dot.life

SXSW news round-up

• Darren Waters
• 15 Mar 09, 15:11 GMT

Here are some of the product announcements and trends emerging at SXSW09:

Facebook launches Connect for iPhone

The giant social network has been working hard to leverage the power of its 175 million strong user base outside of its walled garden.

Facebook Connect allows third party websites to bake in the profile and friend lists of Facebook users and now it has been extended to the iPhone.

At launch 9 applications are currently live in the iTunes app store,which leverage Facebook Connect.

One of the first frms to take advantage is a British company, called Playfish. They have found enormous success releasing games on the Facebook platform.

I spoke to them at SXSW and they explained that the size of the Facebook community and the simplicity of distribution made the social network really attractive to them.

They now have more than 50 million registered players on Facebook and passed the four million daily active players mark quite recently.

No wonder then that they are keen to now extend the gaming experience from the browser to the mobile space, with the iPhone.

Other applications to take use Facebook Connect for iPhone include:

* Who has the Biggest Brain by Playfish
* Movies by Flixster
* iBowl and Agency Wars by SGN
* Urbanspoon
* Tap Tap Revenge 2 by Tapulous
* Whrrl by Pelago
* Live Poker by Zynga
* Binary Game by SayEight

Cnet's report on the launch, and the mobile social networking aspect, is here.

Twitter made simpler with WeFollow

While Twitter has been the communications medium of choice at this year's SXSW it has been difficult to sort the signal from the noise because almost everybody here is using the service and there has been a flood of "sxsw" hastags.

WeFollow is a Twitter directory from Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, wihich aims to make finding people, trends, categories a lot simpler on Twitter.

It is completely user-powered, with filters dictated by the number of people who use a particular hash tag.

You can add the tags which relate to you by sending a Tweet to @wefollow with three different hashtags - and that will insert yourself in the directory.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand has more.

Friends on Fire

Yahoo is extending the usefulness of Fire Eagle, its location awareness tool, by building an application for Facebook that allows friends to share their location.

"There are services that are more immediate than Fire Eagle, but as we get more apps, the value of updating once and having it shared across all your services is more important," Fire Eagle creator Tom Coates told Cnet.

Of course, Friends on Fire uses Yahoo Maps technology to plot locations of friends. That's fine if you are in the US, but their UK mapping data is a long way behind Google's.

• Permalink
• Comments

All the fun of the Dorkbot fair

• Darren Waters
• 15 Mar 09, 06:13 GMT

Stumbling into the Dorkbot expo at South by SouthWest is a little like that scene in Blade Runner at the home of the toy maker J.F. Sebastian.

A jumble of technology, from robots to sculpture, children's musical instruments to 1970s synthesisers it had the air of unearthed future aracana to it.

Dorkbot is a global phenomenon - it is a loose gathering of artists, engineers, musicians and hackers.
Their collective tagline is "People doing strange things with electricity."

In a small tent outside the main conference centre at Austin, perhaps the strangest thing with electricity was local music experimenters ArcAttack.

The group uses Tesla Coils, which generate flashes of electrical lightning bolts which also produce a square sound wave. That soundwave is fed by fibre optic cable into a midi controller, producing a sound not unlike the analogue synthesisers of the 1970s.

The group played the Doctor Who and Star Wars themes using the Tesla Coils, with percussion delivered by a series of robotic drums.

It was the undoubted highlighting of Dorkbot 2009 at SXSW, which also featured handbuilt synthesisers, and a band called Painful leg Injuries which uses a Nintedo Wiimote controller to play music.

After a day spent in panels musing the future of social networks and the rise of e-mail 2.0 a little light music powered by lightning bolts was very much needed.

• Permalink
• Comments

Twitchhiker heads for celebrity status

• Darren Waters
• 15 Mar 09, 05:15 GMT

Twitter might not be everyone's cup of tea - indeed there are complaints that it is going into information overload here at SXSW - but one journalist has used it to help him travel thousands of miles in just 14 days.

Paul Smith is the Twitchhiker and has used Twitter to travel from his home to Newcastle to Austin, Texas, only by connecting to people on the messaging service and using it to leverage people's generosity and good will.

At the start of March Smith left Newcastle with only a ferry ticket to Amsterdam in his hand - and that was arranged through Twitter.

He cannot plan more than three days in advance and has to leave each location within 48 hours of arriving.

His plan is to try and make it to the opposite point on the globe from his home. As his website says: "New Zealand is the place closest to the opposite point on the planet to my house, so that should be my intended destination.

"Actually, the closest landmass is at 52.546° S 169.173° E, an island barely five miles wide that's so insignificant that Google can't be bothered to name it."

After a few days zig-zagging around the low countries he managed to get a flight to New York and has since endured a number of road trips through the American mid west before making it to South by SouthWest in Austin, Texas.

He is raising money for Charity: Water as he goes, but he told me this was as much about 'the experience' as it was anything else.

When I tracked him down - which isn't hard as he is tagged with GPS and you can follow him on Google Latitude - he had just heard that he was going to be interviewed by Good Morning America on ABC TV in the US and that he had secured a flight to San Francisco.

"I'll probably hang around the West Coast for a while before I can get a flight to New Zealand," he said.

For a man who has lived and breathed planes, trains and automobiles for the last 14 days he is in fine fettle and enormously good spirits.

After the Good Morning America interview is screened tomorrow he will probably be a celebrity in the US and I wouldn't bet against him reaching that small island off New Zealand ahead of the 30 day limit.

• Permalink
• Comments