Frothy Concepts Archives - Page 12 of 15

Reaching Theoretical Broadband Link Speeds (in the US)

3 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I’ve just spent 48 hours “beating myself up” over the Comcast (cable) high-speed Internet system here in San Francisco. I say beating myself up because I was so convinced the problem was Comcast that I spent hours on the phone with them, but ultimately most of the problems were in my own network. [Not all, but most.]

In US cities, the license to install and operate cable television networks is a city-granted monopoly. When cable TV was first being installed, each city opened a bidding process, and cable operators bid to be granted the franchise to install and operate the cable system in that particular city. If they won it, they then had exclusive rights. So in San Francisco, we have telephones provided by AT&T (which originally was Pacific Bell Telephone Company) and we have cable TV provided by ComCast (only – no other provider). Satellite TV lies outside this structure and is available everywhere on a competitive basis, but that’s a different issue.

Comcast also delivers Internet connectivity (and telephone service) via their cables. And that’s the rub. [Read more…]

Twitter “verified accounts” coming soon

14 June, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Good to see this … Twitter will be offering “verified” accounts soon.

We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months.

We ran into a problem with an account purporting to be the office of the Dalai Lama [OHHDL] in 2008. The account looked like it might be real, but turned out to be someone impersonating the office. But it wasn’t exposed until more than 10,000 people had started following the Twitter account.

This move on Twitter’s part will be welcome.

Use OpenID on your WordPress blog!

12 June, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I like OpenID^[1] although I think it’s more complex than most people can handle — and that’s a big hurdle. OpenID gives visitors to your blog or web site a chance to log in (create an account on your site) using their login information from a participating OpenID web site (like gmail). In other words, they don’t have to create a separate account at your blog – they just reuse their Yahoo (or gmail or other^[2]) account. In theory this should make it easier to remember account names and passwords because you just use one account to log in at many sites.Ever since OpenID was announced (2005) I’ve loved the idea. There are OpenID providers, and then there are other sites that allow users to utilize OpenID for the creation of accounts.

[Read more…]

I’ve lost my identity- would you please look under the couch?

21 May, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Where’s my identity? Well, of course, it’s my brain and body, to be sure, and all of that stuff I’ve done during my lifetime, and all the connections I’ve made, but then again, my personal data is all over the place so who knows how much of me might be scattered around in many places?

The thought occurred because I got out of my car a few weeks ago without turning it off, and when I returned to it several hours later, it was still on.^[1] Nobody had messed with it, but it had remained there at the curb completely “on” and drivable. My “identity” as far as the car was concerned was the RFID “key” that I was carrying with me.

Where else have we embedded or attached our identities to physical objects these days? [Read more…]

Where are your Twitter followers?

20 May, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

Robert Scoble just posed this question, “Someone just asked me if there’s a good way to get a holistic look at Twitter or friendfeed followers. I don’t know of any. Do you?”

He was talking about their geographical locations. Among the answers, one person pointed at a Yahoo Pipes application that puts pins (each corresponding to one follower) onto a world map. I‘ve written about Yahoo Pipes before — it’s a web service that lets you “visually” create an algorithm that reads RSS feeds and manipulates them. Pipes can filter, put together, count, limit and obviously do a lot more. I have created a Pipes application that filters several RSS feeds and then makes them available for insertion on a blog.

[Read more…]