Google closes down Lively

I had reviewed the new virtual world "Lively" introduced by Google this summer. They had introduced it as a sort of competitor to Second Life.

Apparently Google shuts it down at the end of this year due to insufficient demand for this service. Well, maybe we have too many virtual worlds.

Whack the Gopher or Smack the Toon

Whack the Gopher on the head

Most of you have probably played a game at amusement parks where you whacked a mole or a gopher or a similar animal with a plastic hammer on the head as it came out of the ground. Wack a Gopher is a simulation of that game on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Of course your finger on the touchscreen becomes the hammer.

I found the touch functionality quite clumsy in the game. You have to touch and press quite hard and you miss a lot of gophers that are far out in the distance.

Grade : * (out of 5 *)






Smack the Toon

Same principle. However, the touch functionality is used much better in this one. It is also possible to use the multi-touch with more than one finger. A light touch works.

Grade : *** (out of 5 *)

More iPhone / iPod Touch Games

Video Poker

iPhone/iPod Touch has started to get lots of card games, Video Poker by Mobilityware being one. It is a very simple variant of the poker game. You start with 5 cards and bet an amount. Once your cards are open, you decide to hold some cards or replace some. You have to get a pair of jacks or better to get money equal or above your bet. A royal flush gives 250 times your bet, whereas three of a kind gives 3 times your bet.

Quite simple and boring game, in my opinion.

Grade : ** (out of 5 *)

Omni Nom Nom
The classic Snake game rendered for the iPhone. I had first played the Snake game on the old Apple II (many years ago).

You use (virtual) buttons (shown by leaves) on the screen to navigate your snake and eat yummy food, causing your snake to get larger and consequently more difficult to navigate. You can select from three difficulty levels and four game area sizes.

The last size selection is "Progressive" in which the size of the snake is determined with respect to the level you are in, and starts with a big size.

I found the touch controls quite usable, however, sometimes I tended to touch a bit earlier or later, unlike playing with the keyboard. All in all, a good implementation of the classical Snake.

Grade : *** (out of 5 *)

Blackjack

Simple Blackjack game from MobilityWare. You play against a dealer with a nice graphics interface and simple buttons. Simple but boring.

Grade : ** (out of 5 *)

My Favorite iPhone/iPod Touch application : Tap Tap Revenge

Lately there has been a flurry of music-related games, notably Rock Band and Guitar Hero. These games are based on the player performing along with the display where notes flow on the screen and the player has to press the right notes at the right time to get points. Of course you have a guitar accessory, depending on the game and the console you are using. The next version of Rock Band adds drums and other instruments, enabling multiple players to jam as a band. The games are incredibly entertaining, and it is possible to download new music (converted to the game format) so that the game is never boring.

It is difficult to imagine something similar on a tiny iPhone/iPod Touch. However, Tap Tap Revenge by Tapulous is an amazing application that uses the same concept. You try to catch balls (representing notes) as they move over three vertical lines by tapping your iPhone / iPod Touch screen exactly as they are passing the line. This is easier if you listen to the song and follow the rhythm. You get the maximum point if you tap exactly at the right time, and less if you are slightly off. If you get the right timing over and over, you can get multipliers, thereby getting more points.

The new version (1.2) has introduced the 8x multiplier, which you get by getting 50 notes in a sequence right. The screen changes with larger balls and a totally blue background. You lose this mode if you miss even one note.

Your scores can be submitted to the Tapulous Web page, which holds a Leaderboard for each individual songs. The songs are usually catchy, sometimes jazzy and mostly electronic or dance. Every week new songs are loaded, and there are competitions held irregularly.

There are four levels of complexity, and the last two levels are pretty difficult. You usually have to use two fingers at a time.

It is amazing to see how such a small (9 Mbyte) application can be so good and entertaining. I think PC and Mac developers have to learn something from iPhone/iPod Touch developers.

iPod/iPhone become amazing music devices

The iPhone/iPod Touch have been used for many things, including listening to music that you store on your device. However, you have only limited space on your device, depending on which version you have (max. 32 GBytes for the iPod Touch and 16 GBytes for iPhone). Many people have music libraries much bigger than these limits.

