Sam Davyson

There’s some questions being asked of O2′s position in the approval of the new 0870 app. It apparently took over 400 days to be approved and as the Telegraph reports here O2 didn’t want to app to appear due to loss of revenues. O2 are denying it on Twitter.

I never fully got into using delicious for my links. I always preferred keeping my links on my own turf, so I’ve used browser bookmarks and more recently I created DavysoNub as my personal URL shortener and bookmarker. I never quite built up the UI enough there though. I think really I wanted something a bit more like Tumblr but fully self hosted.

Then when browsing Daring Fireball I realised that what I really wanted was what he running. He has blog posts interspersed with links with added commentary. The only different between the posts that are links and the “true” blog posts is that clicking on the title of one of the link posts takes you directly to the source rather than to the permalink page for the post. A star is provided to the right of the post title to further differentiate the entries and also to provide an actual permalink for the link and comment.

John Gruber uses Movable Type so I’m not sure how he achieves the effect he has. I however use WordPress so I knew I’d have to use a different work around anyway. After a bit of fiddling around I now have a similar system going on this blog. This is how I did it:

• In the template of the blog where the title is posted I edited it to be conditional on a new custom variable. This variable will hold the address that the link posts will link to. To retrieve the custom variables you use this php snippet within the loop:

$custom_fields = get_post_custom();
$link = $custom_fields['Link_Post_URL'];
$url = $link[0];

• Now use the contents of the $url variable to determine which sort of title to display. Something like this.

<? if($url=”") { ?>
…

// normal title with link to permalink for blog posts

<? } else { ?>
…
// link title for link posts
<A HREF=”<? echo $url; ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></A>
<? } ?>

• Finally when you make a post – add a custom variable to it with the name Link_Post_URL to those that you want to  make link posts. After you’ve added it the first time there’ll be a drop down menu to make it easy to add it again.

Remember to try and differentiate posts in some way to explain to the readers how your posts differ. On this blog I’m using grey backgrounds for blog posts that are true blog posts and non-grey backgrounds where it’s just a link. I’m also omitting the comment link and second timestamp on the link posts.

Now all I need to do is to get this linked up with DavysoNub. I’ll see what I can do with that.

I’m glad to hear it! I use this religiously and I recommend it to everyone.  I wish they’d get the dropbox.com domain though. If you join using this link we’ll both get an extra 250 MB.

The technophile column in the Guardian gives the Spotify mobile app a very positive review. Points out that you can share Spotify accounts by forcing offline mode. Doesn’t really elaborate much on the major downside of no background playing (iPhone only). My review is still on the way.

A neat tool that I’ve been using for a while to generate random passwords for online services. Works really well in every case unless there’s also a desktop or mobile client involved where you can come unstuck not knowing your password. Worth looking at.

This is a very nice looking Google Map with Twitter trends put over the top. Lily allen is all the rage in London clearly.

I know this is an old app, but it have just recently added Guardian crosswords and so I’ve got it. It’s fantastic.

I saw Lissn’s presentation at the TechCrunch 50 conference on the live Ustream feed. I was interested. It seemed to be a realtime chat service with a focus on listeners (“lissners”)

SIGNING UP

I signed up for an invite soon after watching the webcast, and a few days later (yesterday) I was emailed an invite. Today anyone can sign up on the website for an account meaning that the invite system was remarkably short lived. I wonder if this was intentional or if they found that enough people hadn’t signed up for invites to make the service feel busy and they wanted to get more people in.

From receiving the invite signing up was a 5 step process. Click the invite link. Fill in two short forms. Check your email for a link. Fill in a captcha. And – boom – you’re account has been made. I’ve put this to the founder of Lissn as not being a particularly good way to go about things and he’s agreed. So lets leave this – you make an account. Now what?

WHAT IS IT FOR

According to the homepage:

Lissn connects friends, locals & the world through live, real time conversations. Become a part. Join for free!

I wonder what that means. It sounds like Twitter doesn’t it? But maybe with a better interface for conversations rather than the @reply system which is confusing at first. Maybe something like quotably? (RIP). Having looked around the service I think that this is fairly accurate. Lissn is about the exchange of short messages – but it’s new feature is that messages are organised around conversations. It’s all realtime but the conversation has a permalink so it doesn’t have to be realtime.

So can you spot the difference between this product and any forum where you can create threads?

The answer is incredibly not much. It updates without you refreshing (available on lots of forums these days) and messages have to be short. So maybe Lissn is to Forums as Twitter is to Blogs. They’ve simplified the experience to try to make it more about now and more spontaneous. Personally I find the UI really confusing. Let me show an example:

A conversation on Lissn.com

First of all the image at the bottom is my avatar – that is showing that I am on the page i.e. that I’m “lissning”. What about the rest of it? So it would seem that Andrew has posted “Let’s see if it embeds…” as the starter for the conversation and then there have been four replies to it. The first one is at the bottom of the screen (by Andrew again) and then Mike, Jeff and John follow up. So far so good. It looks a lot like one tweet at the top of the page and lots of comments on it below.

However if you click the “Show Transcript” link (which is top right) a box loads at the bottom (image here) and in it it says:

Andrew McIntire: Let’s see if it embeds media… http://imgur.com/gM19g.gif
Paul Smith: spotify:track:0zZc3I2Rx1aVragXt8bYKp

Who is Paul Smith? And why doesn’t his comment show up in the main stream of things? Is it that it’s been marked as spam or something (not that it is)?

A further confusion is that if you are the creator of a conversation you seem to have the right to promote one of the comments to be a full bubble like your own original message. I haven’t had enough conversations to explore this functionality fully but I can see this is where Lissn becomes the most realtime.

WRAP UP

Lissn is a new service, and so far it hasn’t got too many users. Around a thousand at the time of writing (judging by the predictable URL structure used for profile pages). Many of these people will of course be signing up out of curiosity and not spending much time with it. With more people perhaps the utility of the site will become clearer. It is hard to think of it however as anything new.

That being said there is a planned Town Hall meeting later today which maybe will address some of my misunderstandings. This can be seen on Lissn here.

I’ve downloaded it of course, and I’ve got myself one month of premium membership in order to use the app. I’m going to try and watch my usage carefully to see if I think it’s worth it.

So far I’m hugely impressed by the app itself. More soon.

Stephen Fry on Car Pool

I’ve just found out about this Car Pool podcast by Robert Llewellyn. Each episode shows him driving a passenger to work or between meetings or similar. The passengers he has had are all really interesting and the conversation is always engaging. Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Jason Calacanis, David Mitchell… Viewing these people riding around in a car makes them seem much more human than how they are normally presented.

I found this after listening to some of last weeks TWiT episode.

You can view it on llewtube.com or iTunes.