Chris Tomkins’ Blog

If you use Firefox on Windows (apologies Mac and Linux users but this is Windows only) and commonly view photos and videos online, you have to try out PicLens - a fantastic add-on which allows you to browse your photos using a “3D wall” effect (think Apple’s Coverflow technology for iTunes but in 3D!). I find this a really fast and user friendly way of navigating through a set of photos. Not only does it support Flickr but most of the commonly used photo sharing sites and even YouTube. Definitely worth a look. Thanks to Trevor for pointing this out.

Nowadays I hardly ever buy something without seeing if I can get it cheaper elsewhere or find a discount voucher online. A few days ago, I got even more evidence of why its pays to shop around. Shelley and I were looking at buying a fridge/freezer (one of these big American style ones) and locally could only find the one we liked in Currys (there doesn’t seem to be a great selection of shops that sell fridge/freezers now adays) for £599.99 plus £49.95 delivery - a grand total of £649.94. Thinking this seemed a bit steep, we decided to come back and shop for the same thing online.

First we tried the shopping comparison web sites - Kelkoo, Dealtime and Shopping.com which gave us a better price of £569.99 from Dixons with free delivery (already a saving of about £80). Then we scoured the web for free vouchers which gave us another £20 off the Dixons price, so now a saving of £100. Next I went to the cashback site I tend to use, Freefivers (let me know if you want to join and I’ll refer you), which gave me 1.25% cashback with Dixons, about another £7. So far, I’d saved £107 off the price in the shop but then I thought - lets buy it using my American Express Platinum card which gave me a further 5% cashback, ~£35.

So, all in all - shopping around saved me over £140! Not bad for 10 minutes work online, particularly when you compare it to the time getting to and wandering round the shop.

Bargain!

When I travel on business I tend to take internet access in the hotel for granted nowadays - it doesn’t have to be wireless but it seems to be becoming the norm. But how much should it cost? I guess it depends on the class of hotel, but the £15 for 24 hours I’ve just been charged by the Holiday Inn Ipswich Orwell seems excessive - especially as my home broadband costs less than that for an entire month! The alternative was £6 for an hour or £75 for a week - not exactly a great choice. Most of the hotels I’ve stayed in recently have had free wireless (even some of the B&Bs I’ve stayed in have free wireless) so £15 for 24hrs is definitely a bit steep.

What do you think?

Just discovered that you can now choose to receive your TV license via email - so if you want to cut down on the paper you receive (yeah I know its only one piece a year in this case) then just go to the TV Licensing website and change your preferences so that you receive your TV license and any other communications via email rather than post.

I’ve already switched to online statements for my bank and online bills for my mobile phone, broadband/home phone, gas and credit card but still seem to be inundated with paperwork at home - roll on the day when I can access all my bills online from one place, see summaries of my expenditure and be advised of when I should switch to an alternate provider/package - I’ll keep dreaming

For the last 12 months or so there have been rumours about Microsoft buying Yahoo! and I even blogged about it back in May but today Microsoft have formally made a bid for Yahoo! valuing them at $44.6billion. There is no news yet from Yahoo! as to whether they are going to accept this offer but with the current forecast misses and predicted job loses at Yahoo! it is a definite possibility (even more consolidation as I predicted).

This could mean a serious shake up of internet services if it goes ahead as Microsoft and Yahoo! have a number of overlapping internet services - email, instant messaging, mapping, portal, search, etc. which I’m sure long term they would look to consolidate - a serious undertaking! I, like many internet users, will definitely be interested to see what they do with services such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.

If this does go ahead, watch out Google!

Just over a couple of weeks ago I wrote about my hopes for online services in 2008 and it looks like they may already be starting to come true. What I was looking for was data portability - the ability to be able to have a single login, a single profile, a single current status, a single set of contacts, a single set of photos, etc. etc. and be able to take them with me to whichever online service I wanted to use.

The DataPortability.org group was set up with pretty much exactly this in mind. I was a bit sceptical that it would come to anything initially as there were very few members but it looks like the big players are all joining up. So far there are representatives from Google, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr - an amazing feat to get them all at the same virtual table I’m sure.

The first thing to come out of this, I think, will be more widespread adoption of OpenID for user login, probably as it is the simplest. There are already a number of sites supporting it (1,2) and some big companies talking about introducing it (read about France Telecom). If you haven’t already got an OpenID, then go and find out about it as I’m sure you’ll need one soon

I’m hoping we see lots more from this group in the future.

Still don’t get this whole thing about data portability? Then check out this video which explains it all.

As 2008 beckons, I thought now would be a good time to think about what I’d like to see from online services in the next 12 months. For me at least, the answer is consolidation. The main online services I use today are: GMail (email), Google Reader (RSS reader), Google Maps (maps - obviously!), del.icio.us (bookmarks), Skype (phone calls), Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo (social networking), Dopplr and Plazes (where am I), MyMileMarker (fuel consumption tracking - yeah sad I know), Geni (Genealogy), Yahoo Messenger (instant messaging), plus with my new camera (Canon 400D which has arrived while writing this post ) I am sure Flickr (photos) will get added to this list.

Although each service is focussed on something different, all of these services have a number of things in common:

• A user id and password
• One or more profiles
• A contact list
• A page containing recent updates
• Current status

In 2008 I would like to think we will see consolidation in these areas so I can have a single user id and password, a single set of profiles (e.g. professional and personal) under my control which I can choose to share with online services (i.e. I enter my information once), a single contact list, and a portal containing all the recent updates from my friends who are using these, and other, online services.

