Google’s new OpenSocial.org website is the front for the OpenSocial Foundation, an attempt to gather support for open development of OpenSocial-y issues such as data ownership and APIs.

Naturally, being the omnipotent creature that Google is, they’ve used their own Spreadsheet and newly-added survey feature to gather supporters (myself included).

Unfortunately, while the email address is hidden, it’s not gone completely. View the source of this page - a HTML output of the spreadsheet which appears on OpenSocial.org and behold: a listing of every email address submitted.

Here’s an idea that I’ve been wanting for a while. When I’m on the road, heading to a client’s office, and I get caught up in traffic or running early, I’d like to let the client know automatically.

Generally, you can text (not an option while driving), email (ditto) or phone the client. Personally even with a bluetooth headset I try to avoid calling people. You could pull over, but I’ve heard they frown on that on motorways, and if you’re late it’s only going to make you later…

So here’s an idea I’ve been playing with for a while: set up your phone with GPS and have it text or email the client to say ‘running 10min late…’ or ‘ETA 11.35 - stick the kettle on’. Being a web-savvy kinda person I’d have a webpage set up with Google Maps and a near real-time trace of my position.

Along comes Yahoo Fire Eagle, a web service designed (as far as I can tell) as a hub for all one’s location-based services. Something tells Fire Eagle ‘I am here’ and it dutifully tells all the subscribed services where you are.

Great. And I managed to get an invite too - double great.

The problem is, Fire Eagle is as new as you can get. It works as a service, but there’s very little talking to it and very few services that use it. Then again, that’s the point of inviting a whole load of developers to play with it.

That is until I spotted Navizon. This program (the Lite version is free) sits on your mobile phone and uses a combination of Celltower triangulation, Wifi AP triangulation and good ol’ GPS to figure out where you are. Joy of joys, it publishes to Fire Eagle too.

After about an hour of faffing around with Navizon’s weirdly ugly user interface, I finally discover that to actually publish to the server (and on to Fire Eagle) I must enable something in my Buddies(!) menu. Yes I know - RTFM and all that, but frankly there’s something to be said for making user interfaces vaguely intuitive as well.

I still don’t know what my ‘Home Area’ is about or what it has to do with anything. I can only assume it’s a privacy thing to stop people finding your exact home, but goodness me everything about their website is counter-intuitive.

For a while, it worked. Navizon worked out where I was (accurately, and brilliantly) purely based on Wireless APs (mine included, it seems). I walked to the shops and it followed me. I went to the next town and - apart from placing me 200yds in the sea - it was fairly accurate.

Then I noticed something that upset me. The program running on my Windows Mobile PDA/Phone was slow to begin with, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. When I tried closing Navizon the entire thing crashed. Later on, I tried it again - same result.

While playing with the program I also noticed that the phone was noticeably hotter than usual, and realised that the thing was sucking battery juice. I have to say that this is not necessarily Navizon’s fault as such. Wireless sucks the life out of phones at the best of times, and with Wifi AP locating switched off the system would rely on the far less accurate cell triangulation or the perpetual tethering to a bluetooth GPS. Unfortunately I could never figure out how to switch off Wireless AP locating, and I was mobile so reading the manual was not an option.

Which brings me into the close of my little foray into the world of location updating. What started off as high hopes for a service I’ve been looking forward to for a long time has turned into a complete disappointment. The biggest turn-off for me was how utterly unintuitive and resource-hungry Navizon’s phone app seemed to be. I hope Navizon can get their product straightened out, and if they do I’ll be right back to try it again. Alternatively I hope somebody else (perhaps spurred by the interest in Fire Eagle) will develop a slimmer, simpler triangulation/location app that publishes to the Internet.

Until either happens, I’ll continue dreaming up new services that might one day exist!

Been running WordPress 2.5 for the last few days. I have to say, after getting over the initial learning curve of any new interface (however slight), I’m rather impressed.

The post writing is a lot simpler and easier to use. I like the AJAX touches (e.g. when creating a permalink from a title) and the entire thing has stepped up a notch in perceived quality.