Up to now, the solution was to keep playlists for the iPhone/iPod Touch and store only music on the playlist, and vary it when you get bored.

Now a new application brings an amazing capability. Simplify Media is a cool application that lets you stream your iTunes (or WinAmp, if you prefer that) library to another device/computer (e.g. your iPhone/iPod Touch) over WiFi (for iPod/iPhone), EDGE (for iPhone) or 3G (for iPhone). Suddenly your limits are gone, you can listen to all of your library remotely on your device. You can even invite other people to listen, so that they can listen to your library. You can also stream music from your music folder or WinAmp folder if you use that application.

This would also work if you are away from home and using another computer with an Internet connection, so you can reach your favorite music.

I just can not imagine how amazing it will be to use this application. I tired out the beta version on my iPod Touch and it worked like a charm. Of course you should have a fast network, I used a 1Mbit ADSL line with WiFi and it worked fine. It takes a few seconds to buffer in the beginning, then it works. You can also see the album cover, get information about the artist, even see the lyrics to the song that's playing.

One of the best iPhone/iPod Touch apps....

More Virtual Worlds : SmallWorlds

After using SecondLife for more than a year now (very infrequently) and trying out Google's new Virtual World Lively (negative review here), I had a referemce to a new Virtual world called SmallWorlds in GeekBrief.

It is a Beta site today and there is no indication of when it can be released in its final form.

It runs on a normal browser.

You select an avatar and customize it. It is much less customizable than Second Life, but it is OK.

You then select your personal space and start buying stuff. However, you are asked to perform some missions, which include going to a shop, buying a chair, getting back to your home and placing the chair there.

After the basic missions are done, you can just travel around, or you can do some more advanced missions. Actually I like the missions part, since Second Life gets boring after the first few times, these social missions are fun. I played pool with another person (very poor performance!)

I did some decoration on my place, then I was sent to Game Planet to excel in gaming, and so on.

It looks like fun. User Interface is simple, but it looks promising. For some reason everybody logged on were Brazilian, but I guess it depends on the time of the day.

iPhone/iPod Touch Games

There are lots of free and charged games released for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I tried out some of these games on my iPod Touch.

Advent

This is basically the original text Adventure game originally developed for mainframes. If you are an old-timer and a Unix/VMS guru at his prime, you would have played this. You are usually in open forest, or surrounded by hills.

It is a simple, good implementation of the original game, and I enjoyed it as much as I did in the past! (Yes, I may be old-fashioned in certain areas, I also listen to Bach).


iMaze
Simple maze game. You try to lead a metal ball through a maze into its target. You do this by tilting your iPod / iPhone so as to guide the ball, using motion sensors in the equipment. Simple and unassuming, but OK. There is a Simple mode and a Complex mode that you can select.

pearMe

This is a simple photo matching/memory game. You turn over covered photos to reveal two identical pictures, in whcih case these are taken out. You can customize the number of pairs you want in the game. You can also import your own pictures from the Photo library to use in the game.

Meaningless iPod Touch applications....

Once I had my iPod Touch updated, I started checking the applications I had downloaded. I guess it is the same for every platform, there are killer applications and there are the meaningless ones. Here are some I really did not like.

Alarm (Free version)

As far as I understand, this is an application that sounds an alarm if you drop the iPhone out of your pocket, since it would detect the rotation (maybe more than once) that results from the fall. It's meaningless for iPod Touch, of course, since it has no speaker.


Bubbles

You can make bubbles by dragging your fingers on the screen and pop bubbles by tapping on them. So... The game info says it is a nice distraction for toddlers. I am sure you would not want them to put an iPod to their mouth, which is what they will do once the distraction is gone.

More Twittering on your iPod Touch

The second Twitter-related Application release for the iPhone/iPod Touch is Twittelator. Although some of the screens look a bit cramped, this App has an advantage over Twitterific.

It can show different groups of tweets like Friends, Everyone, Favorites and so on. It has an Alarm feature which is supposed to take your location and let you write an alarm message and publish it along with your location. A bit dubious whether this can actually be used during an alarm situation.

