exactly where you are, what’s on the other side of that building, what your friends are doing on the other side of the planet, and having access to more or less any information you might ever dream of, could have been the perfect subject for comic books not that many years ago.

Since I have plenty of time on my hands, I’ll start thinking about my superhero costume.

The news of RSS death might be exaggerated

While Steve Gillmor is declaring RSS dead, buried by the emergence of the real time web, I was thinking about the course of events as far as content authoring and fruition are concerned.

At the very beginning there was WWW, an application designed to author and browse web pages, all in one. But right after that, browsers evolved leaving behind the authoring part, which became the domain of a whole bunch of “professional” applications, separating content authoring from content creation in different tools.

Later, at the beginning of blogging, Radio UserLand would bring together again content authoring and reading: you would use Radio to write on your own blog, and you would use Radio built in browser to read what other people would publish on their sites, using RSS.

But then, again, authoring and reading tools separated these tasks: WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger etc. are authoring tools, while Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Bloglines, etc. are just readers.

Also if they do provide some degree of openness, Twitter, Facebook and most other SN we see today have brought again together the authoring and reading features, within the same applications.

While having the two features united makes a lot of sense to bootstrap a service, it looks like so far they ended up being separated by vertical specialized application. I guess we are going to see this split happen again soon.

PS: I do think that the news of RSS death might be exaggerated. Maybe some users don’t have time to bath in river of news anymore because they are too busy juggling real time applications, but most of these funky quick apps are still based on solid RSS pipes.

1982

Since my mom started getting old 35mm slides scanned, all kinds of curious reminescences are bubbling up.

At work, in 1982
This is me, back when my parents’ business was just a room in our house. You can spot an Apple II (or, better, Apple ][), the box of a Vic 20 and, in the background, an Olivetti M20. In the next picture you can see that I was using a Sinclair ZX81 (connected to its fantastic “spark printer”).

Multi-language Social Networks

FriendFeed-1.jpgFrom the logo I see today on FriendFeed, I guess they just introduced localized versions of their UI. For the Italian and the Turkish markets.

I don’t care much, usually I don’t like localized versions, but the move totally makes sense: FF is quite popular in Italy, and from what I hear social networks are very popular in Turkey.

But while most social networking tool support multi-language UIs, what they are missing is support for multi-language users.

It’s what happens to everybody who speaks English and a other languages, and has friends speaking exclusively only one of those languages.

I ended up trying to write most of my stuff in English, because my friends on-line are a pretty mixed group. But I do realize that sometime I publish stuff in Italian, and while most people can live with it, I know that somebody is slightly annoyed by this.

I don’t think that figuring out a language of an item is very difficult these days, but I’m still waiting to see a social network that does this well, allowing users to receive only items in languages they can understand, if they want to.

As far as I am concerned: I’m happy to see some French, or German or any other language, crossing my feeds from time to time.