SwerveBlog

A friend of mine has just completed some design work on a site Shuddervision. He’s pretty good on his design (although I’m still ribbing him to this day about his explanation of CMS meaning ‘control management system’ come on Tom, get it fixed!).

Anyway, the video on the homepage of that site reminded me of this oldie but goodie (well, it’s not that old.. but it is good):

And as it happened, I needed something to distract me from twitter (now there’s a thought eh?!)

Google Moderator Logo

This was a bit out of the blue, but for the first time in ages I clicked on the ‘Everyone’ stream in Twitter, and the second tweet on the screen was this from Brit. Turns out I caught that tweet 22 seconds after she posted, and as far as I know it was the first announcement of Google’s ‘Moderator’.

The Appspot Moderator is a place to ask Google Engineers a question directly, and there’s a voting system in place but I’m not really sure why. The help doesn’t actually say very much. But, you do get to ask any question you like of Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, and eight other Googlers.

Stupidly (?), I asked a serious question (partly based on something Rand wrote a while back, and partly simply to see what kind of response we’ll get through this new forum - and it is a question a few people will be interested in getting an answer to). TBH, Vanessa Fox’s question was much smarter.

You can also ask questions to world leaders (living or not) or suggest Android Apps. Does that indicate there won’t be many answers forthcoming? I guess we’ll have to see.

I did, of course, tweet this find out but maybe because of the time, or maybe because I don’t have that many followers, it only got a few clicks.

I’ve since found this post on the App Engine Blog, but I was a little surprised it wasn’t ranking top for [google moderator].

So this was my question - vote me up!!

My Google Moderator Question to Matt Cutts

I’ll be interested to know what you think…

Not ten minutes ago I was playing Scrabulous on Facebook, something I do every now and again to flex my mental muscles, get my head round some general wordiness, and, of course, whup my friends.

I’m sure most people are familiar with the scrabble game that’s taken the FB by storm since the web game was ported onto the platform. Unsurprisingly it’s caused a bit of a stir with the 2 major rights holders (Mattel and Hasbro, in different parts of the world), and their online sub-licensees, EA and Real Networks (again, for different parts of the world). Well now there’s a real storm kicked up as Hasbro / EA have forced the issue and had Scrabulous removed from Facebook.

This has all happened, as far as I can tell, in the last hour or so. I played moves in two games in that last hour, and then within minutes of patting myself on the back for being rather canny there was no trace of the game on Facebook at all. Even a search for the application returned a ‘page not found’ error, although very quickly there have been more Scrabulous support groups spring up and even a ‘Save Scrabulous’ application has appeared.

I’m pretty annoyed, although I guess it was in the post. I wasn’t aware that EA were developing an online version of Scrabble with the intention of making a social networking (i.e. Facebook) version, but apparently it’s already available. And they know they can’t compete fairly with Scrabulous’s half a million regular daily users… but of course they don’t have to.

Supposedly the action was taken in America to protect the US and Canadian rights that Hasbro and EA hold, but it hasn’t taken long for it to filter through to the UK. TechCrunch called it vapourware in an earlier article this month which leads into this article on today’s events in the Washington Post, and twitter is currently alight with chatter.

To add fuel to the fire, the official version of the game has been hacked and is inaccessible at time of writing. You can find out a bit more of the conversation about this over at Digg, but this has definitely caused problems for the official rights holders in North America at a time when I’m sure they were planning on making a few converts out of moping Scrabulous fans.

As the EA version of Facebook Scrabble is only available in North America, which means that folks in the UK (and other parts of the world) can’t play their mates across the pond anymore, there’s going to be further backlash.

There is a Mattel version called Scrabble Worldwide now available on FB also, but this specifically states that it is not available to users in the USA or Canada, so the same problem exists there too. I’m not sure whether Hasbro, Mattel, EA, and Real will get their acts together and sort out some way of linking the games together - but of course there’s all sorts of underlying issues like advertising revenues to get in the way of that so even if it could happen it’s probably going to be a long way off.

Scrabulous.com is still up and running at the moment, and it will be interesting to see how long that lasts and whether there’s a mass migration out of Facebook just for people to play - after all, there’s no reason why you can’t have another tab open in FireFox.

I guess I’ll have to figure something out with my regular opponents, and maybe even revisit the game in the real world again (you can’t beat the deluxe edition board). I might even buy some of these 1337 tiles to make the real game a bit more net-geek-y…

When did this happen? Well, hey say it’s a month early and it’s also called Tyner.

Seeing as it was so painless to install, I’m quite impressed. But then, I’m not running any fancy stuff, so I guess you should expect that. Now I’ll have to go look under the hood.

The other day I was idling around the net (as idling is one of my most important pastimes, but more on that later) and I came across an offer to test out Stitcher.

An interesting idea, having some newfangled web service read headlines from TechCrunch or other big and important sites. I can’t remember where I saw the offer, and the service is in beta at the mo, but the simple and straight talking advertising messages and a decent basic premise gave me enough impetus to give it a try.

I’m sure there are other ways to get content read to you, but I’ve never tried and to be honest I’ve never thought I had the need. Having the service ’stitch’ the content you want together, and learn what you like as you go along seemed pretty advanced or at least pretty cool.

(Pic Courtesy of Mike Kline).

Overall I’d say it’s good at what it does, and there’s certainly vast potential in some areas, especially as more and more places either do content partnership deals or simply put their content out in their own audio RSS. The ‘learning’ stitching thing could get pretty intense too, with the right code monkeys working on it.

My problem: I prefer reading. Maybe that makes me a throwback or an aging hippy (I wouldn’t argue with you if you called me that anyway). I can see how it’s great for people to get headlines while they’re driving into the office, they get a bit of a headstart maybe, but I don’t drive (tank t’ lord). And when I’m reading or working I like to listen to music.