Just a quick note to say after playing around with the beta of Firefox 3 I’m making a permanent change towards it. I’ve been using Camino of late. But this Firefox build looks superb.

And you could win an iPod Touch. Or I could ;)  Get involved.

Competition link.

[ Disclosure: This post constitutes my "upgrade" if I win the touch. ]

Last week I did a pyschology experiment in gambling. I got to keep my winnings as a way of thanking me for my participation.  The experiment was a simple slot machine with the setup was as follows:

• I started with £5.
• Each spin cost £0.25.
• Every time I won I got £1.50.
• The chance of winning a particular spin was 1/6.

I had to play for about 30 minutes in order for the experimenters to get enough information about what they were interested in and then I could choose to stop whenever I wanted. If I hit £0 I had to stop.

The question is: When should you stop?

I stopped at £6.50 which I was pleased with at the time since I had started with only £5. However afterwards thinking about it I realised there was an equal chance of hitting zero and getting £10 (moving £5 down or £5 up). And therefore a higher chance of hitting £9 than there was of hitting £0. I felt robbed. Should I? When it is the optimal time to stop?

Thanks to Scott Murphy for thinking through this.

Incredible song.

Thanks to Andy & Berni.

At Le Web 3 Conference Evan Williams, serial entrepreneur and founder of Twitter said that:

Twitter’s a mobile command line.

And he’s right it is. Command lines are brilliant, they make it fast to do things through a simple interface. But to me a useful command line requires two things. It needs to be easy to access which Twitter certainly is. And it needs to have useful commands. I understand that Twitter has caught on because of it’s simplicity but what I want to suggest is with increased extensibility Twitter could be a groundbreaking product.

At the minute you can use Twitter to tell people what you are doing. It is a status machine. And it’s a very fine one. But it could do much more. Twitter’s presence across so many platforms makes it a great way of communicating for other developers to tap into. So imagine if you could text other commands to make Twitter do different things… I’m talking:

• “event” - Adds an event to your Google / Hotmail / Yahoo Calendar
• “email” - Sends the following text as an email
• “loc” - Update your location - This could be shown on a map on your Twitter profile.
• “fbmsg” - Send a Facebook message.
• etc etc.

Lets be clear here… All of these “extra features” could be turned off by default or you could have to start each “command” message with an exclaimation mark or something to mark it out as different. Then Twitter could process it as a command and do whatever is necessary.

My inspiration for this comes from YubNub mainly I think which is a Social Command line that anyone can make commands for. I think Twitter could be great if you could make commands on the fly. I could develop a little app to sit on my site that could get information from me while I’m on the move (using a suitably long command). There could be global commands and ones that only worked from your number that you could make yourself. Twitter could become the defacto protocol of SMS - web interaction. I think it’d be brilliant.

Flickr don’t want to become part of Microsoft. And who blames them! No one wants Flickr to become Windows Live Photo Spaces with Silverlight plugin obligatory with an uploader for Windows only etc etc. Not that any of this would probably actually happen… Flickr is one of the few things on the Internet that I happily pay for. And if that money was going to Microsoft I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Anyway for the moment just enjoy this image:

By jcrr on Flickr.

I want to point out two comments on the MacBook Air. I didn’t make either of them myself but I spotted them both on Reddit and thought they were spot on.

Clythos: Sorry, but how is this smaller? Was anyone ever in the situation that they couldn’t take their notebook with them because it was too thick?

CausticPuppy: Actually, I bet there will be protective cases sold for this, which ironically will make it twice as thick.

I think that they are both excellent points. Particularly the first one. From listening to Twit.tv, seeing the comments on MacRumors, Digg and all over the blogosphere I think that the consensus seems to be:

• Yes the MacBook Air is a feat of engineering. Well done Apple.
• No I don’t want to buy one.
• And No I don’t know who would want to buy one.
• And No it is not the thickness that is the most important thing to me - I’d prefer something with a smaller footprint.
• And boy doesn’t the Asus Eee PC look cheap compared to this… and much more portable.

Conclusion: Good try Apple. Not this time though.

If you don’t know what happened then check Techmeme.

I’m not sure about this announcement. First of all everyone who has said that no one is actually committing to anything here is absolutely right. Just because people who work at Google and Facebook are on the committee it doesn’t mean that data is going to be portable from Facebook to NewSocialNetwork.com anytime soon.

I think that the issue is being clouded though. If you could move your information about friends etc (your social graph) right now would you? Where would you move it to? Moving your social graph is not going to be useful unless all of your friends (or at least some of them) move too. In this way making data portable is not really going to change anything about the lock in with social networks. People are going to stay where people they know are. Similar arguments debunk the significance of Open Social. People don’t switch networks for applications or widgets. They move because of their friends.

What is needed instead is to make the rich experience of a social network standardised. I think Google knows this. The real future is ONE social network for everyone. I see social networking as an extension to email. From Gmail I can email people on Hotmail and they can email me back. There is a communication standard there. So what we need is a standard account type (that is OpenID) and then standards for feeds of activity (that’s RSS), and standards for everything else you do on a social network. Once the social networking “scape” is fully open in this way people can use their own bit of the network (essentially their network provider) like Facebook, or Google, or Bebo, or whatever. And it might have slightly different features just like the way that Gmail has different features to Hotmail but it would have all been the same network. So I can switch from Google to Facebook and I’ll see a different interface but can browse my friends on whichever network provider they’ve chosen.

OpenID and a standard social graph is the key. As far as I can tell there is no benefit in the “half-way” solution where I can move my data from Facebook to Orkut. My friends will still be on Facebook. Fingers crossed this can go all the way.

I’ve updated the physics section of my website following requests from various people. The update sees full notes for all of module 4 and module 5 of physics A2. I’m using the same layout as ever (originally designed for the Biology notes sometime last year) with images hosted on Flickr and available in a few sizes. The pages are ad supported.

View module 4 and module 5.