Bikkuri Tales

I’m amazed when I meet someone who hasn’t heard about Pandora… it’s an amazing service where you can create customized streaming radio stations based on a few artists you pick, or even one single song. Want to hear more stuff like Tom Waits? Or perhaps you’d like to hear something similar to The Rentals’ “Move On”. Simply type in a song or artist, and Pandora will automatically start building a radio station around your selection. It uses the Music Genome Project to find other songs that are “genetically” related to your pick… so if you choose something like Tori Amos, it will look for “lilting piano melodies” and “soft female vocals”… things like that

How do people not know about this?! Go check it out now at Pandora.

I'm a big fan of social networking, and I believe it's yet to reach it's full potential online. Myspace, the biggest of them all for now, is sort of the bane of the internet in my opinion. Marketing everywhere you turn, god awful profile design that makes your eyeballs bleed, and lots and lots of pointless posts about what band you saw first, 20 questions about nothing, and whatever chain letter that's going around at the time. So naturally, when something like fo.rtuito.us came along, I was excited.

fo.rtuito.us is pretty much the polar opposite of Myspace. It runs on serendipity, see. You have a profile which consists of nothing more than your screen name and a photo, and you're partnered up with a person at random. You see only their screen name, and it's up to the two of you to get to know one another via messaging back and forth. After 5 days, you decide whether or not you want to keep them as a friend, and a new person is served up to you. The process begins again.

I think it's an interesting concept, but after having been a user for over a month now, with 0 friends I see 2 main reasons why it's not so fantastic after all:

1) The 5 day waiting period: I understand the idea behind the 5 day waiting period, but sometimes you don't want to wait. Many times the person never writes back, and you're stuck waiting and waiting until you can try someone bew.

2) Language barriers: As is the way of the internet, fo.rtuito.us enjoys a widely international audience (or so I gather from the number of people I've been connected to who live all over the world). The system should have some sort of translation tool easily accessable to members to help facilitate communication between those who don't share a common primary language.

I think the idea of serendipity in social networks is an interesting one, and I do think I'll try to use the system for another month or so and see what happens. My main beef with it as it is now is something they can definitely fix, and the site is ever-evolving, so it will be interesting to see what sort of changes they make in the following months to come.

RSS feeds are so wonderful. I think many people don't really understand their value, but some people use what's called a feed reader to collect various RSS feeds into a single place so they can read all their news and updates quickly.

Personally, I use Firefox's live bookmarks feature. In my bookmarks toolbar I have various categories where I keep my RSS feeds. That way, instead of having another program open just for RSS feeds, I can simply browse headlines from my favorite sites right from my bookmarks toolbar. Some of my favorites are Google News, Craigslist, and Ebay as well as tech feeds from Engaget, MAKE Blog, and MacRumors to name a few. 

RSS feeds are so wonderful. Perhaps I'm just an information junkie, but I think they're essential time savers for anyone interested in staying on top of things. 

There's an interesting article at LRHB Industries about Myspace censoring bulletins relating to AOL's new services widely being regarded as a "Myspace Killer"… check it out!

LRHB Industries

Apple recently released Aperture, their new pro-level digital image management and manipulation application. While I don’t have a nice fancy DSLR to take tons of crazy pictures with, some of the features of Aperture are just insane. Mostly so:

• By the way, there’s no Save command in Aperture. As you make changes, those changes are recorded in a SQL database.

Just. Sick.

Read more here.

I don’t think Flock is going to beat up Firefox in any way, and I’m kind of sad their features aren’t just Firefox add-ons… but at least it’s pretty?

[Edit: My rhetorical question was actually answered here: http://www.decrem.com/bart/2005/10/flock-firefox-and-open-source/ ]

I guess we’ll see what happens when the final release comes out…

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