I might actually use a combination of the two applications, since Twitterific just looks cooler but has less features, whereas Twittelator has more features, but does not look as good. In either case it is now much easier to tweet once you have WiFi to use with your iPod Touch.

Google taking on Second Life : Lively

Google has released their new 3-D chat environment called Lively. Some have compared it to Second Life. The comparison couldn't have been more absurd.

Second Life is a complete virtual environment you travel in with your avatar and interact with physical objects. You can buy virtual land, start a business, earn money and do a lot of the things you do in real life in a virtual environment. Lots of businesses have established their virtual counterparts in Second Life and are using it as another platform for promoting their products or brand.

Lively is not more than a 3-D chat environment. You can create rooms and populate them with objects, but these rooms stay independent, so they are not part of a connected set of land as in Second Life. I found the movement to be very awkward, the 3-D model primitive and the overall business case very weak. I don't know what Google envisions Lively to be in the near future, but it did not appeal to me at all.

Twittering on your iPod Touch

Twitter is the new Web 2.0 tool to do "microblogging" namely sharing short (limited to 140 characters) information messages with friends, family and other acquaintances if necessary. You can do searches on twitter messages through summize, which has recently been acquired by Twitter.

It is possible to SMS your twitter posts from your cellphone, but now there is a cooler way.

iPhone 2.0 update has brought to iPhone/iPod Touch several Twitter-compatible applications.

Twitterific is the first one I tried. It has a simple interface, but now it is much easier to twitter using your iPhone/iPod Touch via WiFi or 3G network. It is possible to see user information and send replies/messages to individual users in your Twitter list. it is not possible however to see who follows you or who you are following, as well as the general Twitter flow ("Everyone").

The Premium version sells for 7.99 euros in Europe and does not show advertisements in your Twitter list, as well as having other themes.

It also has a MacOS X version if you do not like the way Twitter can be used for microblogging, but you need a Twitter account in either case.

Remote Control Your Music

One of the new applications that came with the new iPhone 2.0 update is Remote by Apple. This essentially converts your iPhone or iPod Touch to a remote control device through which you can control your iTunes and consequently your music collection. When you start Remote on your iPod, it asks you to configure the music library you want to control and gives you a password to use.

You enter the password on iTunes and will be rewarded with a full control of iTunes. If you select and play a song on your iPod/iPhone, iTunes starts playing that.

Ona of the coolest (and simplest) applications that I could imagine.

The iPhone/iPod Touch Revolution

Everybody on the net seemed to be talking about the 2.0 iPhone update this last week. Since I was not yet planning to get an iPhone, I was not really paying that much attention, although I knew that this would also bring applications to iPod Touch so that you could extend it beyond what Apple gives you.

Thursday afternoon there was suddenly a flurry activity on the Net referring to the App Store. Apple wanted the customers in New Zealand to be able to download iPhone applications at the same time as the iPhone was released for New Zealand, so the App Store was suddenly reachable on iTunes, although not directly. It only appeared if you went to the iTunes Store and searched for any iPhone applications. It was indeed possible to download iPhone and iPod Touch applications to iTunes. I dived into the App Store and started downloading iPod Touch applications, although there was no sign of any updates yet.

On Friday, just before the U.S.West Coast launch of iPhone (namely around 5 p.m. here in Europe) the iTunes Store servers started to hiccup. It was no longer possible to connect to the iTunes Store (not in Europe and not in the States).

Friday afternoon and evening the stores came back on and I started reading in Twitter and Summize people reporting their experience with their updates. However, there was no news of the iPod Touch update. iTunes started referring to the update, but it was still not there.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. in Europe, the location of the iPod Touch update was leaked. It was available in three pieces of RAR files, but soon enough Apple found out and remove it from their servers. There were also reports of failing updates, so I decided to wait for the official version.

Finally the iPod Touch update was available around 6 o'clock Saturday morning. I was delighted but I had to sleep after staying up all that time.