Downsides (after very little testing):

• It all seems a little slower…. but maybe that’s just my server at the moment. Time will tell.
• The post editing box is still partially ‘below the fold’ on Firefox, maximised with an 800 pixel-high screen. Too much “stuff” above the edit box, which means I have to scroll to write every new post.
• I want to preserve a comment that I removed from the site (ie. don’t want it public; I want it private). Not entirely sure how to do this yet - it thinks the comment requires “approval”

Um, I think that’s about it. I’d definitely recommend upgrading.

A few months ago I wrote an email to the customer services people of a major UK railway company, asking how a major redevelopment of one of their stations would affect my (and others’) travel. I’m still waiting for a response.

A few weeks ago I emailed a fairly substantial phone service company pointing out that their 0845 number was incorrectly advertised as ‘free-phone’, and that if this were clarified I might consider using the service. Again, still waiting.

Last night I sent an email to a food review website pointing out a small error on their page. This morning I got a polite response, a thank-you and a commitment to fix the issue.

Following on from the homepage redesign earlier this year, the BBC News site has been revamped to a 1024 pixel layout.

Personally, I find the amount of whitespace a little too overpowering; it’s hard to see where section divides are (the regional “Around the World/UK Now” sections at the bottom, for instance)

I’m sure CSS purists will also dislike that this redesign still uses tables for layout, although the “Low Graphics” option still exists for any users who prefer it.

It seems this has just happened - none of the subsequent pages (Tech, UK, World, etc) carry the updated layout, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. The BBC tend to keep old designs around for archived material, so looking back to articles from the 90s you can see the page as it was (albeit with a few SSI errors…)

Update:  Steve Herrmann from the BBC describes the changes

Fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, and came up with this estimation of what my life will look like (umm, certain estimates included…)

Spotted a new comic strip today, sarcastic Internet humour - always a winner.

BT have caused a right royal fuss over the weekend by blocking non-BT address on their outgoing SMTP servers. Phil Gyford has good coverage of the hurdles required to get through BT’s aggressive blocking, which is intended to combat spam by restricting mail-outs to legitimate and authenticated addresses only.

It’s a real faff, but I’m sure I’ve been through this before. In fact, at least two clients of mine have - over a year ago - encountered exactly the same problem, but everything I read regards this as a completely new update. To the best of my knowledge, one was on business-grade ADSL and the other on residential, but both had the same problem (and remedy - harass BT with copies of domain registrations and letterheads).

So I’m slightly miffed … is this a new extension of a previous BT filtering system or something completely different?

“Please consider the environment before printing this email”

These simple words seem to be gracing a lot of my inbound email these days. It feels like a 2007 fad, whereby every participating business can tick another box in the ‘we care’ category by hardwiring a patronising bit of text into their outbound correspondence.

How many people have read an email, gone to hit Print and stopped short after glancing at the message, thinking “oh dear, yes I must consider the environment”? Worse still, how many have rushed to the printer after mindlessly hitting Ctrl+P, noticed the tagline at the bottom, and promptly taken their own life for the horrible sin they’ve so callously committed?

The irony is that if you do print an email, there’s a small but real chance the “Please consider…” tagline will wrap onto a new page, thus wasting a sheet all by itself.

It being the 21st century, 2008 and the year of Web 2.0 I suggest a more brutal assault on these evil corporate tree-killers, using the power of stylesheets:

Thus, any email printed will remind the reader of how horrible they are, and since it was paper wasted anyway they may as well revert to reading it on-screen.

Try it out here (although you might want to just use Print Preview…)

Arrived in Cork yesterday for the BlogTalk 2008 conference and attached Social Network Portability conference. I’ve signed up to Twitter here’s my stream, since everybody seems to be using that to talk (at the last BlogTalk in ‘04 IRC was the main back channel). One question: how do I find out who else is using Twitter here? Maybe somebody should create a section on their wiki, unless Twitter provides its own search (can’t see it…).