Wavyx

It’s kind of interesting how theses though times make Web 2.0 companies run towards economic reality. Twitter makes no exception, and after a couple of months (if not years), Twitter finally unveiled their “Business Model”. Too bad it’s FAKE (see update)…

You can refer to the article if you’re interested in their estimated pricing details. I’m more interested by the elements retained in this attempt of business model:

• Message Length: First you define a new online SMS service limited to 140 characters. Then you ask your users to pay for 5 to 360 extra characters.
• New Followers: You can now pay to get new random followers. This will probably up your natural web charisma, but for how long? If you discover you’re following some new stranger premium twitter account, what would be you reaction? I know mine… I’ll probably clean this new following users (the same way I maintain my own list to keep a good noise-to-signal ratio).
• Celebrity Followers: assuming celebrity check their accounts themselves, this could be interesting. As for private users, I’m concerned about being forced to follow new people. So who want to be read by Barack Obama ?
• Auto-Spell check: “free” features are always welcome except when you’ve got to pay for… Moreover what’s the point of spell check when you try to compress your ideas. Or if you have an “eagle account”, which means 250$/month,  I hope you check your tweet before hit the send button.
• Hours on recommended list: This is kind of obscure for me…and since I think people choose followers among friends, friends of friends, celebrities or specific blog writers. It is still nice to have advertising on “recommended lists” but what does it really worth?
• Twitter concierge: This means “you” are no more really talking to your community. However this can be really handy if you’ve got many tweets to handle. For 250$, I guess you’d probably find more than 5 hours in some outsourcing services.

This new Business Model from Twitter is definitely an interesting move to follow. But I have to confess I’m pretty skeptical since these enhancements come to a relatively high price, without mentioning the intrusion in your private followers. So let’s see how the Twitterers are reacting…

UPDATE:

This was a cool blog post joke, and I’m really busted   Anyway a couple of elements are really interesting like the one you pay to get new followers (even if not really viable). You can also see how people are waiting for some Twitter move. Anyway, IMHO, Twitter could propose increased message length for a small price. And I would definitely never pay to follow “celebrities”.

Last but not least, I think Twitter has a classic option to make money: insert random ads, or adtweets between your tweets with respect to your content/subject. Marketers would maybe pleased by such way to get intouch with customers. The only question is weither this adtweet would identified from you or from twitter service…

So If you read till this, just check “take me to the twittersphere” a real funny video about our Twitter deviance I really LOVE these twitter zombie addicts

I guess you’ve heard the negative buzz about Facebook and it’s new policy concerning your data (or their, who knows?). Marc Zuckerberg reacted to the “All your data are belong to us” rumor. You can read the original post here.

In a few words, he says “blah blah blah… it’s complicated”. No surprise! But reading the TechCrunch post about this new explanation to calm down the Facebook generation, I was a bit surprized by the metaphore used:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different

It sounds a bit easy of a comparison to me.
I send a photo to a friend, it’s right that my friend can keep this photo…  BUT

• Facebook itself is NOT my friend !
• Facebook is not 1 person I share something, it’s more about a company sharing with third parties.
• A friend is somewhat a local storage of this information. After I publish something on Facebook, who the hell knows where it can be…

IMHO, this is not a question about “let’s be more permissive, because it’s online media“, it is now time to define a basic rules set about online privacy. Facebook already benefited a lot of this ‘empty’ juridical place.

Tough times call for tough measures, and even if I understand Facebook need to secure it’s value, I think we should not tolerate such deviation in the use of personal data shared among friends.

As we are Friday 13th 2009, I thought it would be nice to give 13 advices on how to use Twitter. So here are 13 DO’s and DON’Ts to get the best from Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently examining ticketing systems. You know this thing who replies to you “You request #330248 has been submitted into our system,…. we’ll get back to you”. This may sound impersonal but Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll guess you already know Twitter (if not you can refer to Twitter for dummies). Initially, it is a social communication tool to answer the fundamental question: “What are you doing?”.  So you are not really convinced? I understand but there is actually a growing buzz about Twitter, its community and all the ecosystem or related tools. But let’s analyse the specifities of this new media.

A new media

When you read the homepage of Twitter.com, you may still wonder what so different about this communication tool. You can read more about “How Twitter was born“, but I’ll give here my vision of what is this media.

