Tech, Gaming and Bile!
Posts tagged friendfeed
Friendfeed, Apps room.
0Want to know where you can find total gems of applications or even share your favourite ones?
Maybe you’re developing the next killer app and want somewhere to advertise it or ask for help because it has grown way beyond your capacity and you now need extra hands.
There is a place you can go, we may not know your name but we’re friendly anyway!
It’s the Apps room in friendfeed. If you already have a friendfeed account you know the drill, just hit the link and add yourself to the room.
If you don’t have a friendfeed account and maybe haven’t even heard of friendfeed, then you’re in for a treat!
Friendfeed is a microblogging community, kinda like twitter on steroids. It allows you to pull in loads of your activities such as videos your favourite and publish in youtube, pictures you favourite and publish on flickr, updates to your blog, every one of your tweets and so many more!
People can then leave comments to your messages and whole conversations, debates and tomfoolery can ensue.
If you haven’t heard of friendfeed or if you have but you’ve been holding out then I fully recommend you take the plunge and sign up here.
Once you’ve signed up, add me 
– I’ll add you back – and jump into the multitudes of rooms and simply take part!
Here are some starter rooms for you:
Windows 7, naughty me!
04 years ago
Here’s the contents of a few messages as I was streaming my installation of Windows7, which I had to cut short the streaming because my GF entered the room and I respect her privacy. Just as I had people picking up the stream after my flatmate got it linked on EVE Radio .
Sorry for those who were cut off so soon!
posted a message on Twitter
“naughty me is installing windows 7 here http://www.alphaxion.com/?page… Oops
- urgh.. come on microsoft, why can’t I delete a dynamic drive from the setup? do I *really* have to go into another instance of windows to do it? BAD FORM
- ok, after some jiggery and pokery with storage and moving data across I’m now *finally* moving with installing win7. Just got the 45 min copy of files to wait now :/
- boredom begins to set in http://www.ustream.tv/recorded…
- well, after having a play around with the settings and a nose about media centre, the damn thing packed in on me and wouldn’t boot back up again. I think it’s more down to a buggered HDD than the OS. Will explore tonight.
Had plenty of problems, primarily with the fact that I only had sata hdd’s at hand but the machine I was using didn’t have onboard sata. Sadly, the only sata card I have is an Adaptec 1210S which never had vista drivers built and win7 doesn’t have any native support.
I then tried a HDD from an old system, a tiny 10gb and was rejected “windows requires 12gb of free space”.
Found another, but was a dynamic disk and just like vista it refuses to deal with it. This is quite a bad failing really, there should be no reason why you can’t convert it within the setup interface! I had to boot to another OS in order to sort it out before win7 setup (winPE) would even accept the HDD.
To anyone with influence at MS, please get this looked at!
I will be continuing this tonight, as I try to resurrect the damn thing and grab some screenshots. One thing I did notice is that all the changes are very subtle right now.
I know the major interface changes have been omitted right now, but there are still plenty – something I noticed immediately is that the “explore” option when right clicking [my] computer has been eliminated because it is all one view – which it has been since vista.
The display settings interface has been tidied up a bit, I really wish I had got screen caps before it died. It looks a bit more friendly to less experienced users.
Win7 seems to accept vista drivers for hardware quite happily, so maybe the driver hell won’t be as pronounced with this version. I had my sound card (ADI onboard) and Hauppage TV card (PVR350) running quite happily from drivers downloaded from their respective sites.
Windows picked up its own drivers for the 6600GT I was using for the video card, I used an fx5200 when installing it. Wanted to see how it would handle a vid card swap. No problems. 
Something I didn’t notice was the performance scoring system, it just let me go straight into the aero style without having to redo anything. Whether this will be in the final version or not remains to be seen.
Media Centre is very usable, with some tweaks here and there – teletext buttons onscreen was a nice touch that I don’t remember being there before. It seems to have lost the double right click to go back to the EPG for some reason.
I just plain didn’t have enough time to go through it as it crashed in media centre and wouldn’t let me get to the task manager before it rebooted on its own and complained about the boot device, halting my playtime.
Also, if you’re thinking about running the beta win7 in virtual PC don’t bother. The VM additions software will blue screen on you and stop it from booting. On the plus side, I got to see the recovery wizard that will run through a diagnosis for you and then spit out its recommendation – in this instance it suggested I do a rollback using system restore, don’t know if it will always suggest that or if it can do other things too.
Expect some screenshots in the near future, until now it’s text only 
Taking friendfeed beyond the cloud – Revenue making 101
2Every so often you’ll see the question “How will [insert current web 2.0 darling here] make money?” and almost always people will resort to “by placing adverts!”.
Lets get this out into the open now, advertising is not and never will be a realistic business model on the internet – For a laundry list of reasons such as:
Now, to the real meat of this article. Current interwebnet 2.0-ified favourites du jour are the micro blogging sites like twitter, friendfeed, pownce (RIP) et al. They’ve grabbed our attention, got us hooked and now people are starting to ask just how they intend on financing such a lovely system so we can continue our crack like addictions.
I know many of you out there still follow the decades old belief that we shall all migrate to network resident apps and anything not in the cloud will fall away like the death of VHS when DVD came along and gave it a bloody nose and bruised it’s ego.
If you believe this then you’re missing out on a tried and tested means of making money – the inhouse solution and the juicey support contracts that go with them. Real revenue that isn’t reliant upon flakey ad providers that can change your income at a whim. If you have made a product you don’t put it into a public place and slap adverts all over it, you sell the damn product.
In order to explain this, let me pick on my favourite micro-blogging sensation – Friendfeed.
I love the ability for this system to pull in RSS feeds, mainly because this one feature alone can transform friendfeed from a public social time sink into a powerfull private system monitoring tool (among many possible uses).
It can’t really be plumbed into the public friendfeed ’cause the data is of no interest to anyone unless you were seeking vectors of attack or trying to dent the company value. Inhouse is the only place for this and it means deploying the system outside of the cloud and in the murky backwaters of the server room.
Sorry cloud utopians.
But how would it make for a great monitoring tool? Surely there’s no space for yet another competitor when you have systems like Solarwind’s NCM that trawl SNMP and WMI?
Well, pretty much all monitoring tools will fire off alerts via email and as any network admin will tell you this can get pretty annoying if it is a little too eager to inform and is quite difficult to derive any meaningful “big picture” stats from since most will either have their own (non-sharing) reporting module or don’t have one and rely on emails only.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way of picking up alerts (either from RSS or redirecting the email alerts to the inhouse solution instead of you) from various systems that ordinarily can’t talk to each other. You could even create RSS feeds out of your server event logs using Greg Reinackers little applet and watch failures in real time.
Now imagine this info accessible from a desktop widget or via an API so you can integrate it with the corporate intranet instead of cluttering up your inbox every time a grunt trips over something?
Combine this with analysis modules that do things similar to ffholic and friendfeeds power to entertain morphs into the power to knit all of your monitoring systems together and open up avenues for datamining them.
A system that compliments and sits on top of your more expensive or built-in monitoring apps rather than replacing them and provides an interface for a plethora of plugins and ways to share the data across the business.
Surely that would be a far better thing to sell than pithy advertising space?