chris
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Homepage: http://www.usrlab.com
Posts by chris
The Great Spotify Scandal
April 14, 2011 - 12:39 pm
Posted in Philosophy | 3 comments
The blogosphere is all a-buzz today after Spotify’s announcement that it’s free and open services are to come to an end relatively soon. As of May 1st anyone who isn’t a paying subscriber to the music service will find what they have access to severely limited – 5 plays of each track, and a further [...]
The Early Bird Gets … Left Behind?
February 10, 2011 - 4:31 pm
Posted in Futurism, Web Projects | 3 comments
One of the fundamental principles of agile programming, and something that’s leaked out in to other less trendy development methodologies is the notion of “release early, release often”. In a nutshell it says you should release your software product quickly and then update it when you have a new feature or two. It’s fundamentally different [...]
January Beta Round-up
February 1, 2011 - 4:26 pm
Posted in Web Projects | 2 comments
During January I’ve played with a few interesting web apps. From small one-man developer ideas that people are building in their spare time to big VC funded sites there are some exciting things around the corner. About.me – http://about.me – An online “business card” app. All in all, pretty good. I’ve yet to see whether [...]
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context Part 2
January 25, 2011 - 2:41 pm
Posted in Philosophy, Social Media | No comments
Continuing from the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago the rampant march of “emotional data” continues. Path, the ‘limited’ social network that only allows you to keep 50 contacts in your network at any given time, have updated their app to version 1.3. The latest edition lets users tag posts with one [...]
A long way down: Will Google survive?
January 21, 2011 - 12:38 pm
Posted in Futurism | No comments
In the past six months the chaps at Google have been busy. They’ve been pushing products out the door like nobodies business. There’s Google TV, Google eBookstore, Google Hotpot, Boutiques.com (although you’d be hard-pressed to figure out that’s a Google project just from the site). They’re innovating and inventing exciting things at GoogleHQ. There’s an [...]
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context
January 13, 2011 - 3:05 pm
Posted in Philosophy, Social Media | 1 comment
Watching Amber Case’s recent TED talk, “We are all cyborgs now”, I learnt about the fascinating concept of “ambient intimacy”. As the self styled ‘digital philosopher’ explains; “It’s not that we’re always connected to everybody, but at any time we can connect to anyone we want.” How intimate the relationship we have with [...]
Crowdsourcing Volatile Location Information
January 10, 2011 - 4:01 pm
Posted in Futurism, Philosophy | No comments
Geolocation check-in apps, such as Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook Places etc, have become relatively mature in a very short period of time in internet terms. Foursquare, the market leader, has been in use for less than 2 years (although it is based on Dodgeball that was around for a few years prior to that). As the [...]
New toys: scoop.it and ifttt
January 6, 2011 - 3:05 pm
Posted in Web Projects | 6 comments
Scoop.it Scoop.it is a new curation app that’s just opening up to Beta users. I’ve been playing with it for a little while, and I have to say it’s pretty awesome. I’ve used curation tools in the past (namely Curated.by) and while I’ve liked what they do it’s always felt like a bit of a [...]
Two Years On…
January 5, 2011 - 10:16 am
Posted in Social Media, USRLab | No comments
January 5th 2009: I joined Twitter. It was when Twitter was just beginning to hit the media in a big way. Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross were busily evangelising the service on BBC1. Every newspaper was carrying stories about it. My friends both on- and off-line were beginning to talk about it. So I signed [...]
Vibefeelr
January 3, 2011 - 3:26 pm
Posted in Social Media | 1 comment
Continuing the delightful trend of new web apps* with daft names, I’ve been trying out the beta of “Vibefeelr”. Vibefeelr is essentially the same as Twitter but with added feelings (the “vibes” in the site’s name). Each short post is limited to a whopping 421 characters and comes tagged with a particular vibe from a [...]