Single User ID, Password and Profiles

OpenID (and OAuth) already go someway to addressing this (although you currently still need a user id and password as well). These are relatively new technologies but quickly being adopted - Plaxo, Dopplr, MyMileMarker and sites such as Technorati already support them and there are rumours Google are going to do so too. Come on Google, get your act together and support OpenID then the rest of the big players will no doubt follow suit

Contact List

Most online services nowadays provide a way of importing your contacts from your address book so you can at least find friends who may be using the online service in question, however this is typically only done when you sign up and so is static. Your contact list is dynamic, you meet new friends and colleagues all the time, so what you need is something that keeps your single contact list in sync with all of the online services you use. Plaxo goes some way to doing this and is my online service of choice, although it is far from perfect (see Andrew’s recent blog post and subsequent comments), and is not helped by Google and Facebook not opening up your contacts/friends list for syncing with other online services. If Plaxo could sync with GMail and Facebook, then I would pretty much have a single contacts list so come on Google and Facebook, open up and let people sync their contact data, it is theirs afterall!

A page containing recent updates

Plaxo Pulse, Google Reader, Facebook home page, etc. etc. are just some of the pages I visit regularly to look for information updates from sites I am interested in, and also information from my contacts. Plaxo Pulse does the best job of information from my contacts provided that person is already a Plaxo member - I can add a simple connection and then see the information the connection wants to share with me, e.g. blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos etc. The only problem is that it is down to the connection to define what things I can see, even if they are public. For instance, if friend A decides to share their blog posts with me but not their public Flickr photos, I won’t see those in Plaxo Pulse and have no way of adding this in even though I can easily go and view these directly at the site. Facebook’s home page is another solution, although this quickly gets polluted with junk such as advertising, zombie requests, etc. although I notice you can now customise this much more (as you can with Plaxo) which should get rid of much of this.

Current status

Many of these services also have a notion of current status, e.g. online/offline, your current location, a short message about what you are doing/feeling. Some of these are integrated, e.g. Plazes allows you to share your current location as your Skype status which is really useful although it would be nice to have a single online status message which I can update and then have the option to share my current location with people.

Here’s hoping we see some consolidation in these areas next year - just imagine how much time you would save having a single user id and password, a single set of profiles, a single contact list, a single page of recent updates and a single status message!

Let me know what you would like to see from online services in 2008.

If you have visited my blog over the last week or so you may well have noticed it has been hacked. Things started with an extra link appearing in my blogroll, which I removed, and then the front page got modified for a page advertising the hacker. Since then it has been down while my friend  Sean, who hosts my website, has been upgrading Wordpress to the latest version and  checking everything looks OK. Luckily it looks like the database was left untouched but it will definitely encourage me to ensure I am at the latest version of Wordpress. If you are using Wordpress you may also want to take a look at hardening your security.

A number of my friends and colleagues, like me, have started using Plaxo in order to keep some semblance of order over their social network of contacts (formerly your address book). As of a few months ago, the latest version of Plaxo has a feature called Pulse which allows you to share feeds from other online sites you might use such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Last.fm, shared items from Google Reader, etc. etc. as well as your own blog(s) with your network of contacts. Unlike Facebook, it is a) open and b) gives you the opportunity to share different feeds with different groups of people (e.g. you can choose to share your Flickr photos with your friends and your blog postings with just your business network). I find this a really useful feature, although most of my contacts don’t seem to use it - they obviously don’t have their finger on the Pulse! So, if you are a friend/contact of mine who uses Plaxo, go into Pulse and hook up some feeds so I can see what you are up to. If I am already in your address book you should see a number of my feeds depending on whether you are a business contact or friend. If you haven’t joined Plaxo already, I strongly advise you to check it out.

As of this week you can now add a lifestreaming widget (i.e. the aggregation of your Pulse feeds) to a widget which you can then display on your blog which some people may find useful.

Update on 23/10/07: The lifestreaming widget can be found here, and some other feeds people may be interested in which can be added include Jaiku and Twitter.

I noticed this week I’ve reached a milestone on LinkedIn - 100 contacts. OK, so I know lots of people have more than that, but I feel this is a pretty good number and all of the people I am connected to are people I have worked with, have studied with or people I have linked up with online through a variety of different mechanisms (not just anyone and everyone). Some other interesting stats about my connections:

• They come from a variety of places including the UK, US, Denmark, Japan, Ireland, Poland, Norway, Canada and Singapore
• Only 8 people in my network currently have more contacts than me
• The highest number of contacts of anyone in my network is currently 318!
• I have no contacts with surnames beginning with E, I, Q or Z
• I have 13 invites that have not been accepted

But is LinkedIn still important, with Facebook’s domination in the social networking space? I think so, yes.

Facebook for me is definitely the more social with LinkedIn being more for business contacts. Features such as the CV style profile, references, the LinkedIn toolbar and jobs insider and the question and answer system on LinkedIn are incredibly useful and don’t really have parallels in Facebook (yet). Yes - I have contacts in both and yes - it would be good to have a single set of connections (Plaxo helps me a bit here) but I still think there is a place for both. LinkedIn is adding new features (albeit slower than most people would like) such as photos and there is talk about an open API for people to contribute approved applications (hopefully none of the zombie/vampire/pirates style of app in Facebook) to the platform which will make things interesting. If any potential LinkedIn application developers are listening, a few features I would like to see are:

• A place to put certification details in your profile
• A way of displaying all contacts on a map
• Integration with a service like Dopplr so I can see where my contacts currently are

But anyway, I’ve reached 100 contacts (and I’ve even added a few more today!) and I plan to keep using LinkedIn for the foreseeable future, so if you know me and want to connect, send me an invite.