Yet another new web 2.0 site has appeared on the social networking radar, yet this time this isn’t a portal to make new friends. Instead it’s aimed at those of us that don’t live in the mortal realm. That’s right, YouDeparted.com deals with the morbid after life. Or rather it would, if it weren’t for the members wanting their wishes to be carried out when they’ve passed away. Therefore, I actually find it quite charming. At least this way, the deceased member gets the funeral service that they want and the right people are honoured with the information to their lives. I imagine that all too often when someone dies, their loved ones are still left in the dark about certain entities such as PINs for bank accounts, where their Will is stored and personal wishes. The service is also able to contact people, elected by the member who they would like to be notified of their death – imagine that landing in your inbox or RSS reader – with funeral details and video messages from beyond the grave.
Security is obviously imperative with this kind of sensitive data floating around the web, and the system is so secure that not even the designers can access the personal content – according to Collin Harris who founded the site. Harris, who read about a 63 year old man who lost his life on route to Lake Tahoe whilst driving in his car. The thought that the man dying at a relatively premature age might have meant that he hadn’t left any instructions on what his relations should do upon the event of his death. This then acted as a catalyst for him to launch the site.
Archive for September, 2007
Highlight: YouDeparted
September 27, 2007Web 2.0 doesn’t work?
September 12, 2007
Stop the pokes, comments and bulletins! Web 2.0 social networking sites don’t actually create actual friendships. To which I say, big wow – with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Despite creating a MySpace for myself, I don’t actually care too much about it, and never really liked the whole social networking revolution. People abused the system, creating the most outrageous, wacky and annoying pages that blurted out music with every click. Others however, became addicted, slowly spending more time in their artificially created world than in their non-existent real life.
What’s more, now it’s official. Research carried out indicates that you don’t actually make close friendships online. Psychologist, Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University said “Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world.” The most popular social networking site by far, with 200 million members to make friends with, MySpace, was purchased for a massive £285m by News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch. And is it any wonder? With so many users, the potential to advertise products and services to a group of people who’ll freely tell anyone and everyone their age, interests and even their sexual orientation.
To some extent, I agree. I’ve talked with some really random people via social networking platforms via comments left via my YouTube channel among other platforms. The experience wasn’t totally pleasant to say the least. I won’t elaborate, but web 2.0 is extremely over rated. Having said that, some have found true love, and even I have made some decent friends via online forums based on interests that we have in common. Still though, online conversations don’t compare in the slightest to meeting people face to face. The Internet revolutionised the way that we are able to communicate with a vast range of people over greater distances than ever imagined, but it didn’t replace the human need for interaction with other people in real life.
Branson Googles Steve Fosset
September 9, 2007
Thought Google Earth was a fun piece of software to look at your house from space, or getting a look in on that Hawaiian beauty sunbathing topless in the Bahamas? Well, think again, Google Earth is a serious tool, when it needs to be. The search for Steve Fosset, a pilot missing in Nevada, is being expanded through the use of the same satellite images that Google uses in Google Earth application.
Richard Branson is the head honcho who’s asking Google for their imagery; who told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space”.
An Apple a year
September 5, 2007
Apple have made a few significant keynotes over the past nine months. Way back in January (is it really so long ago), we saw the birth of the iPhone. Still unreleased in the UK, the iPhone hardly attracted the same market that the iPod did. Little wonder that people were left wanting a PMP iPod. Even I, as an ‘anti iProduct’ person saw that Apple should have ditched the feeble phone features and made a wi-fi, video iPod. Now the web is alive once again as Jobs took to the stage of yet another keynote to make some more iPod related announcements.
Now, Apple have launched the iPod Classic, which is pretty much the iPod of old, bumped to an impressive 160GB. More importantly, they’ve released the iPhone without the phone, and called it the iPod Touch. Wi-fi functionality utilising the same Safari browser of the iPhone, which is good for browsing the web in hot spots, but more crucially it’s the video iPod that everyone wanted to see. On board YouTube makes it Apple’s own worst rival, who’s going to want the frankly pathetic phone features of the iPhone now? Even the nano has gotten a little more porky as it can now support video playback, retaining the 24hour music playback of old or 5hrs for video isn’t too shabby either.