Saturday afternoon I paid around 8 euros to buy, download and install the iPod Touch update. We had two iPods at home, but I only had to pay for one. The update gave me a chance to backup my existing content on the iPod. This was done pretty quickly (most likely because I was synchronizing the iPod with content on my laptop, and it did not necessarily have to backup the actual content physically but just make a note of what was being sychronized). It then put the iPod to its factory settings, then started restoring the content. This took some time, around three hours.
I then had to synchronize again, including the Applications to be synchronized. Since most iPhone/iPod Touchapplications are quite small, this was a quick process. However, I received some error messages for some applications, namely Graffitio, Light and iFob. When I re-synchronized, I was able to load these applications as well.

So, I was finally in action late Saturday evening. Now it's time to look at these terrific apps....

Being Part of a Flock

One of the main features of Web 2.0 is the importance given to social networking and other dynamic ways of communication with individuals who have some commonality with yourself. That's why today's teens are running multiple services at once, such as using Facebook and MySpace for social networking, Twitter and FriendFeed for sharing short messages and status updates and using Flickr and Picasa to share photographs. Each of these applications have their own strengths and weaknesses.

However, when you have too many of these applications running, you have to constantly check all of their web portals to get a complete picture of your entourage.

Flock looks like a browser at first sight, but it can be more accurately described as a meeting place for all Web 2.0 applications. You can customize it so that it can get feeds from many popular Web 2.0 applications.

The sidebar can show information from a variety of services including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Flickr and YouTube. It has support for blogging directly in the browser for blogging services of Blogger, BlogSome, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Xanga and even self-hosted blogs. You can get feeds from many news or RSS services, share photos with PhotoBucket, Picasa and Piczo.

Of course we should not forget the fact that Flock is also a regular browser. It is based on the Mozilla common code and I did not see any major problems with it.

I think this idea of an "information hub" that puts together all your sites and the information coming from those sites in a configurable format will develop further. Although Flock 2.0 is still in Beta stage, you can download 1.2 if you don't like beta versions. It has been ranked #6 in PC World's "Best Applications of 2008" evaluation.

Web Site Analytics. SiteMeter and Woopra

I have been blogging for about 2 years, and the number of my blogs has increased steadily. My preferred tool for blogging has been Blogger (I know others prefer WordPress). In order to be able to follow the demographics of blog readers, I have been using SiteMeter.

SiteMeter is a Web-based tool that helps you to analyze the visits to your web page, and it works with blogs as well. You create an account for each web site and add a simple script to your web site/blog background. The number of visitors to your web site will be shown in a small rectangle (the style of which can be modified).

You can click on this rectangle and see the latest visits on your web site. You can see the IP addresses and sometimes the domain names of the computers, but not the actual e-mails or identity of the visitors. You can get different statistics and breakdown according to their locations or other criteria.

I had seen the reference to Woopra in the wonderful GeekBrief podcast when I was trying to clear my backlog of Geek Briefs. It was promoted as a Web Site Analysis tool, and Cali was impressed by the features shown by the developers.

I downloaded the beta version of the application from the web site and installed it on my Dell XPS M1730 laptop running Windows Vista Enterprise. The installation went through without any problems. Then I had to register a user ID / password that can be used to perform the analysis for one or more websites that you manage.

I then added two of my websites to the list. They were put on the pending list, as the developers had explained in the podcast that they are trying to keep control of the number of users they will serve - with this free tool - to keep the server requirements under control. It took Woopra 4 days to send me the confirmation messages. Then I could log on to the Web site and also use the client tool.
The Web site shows all the sites you registered. It is then possible to get visitor statistics based on different criteria such as the countries of these visitors, operating systems, browsers and even screen resolutions.

The Web version of Woopra is very similar to SiteMeter, but it has some extras like a list of back links and direct references.

However, the analytics functionality gets a big boost when you start using the client tool. First of all, it shows users Live. This is an amazing functionality, since you can see a lot of detail about individual visitors.

Furthermore, you can start a Chat session with any live visitor. This is not something I saw in any other tools.

It is possible to get into interaction with visitors at the time they are visiting your site. You can tag a particular visitor and keep a history about subsequent visits.

You can analyze how a user has reached your site (e.g. Google).

