So the recent post on Twitter Etiquette (and it’s subsequent sequel) over at Global Geek News Blog has created a lot of debate about what is and isn’t acceptable on Twitter or any other micro-blogging services. What’s very interesting is that there’s one thing on which everyone seems to agree:

Don’t post the same thing to multiple services. If you are going to have accounts for all the different services like Utterz and Pownce, post unique messages to each service. Don’t post the same thing to all of the services. Nobody wants to receive the same message multiple times because they follow you on multiple services. Decide what you want to post to what service and stick with it. Don’t post a single message to multiple services.

Which is really good to know. After all, while you’re out there spreading the good word, you don’t want to alienate your audience / fellow-travelers.

I therefore retract the advice I gave in my initial post on Presence, wherein I said:

for instance you can post to Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr in one

Let’s now call that bad form.

It also calls into question the recent update of Twhirl to cross-post your status updates to Jaiku and Pownce; that will only be good for those rude spammers.

However, if the next, or some future iteration of Twhirl can be used to individually update each of the services AND perhaps even munge together all updates from your friends, yes you’d have a unified mircoblogging client.

Technical SideNote: say such a client does evolve and people keep broadcasting to all – it should be a simple matter to write a plug-in to just strip out all duplicates, effectively making this just vanish.

via Sean Bonner (who has his own interesting take on all this too)

From: yankodesign.com

Shaking hands is a customary greeting action. Handshake brings the action one step further by creating an information transfer function. Handshake operates when people first meet and shake hands, and the rings on their fingers gain the proximity to operate. The rings exchange the users’ information and store it while the users are shaking hands. The more people met, the more information transferred. When the users browse through the people they have met, the card displays the basic information that was stored in the ring. The power source originates from the human body temperature, so no plug is required.

Need to wake up easier in the morning? Get the alarm ring.

Via Warren, who’s now sworn off Tweetr and is trying out Twhirl, we learn the following:

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you’re Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you’d like (I successfully added six).

Oh, that’s a great way to be Present on all three services. But what getting all your replies? Sadly:

The one crucial thing that’s missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it’s nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it’s a one-way street. It’s also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

But, it’s definitely a start; a step in the right direction towards the creation of a true unified microblogging client.

From : Newscientist.com

A virtual child controlled by artificially intelligent software has passed a cognitive test regarded as a major milestone in human development. It could lead to smarter computer games able to predict human players’ state of mind.

Children typically master the “false belief test” at age 4 or 5. It tests their ability to realise that the beliefs of others can differ from their own, and from reality.
“Today’s characters have no genuine autonomy or mental picture of who you are,”. He [Selmer Bringsjord] aims to change that with future games and virtual worlds populated by genuinely intelligent computer characters able to predict and understand players actions and motives.

Bringsjord’s colleague Andrew Shilliday adds that their work will have applications outside of gaming. For example, search engines able to reason about the beliefs of a user might allow them to better understand their search queries.

John Laird, a researcher in computer games and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is not overly impressed. “It’s not that challenging to get an AI system to do theory of mind,” he says.

But Bringsjord points out his is the first computer character to achieve theory of mind, something necessary if characters are to become smarter, better opponents and collaborators. His team are now attempting to make characters that can lie, which also requires reasoning about other people’s mental states.

From PCWorld:

A PC to rival Mead’s Trapper Keeper folder system. A wearable computer-bracelet to serve as your digital slave. A smart cutting board for the kitchen. And some entirely new concepts for the visually impaired. Meet some of the finalists in Microsofts Next-Gen PC Design Competition. We picked 15 we thought had a chance of making it. Because we like some more than others, we give you a reality check with our best guess on odds of them taking one of the awards. But who cares if these designs actually make it–this contest (which requires no working models) encourages designers to completely re-think the PC as we know it. And that is a good thing.

Junior High Deja Vu

The T-Horizon is sort of like the Mead “Trapper Keeper” notebook you used to buy every fall for school–except that this is a fully functioning PC. You can either spread the PC horizontally on a table, or use the compact version while working on the road. The T-Horizon features a detachable processing unit, double-sided transparent, flexible display screens, multitouch screens with touch-evoked resizable keyboards, a 3D projection module, and a built-in Web camera. The “strap” that holds the notebook closed doubles as a detachable media player. The PC communicates with its wireless components using Bluetooth.

Braille Meets the Digital Age

Get hands-on with Siafu, a PC designed to give sight-challenged people a more intuitive computing experience. It lays flat like a tablet and allows the user to interact with it by touch. The surface of Siafu utilizes a “conceptual material” called magneclay, which can morph upward into any shape. This means that Siafu can generate infinitely refreshable Braille and then display it in a book format. Siafu also has the ability to display images as a three-dimensional relief, allowing blind computer users to experience digital images and graphic layouts for the first time.

