Twitter Annotation Proposal – Image
This is a proposal for a twitter annotation that I hope to be blessed by both the development community and twitter itself.
Image Namespace
Images are something commonly shared throughout twitter. Something that would be fantastically idealistic would be embedding image data into twitter annotations.
Due to constraints, images should be resized to a lower-quality “preview”. Possibly VGA or so? A link to a privately hosted image should also be available.
Using the current preview information supplied by the twitter development team, I imagine that it would go something like this:
"image": { "preview": "data here.. base64 etc.", "preview_encode": "base64", // Or whatever else floats your boat. "bin" or "binary" for raw data. "full_src": "http://example.org/link/to/image.jpg" }
Any additional thoughts on other information that should be included? Maybe a title and description, or is that not needed? Please, leave all of your thoughts and ideas in the comments!
Using Google Voice with Outlook’s Dialer
Microsoft Outlook has this very nifty feature where you can connect your computer to the phone line and use your Outlook Contact List to instantly dial someone’s number. Of course, when they created this they needed to add support for using a calling card, as long distance in the same country hadn’t even begun to be free.
Now if you use Google Voice, you can use this to your advantage with the simple addition of just a few seconds to the call.
Continue Reading for Instructions on how to Outlook up to dial through Google Voice
Features Wanted in Skype
I realized there are some neat little features I would love to see in Skype (while playing around with Microsoft Outlook and getting it to call out using Google Voice, I’ll blog about that next).
Calls Out Using Modem
Doesn’t Skype do some fantastic Skype-Out thing where you can even use a specific number as a calling card and call out using it? A whole crapload of notebooks and desktops still ship with modems, why not utilize it! If you don’t have a connection to the net (or you’re just crazy), you could call out using a Skype-Out Call-In Number! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?
Calls Out with Calling Card through Modem
Yeah, yeah, companies don’t like competition or whatnot, but if the previous is supported, why not spice it up a little and allow us to use a different calling card through the settings? That would allow Google Voice users to make outbound calls using Google Voice through Skype, and that would just be AWESOME.
Answering Calls Through Modem
Is your phone ringing? Yeah, don’t you wish you could pick it up using Skype? All it has to do is learn to speak through the modem and BABOOSH, you can now answer your landline ON SKYPE (GOOGLE VOICE MAKES THIS MORE AWESOME).
Contact Synchronization with Google
Come ON. EVERYTHING needs this.
Why SuperTweets won’t kill URL Shorteners
Now, the title of this blog post makes it sound like I’m going to write an essay about why SuperTweets (and the probability of them having a URL metadata for tweets) will not be killing URL Shorteners like j.mp and bit.ly anytime soon.
1) URL Shorteners Keep You Safe
One of the things URL shorteners do now is they keep you safe from malicious websites. You can preview the site you are visiting, and if its determined to be delicious the short URL will either be deleted or blocked or a warning will be shown, letting you know it is no longer safe to visit that URL.
2) URL Shorteners are Branded
All I really have to say here is “Bit.ly Pro” URL Shorteners now have custom branding, so it makes it even easier to send people to your website or promote your brand on twitter by including the link in the text.
3) URL Shorteners are Easy to Remember
When they are used correctly. Services like bit.ly allow you to give a custom name to your short link. This is especially useful in media such as Television or Print: http://j.mp/cnn-transgender is much easier to remember and type than www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/04/14/transgender.irpt/index.html?hpt=C1
With even just these three simple reasons in mind, it is very clear to me that URL shorteners will not be dying anytime soon, no matter how much metadata you can attach to tweets. I’m not even sure they’re bad for the internet, anymore.
Oh Apple, You Amuse Me
Apple iPhone Game Center Icon vs. Microsoft Store Logo:
Oh Apple, has anyone told you lately that you’re CRAZY?
Making Google Analytics Work in XHTML
I was moving my website, Google Voice for Outlook, over from HTML5 to XHTML5 today, and as soon as I did the basic content negotiation filters in PHP so that it would send the appropriate headers if the client supported XHTML as well as only outputting the <?xml if the client supported XHTML, I checked my developer tools to find a JavaScript error. It was Google Analytics, of course. document.write doesn’t exist in XHTML, after all.
The fix was simple, replace the current four line inclusion code with:
<script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); var script = document.createElement("script"); script.src = gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js"; script.type = "text/javascript"; document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script); </script>
This will work fine, unless of course you have no head tag. In which case you should replace getElementsByTagName(“head”) with getElementsByTagName(“html”).
HTML5 Being a Pain in My Ass Again
This time in regards to the highly acclaimed and very well received <video> element.
On my website, Google Voice for Outlook I use the <video> tag to show a demonstration of the system working. I don’t currently have a way to encode in ogg, and/or am too lazy too, so I decided that if the web browser didn’t support h264 video, it’d fall back to the YouTube video. The expected result (from me, of course) was that if it can’t display the video, it’d display the YouTube. Apparently though, in FireFox it does not fall back to the YouTube video and instead just displays a gray box, and the fault this time doesn’t lie with FireFox, but with the standard:
Content may be provided inside the video element. User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browsers informing them of how to access the video contents.
Ugh! This means that if you want to use <video> on any website, ever, properly, you’re going to have to encode it in both h264 and Theora until the industry decides on a set standard.
Purely Atrocious.
Beautiful New YouTube Video Player
I was going through my YouTube subscriptions when a video from BGSU popped up, and it struck me as odd because it had a different and much, much more beautiful video player. At the moment, it seems all videos from BGSU are showing up using this player (on their individual video page). From what I can tell, this seems to be the normal for all YouTube EDU videos. I hope that soon we’ll get to see these for all videos.
The Very Best Thing about Unixkcd
guest@xkcd:/$ make me a sandwich
What? Make it yourself.
guest@xkcd:/$ sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.