I have spent a little time on Woopra, and I will revisit the pages after a while when enough visitors visit my sites, but at first sight it looks like one of the best analytics tools available. It is currently a free beta tool, but we'll see what kind of a commercial model Woopra will apply.

... and the refrigerator talked back to me....

I am a fan of science fiction and so I am used to science fiction stories that depict more and more intelligence in the equipment and machinery that we use (just check Philip K. Dick's fiction, which is full of such intelligent - and sometimes dumb - machinery).

I was staying at a hotel in Brussels tonight and when I opened the door of the minibar, I saw a sign stating that "any minibar item that you take out will immediately be charged to your room, even if you do not use it". How so? It seemed to suggest that there was a kind of automated system that could detect that a beverage was taken out of the refrigerator and could charge it to your room. I checked carefully but did not see any such technology.

However, this is not exactly rocket science. I have been involved since a few years in RFID technology. RFID stands for Radio-Frequency Identification. It involves using radio waves to identify an object or person through a "tag" attached.

There are basically two main types of RFID equipment presently available.

Active RFID tags have a power source and can broadcast a signal in response to a polling request by an RFID reader. They typically have a range of about 100 meters, so they can be used on moving vehicles and do not need to be read by a handheld device. These are typically used for containers, big boxed, vehicles and other moving packaging options.

The Passive RFID concept is similar to the barcode concept, namely they are used to track single items os a collection of similar items. They do not have a power source, so they have to be explicitly read from short distance (a few meters).

There has been a lot of interest in RFID technology lately. There are many applications in the military world, and also in supply chain management systems. One of the most high-profile stories was Walmart moving to RFID technology and also asking all its suppliers move to the same technology as well. There were also privacy concerns about items bought being "trackable" for at least a period of time, enabling supermarkets to track their customers shopping patterns, then utilizing that data (even worse, selling the data to third parties).

So, in a sense, my initial idea that the refrigerator might have such a technology did not really arise from my many hours of science-fiction reading, but from a very plausible near-real time scenario where a lot of things, includsing people themselves being tracked via RFID tags. It is easy to imagine a dystopian world where everyone is tracked continuously via RFID chips embedded under their skin, using omnipresent RFID readers. Sound familiar, anyone?

(For some good insight into RFID technology, check the RFID Journal, a free Internet journal that covers all RFID stories or The Wireless Report, a blog that covers all wireless equipment, including RFID devices)


(Post scriptum: They do it indeed! I got the bill early next morning, and lo and behold, they showed the items I had used at night. Blimey! I had a quick look, and it is a quite simple idea, namely they got sensors at the fixed locations for minibar items and they can detect when something is taken out)

Web 2.0 and Web Page Ranks

Web Page Ranking is a measure of popularity that has been invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. It is a measure of web pages linking to a certain page. A page which has many links showing it is assumed to be a popular page and is given a higher rank in Google's algorithm to determine which pages to show first in a search. (Of course that algorithm also has shortcuts favoring advertisers!)

People have been innovative and they have designed bots or automated programs that traverse the World Wide Web and automatically post comments on pages to increase their ranks. There are precautions that are taken against such predator applications. Most blogging programs require you to post a pattern displayed on the screen to ensure that a human and not an automated bot is posting a comment. There is also a way to disable comments being counted as links in the Google algorithm.

I have recently seen an interesting - and free - application called Comment Kahuna, which enables people to quickly post comments on sites related to keywords they have selected, and also enables them to select pages with a high rank. This makes sure that your page gets a good pagelink back, but also lets you post comments to related comments, unlike those other programs which randomly lets you put comments. (I can remember deleting comments from my blog when they were completely unrelated to the blog entry)

You can create one or more profiles which save your name, e-mail and other information relevant for a blog comment and then search a particular keyword using this profile. You can select which page ranks you want (like between 3 and 8, or whatever. Recall that most pages have a zero rank). Once you find a page and go to the relevant commenting part, you can press a button and automatically post a comment and a URL showing your web page you want a link to. Is this cheating? I don't think so, as long as you post a comment on a related web page and provide a link back to your own page having more information related to the keyword you have selected. Interesting concept, I must say.