Holiday Survival Tech
September 5, 2007Last week I was on holiday in Ingoldmells, home to Fantasy Island amusement park. Whilst there, I set out to use technology as much as I could. So here’s a quick rundown of how tech helped me to endure the week. Between us, we took three cam phones, four compact cameras, one Archos AV 700 (100GB), a PSP, GBA and one laptop.
Using my phone, I was able to stay online, providing live updates via GPRS to Island Quest forums. Orange offer unlimited data for only £1 a day. This worked out pretty well for what we “needed” – OK we didn’t need it but it was useful. Applying for the service on a near daily basis at around just after midnight guaranteed that I got the most out of the service that expired at midnight each day. At only 9kbps, it’s nowhere near broadband speeds, but the way that Opera Mini scales the pages into between 10 and 40kb means that pages load incredibly fast. OK, it’s not HSDPA, but it’s the best that my W810 could offer, and I was more than satisfied. We had tried to connect the phone via Bluetooth to the laptop, then realised that we didn’t have an ISP number to call, and even if we did, the phone would be only serving as a modem to dial the number rather than using the fixed data rate. I know that I could survive without the net, I did when I went on holiday in May, but it makes catching up so much easier rather than trawling forums/news feeds for hours when I returned. I noticed how small the phone was to browse with, when I returned to a full size QWERTY keyboard and 19″ monitor. Staring at a 2″ screen for a couple of hours seriously can’t be good for the eyes, similarly, the buttons are so small, it’s frustrating and time consuming to type posts. I think I did gradually speed up though over the week, but still nowhere near as fast as a regular keyboard. I almost wish that I’d got a Bluetooth laser projected keyboard – that I could’ve easily displayed and used on a table.
The Archos is probably the best portable device to take away. Offering movies, music, and pictures, it’s an all round entertainer. 100GB is gargantuan, don’t get me wrong, but having to select the movies that you might want to watch in advance is slightly tedious. More frustrating is the copy protection that is transferred to the device, preventing DVD movies from being displayed on a TV screen. It’s aim is to stop you from copying the file onto another disc, and unfairly distributing it. I understand that if you want to watch it on the big screen, then watch the original disc, but you don’t take the Archos and a DVD collection. If I wanted to do that, I’d have taken a portable DVD spinner. Fortunately, the movies recorded from TV still worked, so all wasn’t lost, and those that are applied with DRM made for great entertainment on the small screen on a more personal level. Carrying around 70% of my music library was also fairly cool, as when I wanted to listen to Lily Allen or The Sounds, I could just as easily as I could if I was sat back at home.
Digital cameras are a necessity when going on holiday surely. Halfway through the first week I suddenly realised how many cameras we had with us. I had packed two compact cameras, a Samsung S800 (8MP) and Nikon Coolpix S500 (7MP); both have their uses. I found that the Nikon was better for pictures, especially helped by little shutter lag and high ISO to get decent night shots, whilst the Samsung used different compression for video, allowing me to capture lengthier 640×480 VGA res video. Between us, we had 3 camera phones, which whilst not offering the best image resolution compared to the compacts, still produces decent shots. This is particularly important when you don’t have either of the compacts with you. My Sony Ericsson W810 has a 2MP sensor, producing some decent beach shots. My friend also had Sony 3.2MP and Goodmans 8MP cameras, the latter being broken on a ride on the last day of the trip. It went with a nasty hit to the restraint of the ride. I held it for the rest of the ride, but unfortunately, we discovered a great deal of damage to the LCD when we tried to take another picture. I notice that camera manufacturers are incorporating conventional view finder windows back into digital cameras, which would have been useful on this camera as it still takes a decent picture, but shots are difficult to frame without the LCD.
Some of the shots that I took whilst on holiday are featured on my new Flickr account.