Let’s put it like that:  blog + instant messaging/sms + tribe = Twitter ! It sounds simple but Read the rest of this entry »

So I was trying to send a proper multi-recipient email from my Google Apps Gmail. All is configured to allow google to handle the mail (all the MX entries). I can succesfully send in and out mail “to:” my other addresses.  And yes it’s really easy for people who want to have their own emails.

But here comes the BUG: on a google apps domain (not gmail), if you try to send an email with  to: me@mydomain.com and bcc: allmyfriends@domains.com, the bcc adresses do not receive the mail !

I tried many times.  From and to my usual gmail account, all is working perfectly. But using google apps  gmail version (tried with 2 differente domains), I still cannot send email using the to/bcc mails to protect privacy (see gmail help).

I just filled the gmail support form, we’ll see how quickly google fixes that. (let’s hope I didn’t miss a small config step;)

UPDATE: still no answer from google, but it is not a bug, it’s a feature The mail only arrived 18 hours later ! (of course I was not so patient and I sent it through my own mail server)

Last week I tried to share a couple of posts with you… maybe too much ? For the first time, I even crossed the line of 1 post by day :s  But is it noise or signals, useless or interesting posts to you ?

I believe a blog is a two-way communication tool, so I would like to know your opinion about the content, shape, subjects, … I talk about.

What are you interested in? Which post do you skip reading? Are there specific topics you want to discuss here ?

Feel free to engage in this “white card” post, either in english or in french   and I will definitely get back to you.

SQLite is a well known alternative for developers wishing to provide a light database embedded with the application. Moreover SQLite is in the public domain and thus allows many developpers to rely on this SQL database engine.

For .Net developpers who needs a local databse, you can use SQLite in application developped in C# or VB.net by using one of the following wrappers:

1. System.Data.SQLite is the original SQLite database engine. It is a complete ADO.NET 2.0 provider and can be used as full replacement for the original sqlite3.dll. It has no linker dependency on the .NET runtime so it can be distributed independently of .NET.
2. Finisar.SQLite was the original ADO.NET Data Provider for accessing SQLite-Databases using the .NET-Framework. It is no longer under active development and has been replaced by System.Data.SQLite.
3. SQLite.NET wrapper  is a simple wrapper composed by a couple of classes in C# to allow access to SQLite databases. This is not an ADO.NET provider, but instead it provides a simple set of methods to access and retrieve data in a result set class.

I recommend this 2 quick tutorials to get started with SQLite in a .Net environment: SQLite on .NET – Get up and running in 3 minutes and Using sqlite with .NET.

Last but not least, if you need some visual database manager (GUI), you can try SQLite2008 Manager, SQLite Administrator or SQLiteTool. See also SQLite Trac for a more comprehensive list or this link.

When you use .Net, you sometimes need some old win32 api’s. Even if a managed environment is really appreciable and confortable, there are some part of windows you can’t access from C# or VB .net code. Then you often have no other choice than rely on old windows system calls.

This generally implies a lot of marshalling and interop to wrap unmanaged windows functions into nice managed .Net namespaces. And this is also true for mobile developpers interacting with Windows CE dll, see Interop for .Net Compact Framework.

I just discovered that  a couple of Win32 functionnalities are already bundled in the Microsoft.Win32 namespace of the .Net framework.

Another great resource for COM interop is the P/Invoke wiki !

And for those who are (still) more familiar with the old school windows functions, you can refer to this map to find your way in the .Net environment.

Among the devoxx 2008 university slides, you can find a Groovy/Grails presentation. This document contains interesting references:

• Griffon is a Grails like application framework for developing desktop applications in Groovy. You can begin with the quick start guide.
  
• Gradle is a build system like Ant, Maven or Ivy but trying to get the best from all. It supports multi-project build and  dependency management. And you still can use you old Ant tasks.
• Easyb is Behavior Driven Development framework (BDD). It uses a specification based Domain Specific Language (DSL).  The main idea is to keep really close to the business needs all along the development process. With this tool you’ll have a readable documentation AND a unit-testing all-in-one. You may start by reading first this tutorial.
• Compass is an open source project built on top of Lucene, to simplify the integration of search capabilities in your java applications .

And of course you can still refer to the Groovy and Grails websites.