The PC Branches Out

Extending an arm–er, branch–to artists, the Bloom PC sends a series of laser beams between its three upright poles, or “branches,” to create 2D and 3D images in mid-air. The branches allow the displays to range from 15 to 24 inches. Users can choose from a variety of display sizes and viewing angles by repositioning the branches. The two “side branches” also house the PC’s sound system. A user would employ a keyboard or a pen stylus to operate the PC and edit design images. Bloom’s biometric scanner allows it to recognize returning users with a finger swipe and display all saved personal files and settings.

PC as Fashion Statement

What to wear to your next meet-up? Harmonious, a traditional jade necklace design of ancient China which signifies “harmony,” is designed for young people and is suited to blogging, chatting, and social networking. The device’s mapping function shows the physical locations of the user’s friends. If a friend is nearby, the color of the device changes to represent the personality of that friend. Harmonious is meant to be a fashion accessory with computing power.

Modeling Nature

Realism gets a shot in the arm with the Conceito PC, which is designed to be a kind of digital medium for artists: Its flexible LCD screen can be carried around outdoors, and the translucent display can be held up to an object or setting–whatever the artist wants to depict–to create the picture around and on top of the real thing. The screen display can be unrolled and fixed to the supporting stand using the pen as the lock. The base is an LED touch screen with a color palette, from which the pen stylus can obtain colors. The PC has a color sensing mechanism that gathers color from real objects.

Just a few that caught my eye, although the INFO Live and TRVL would be useful now.

You’re sitting in a cafe or bar, enjoying a drink with your buddy when a text message comes through. You glance at the message, and excuse yourself to make a quick call. Seconds later you’re back to your conversation. “Sorry”, you say, “that was my plant”.

Scratch one more thing off the sci-fi future list. Thanks to the boffins at Botanicalls your plants can now Twitter you when they’re thristy!

A quick phone call back and they’re all watered again.

Now, no matter where you go, you can be there for your plants.

via MAKE: Blog

See also:

• Ambient Intelligence – how we will come to have conversations with buildings and objects

Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long and heavily detailed step-by-step guide to creating your own digital personal-assistant that will let you keep tabs on your distributed presence across the internet without having to log in to each site on a daily basis.

In an earlier post I wrote about Presence, giving some tips on how you can link websites together to get the maximum benefit out of all the online communities out there. Hopefully now your content is flowing through the internets, gathering more eyeballs and helping to spread the Grinder message.

But that’s only half the picture. What’s the point of being present everywhere if you can’t respond to all the comments you get?

Once again, you can either login to every site all day long and check your messages or find a simpler way.

So now I’ll guide you through the creation of your very own digital personal-assistant, one that will notify you almost instantly when someone comments on your posts, pictures or videos.

We’re going to do this using Twitter, because it can notify you when you’re online, via IM and offline, via SMS.

A quick side-note: if you’re using Twitter, but aren’t getting notifications for everyone you’re following OR aren’t following everyone that follows you then make sure you track your own username. It’s literally just sending “track USERNAME” to Twitter, then you’ll never miss those @replies again.

Moving right along.

Creating your digital personal-assistant

The first thing you want to do is go to Twitter and create a new account. This is your digital personal-assistant. Choose a cool name and give it a pretty user-pic if you want.

Now set it to follow your twitter account, then logout and login to your twitter account and set that to follow your sexy new assistant.

Lastly and most importantly, log back into the assistant account and check the Protect my updates box; the tweets it will generate are for your eyes only.

Now get on over to Twitterfeed to create an account there. This is how your assistant’s tweets will be generated.

If you have a Livejournal, Vox, WordPress, Blogger or Yahoo account follow the instructions to login.

Otherwise you’re going to have to create yourself an OpenID – do that and then login.

Now you’re ready to start plugging in RSS Feeds and get your instant notifications on. Almost.

Creating an email2rss address

As we’re about to learn, not every site has an RSS Feed for you comments. But every site has email notifications. And thanks to MailBucket you can convert your emails into an RSS Feed. (thanks MailBucket!)

First you need to choose an account name. MailBucket is pretty basic in this regards; there’s no duplicate username notification. So you have to use trial-and-error to see if the account name is free or not.

Just enter http://mailbucket.org/MAILBUCKET_USERNAME.xml into your browser and if it says “No messages are stored for this address” then you’ve got it.

Now add http://mailbucket.org/MAILBUCKET_USERNAME.xml to your Twitterfeed account.

The email address used to populate the RSS Feed is MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org. But here’s where we add just one more layer:

I think this will work best if you use your Gmail account’s Filter functionality to auto-forward your emails to your mailbucket address.

This is for two reasons: 1) it will give you a backup archive and 2) it will give you a fall back in case MailBucket dies in the future.

Go to Settings→Filters→Create New Filter in your Gmail account.

Here’s the trick: in the To Address field you add GMAIL_USERNAME+email2rss@gmail.com and set it to Forward to MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org, and to Archive them – you won’t need these emails appearing in your InBox, but they’ll still be there and be searchable.

GMAIL_USERNAME+email2rss@gmail.com is now your email2rss address.

Side-note: If you don’t have a Gmail address and/or don’t want to bother with another email account then don’t stress. You can create a Gmail account in minutes, do the above, then create another Filter to forward any all emails to your preferred email account. Or you can just use MAILBUCKET_USERNAME@mailbucket.org as your email2rss address.

OK, we’re nearly there.

Collecting the comments left on your works

This last part is pretty repetitious, but remember we’re doing all this now to make life simpler in the future.

WordPress

Go to your blog’s front page. Look in your sidebar or at the bottom of the page, depending on your theme layout. Or you can just search for Comments RSS. Grab that url and add it to your Twitterfeed account.

Flickr

Login to Flickr. Go to You→Recent activity on your photos. There’s your feed at the bottom, add it to your Twitterfeed account.

Vox

Login to Vox. Go to Your Account and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Notifications and check all the boxes for Email Notifications.

Zannel

Login to Zannel. Go to Account. Go to manage account→edit and update it to use your new email2rss address. Then, go to alert settings and select yes for when I get a comment on my zannel and when someone comments on my updates.

VIRB

Login to VIBR. Go to Account/Settings→Account Info and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Account/Settings→Notification Settings and check all the boxes under Comments.

Livejournal

Login to Livejournal. Go to Account and update it to use your new email2rss address. Now, go to Account→Manage Notifications and tick the Someone comments in my journal, on any entry check box.

MySpace

Login to MySpace. Go to Edit Profile→Account Settings and update it to use your new email2rss address.

YouTube

Login to YouTube. Go to Account→Email Options and update it to use your new email2rss address.

What Else?

That’s it really. You should be good to go now. No longer do you have to log in to each site to see what activity there’s been on your posts.

One last thing, changing your email address on all these accounts may seem weird; especially if you’d already been getting the email notifications. The intended benefit here is to streamline all the comments you get into one place. And to move from a browser-based email account, to a thin-client IM/SMS setup.

I hope these tips help you to manage your Presence online.

This post was going to talk about how you could use GMail’s Filter function to easily post to Zannel, Flickr, Vox etc using one email address from your smart-phone. But guess what? Filter’s only let you forward to ONE email address, so that isn’t going to work. Not that this means it isn’t doable – it’s just one step harder – you have to go elsewhere and set up a private mailing list and then use your Filter to forward to that. This marks the first time GMail’s ever let me down though; not a good sign.

But that doesn’t matter either really. Because I’ve been in contact with the good people of Zannel and they tell me that next week a whole bunch of new features are going to be released; that “goes far beyond RSS and puts us in the position to be a true Twitter ++”. And that they’re also “working through an international rollout”.

Now, I think I got a sneak preview of two of these new features today, with buttons appearing (and then disappearing an hour later) to link your account in with Flickr and Twitter. We’ll have to wait until next week to see what else they have in store.

But what this does mean is there should be no need to double post to Zannel and Flickr.

Which brings us to a discussion on Presence.

The internet has splintered into a bunch of mini-nets. OK, maybe it hasn’t really been the same since Usenet. Anyway, some of us like to wander around the internet, stopping to say hello here and there. But it sure seems like the bulk of netizens find the one place they feel comfortable, and make that their primary community. Be they LiveJournal’ers, Flickr’ers, MySpace kidz, YouTube’rs, VIRB indies or Facebookers. So if you want to get the maximum benefit from all these communities, you can either spend all day posting on each – or post selectively and know that it will flow through to others.

You can achieve a lot by simply chaining RSS feeds together; for instance you can post to Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr in one go. VIRB has an import blog function, so you can write on your personal blog and have it appear there too. You can link your Vox and Flickr together to automatically cross post, ditto Vox and LiveJournal. You can even Twitter while you’re in SecondLife. And can pull RSS feeds out of YouTube.

Tumblr is probably the best way to unite all your various presences together – just plug all your RSS feeds into it. And don’t be daunted by their five feed limit, this is easily overcome using Yahoo!Pipes.

And that’s why I said a lack of RSS made Zannel a no go. It’s no fun having your content locked into one community, however much fun that place might be. We Grinders want to get our message out as far and as wide as possible, with a minimum of fuss. Hopefully these tips will help you do that.

UPDATE! The Flickr, Twitter tie-in is now live(ish YMMV). I’d recommend using the post-to-Twitter judiciously though; people don’t generally react well to auto-spamming on Twitter.