We just had an interesting email from CBSNEWS. We know, already it doesn’t sound that interesting. Sure it’s just an email. Sure, it’s for an American Channel who have possibly bought our email address. But that’s beside my point.

CBS News mail out

What’s interesting is not the dull blues and greys. It’s how focussed the mail is on selling direct links to their twitter & facebook pages. But not their main CBSNEWS site.

Can you see how the lady, katiecouric, is always mentioned with an @ symbol (for her twitter feed) & the most prominent logo you can see is the facebook icon.

There is no direct mention of the CBSNEWS site.

So are some bigger companies more interested in getting people connected through their Social media sites rather than their own site?

Something to ponder while Thought Den wrap up their next MySpace app for aMap and plan a  twitter game =)

An exciting moment for me… my first blog post for Thought Den, infact first blog post that’s not on my own blog!…

So far I have been designing logos, web layouts and an iphone game, so lots of fun and varied projects for me to get my teeth stuck in to! See the subtlemob site – our latest creation, where I designed the layout with Ben’s guidance! Check the event out while you’re there.. it looks awesome!

I sit here in my room – (a place I am very proud of, my own little Thought Den.. ambient bubble of music and lighting, beneath drapes and walls carefully plastered with creative inspiration) – I think of how to sum up the past few weeks freelancing for Thought Den. My first paid job actually doing what I love to do… and what an amazing thing it is to do what you love every day and be guided by professionals who can teach you more at such a fast rate!! The highlights so far probably being white boards, creative brainstorming, jokes, drinks, paper throwing when ‘in the zone’, learning fast, and being a part of the thinking den!

(more…)

Yup, there’s not just moose out today for igfest. Looks like the Apple app store could be having it’s long awaited makeover with the release of iTunes 9.

For a while now the store has caused a majority of app developers some real financial tension and many others, a few thousand (more…)

So Facebook have acquired FriendFeed for a reported $50million (guardian.co.uk). Looks like they’re building an extension to their walled garden. A walled garden which harvests real-time and personal data. And most importantly, Google the search engine isn’t big enough to see over.

(Dollar heart from masscorporation)

People’s profiles on Facebook and FriendFeed purposefully aren’t viewable by any old wierdo class-mate looking to “catch-up” and ironically the same applies to Google’s Stalk-bot (that’s our new name for the Google Bot =) ). Even though it’s job is to read every site and index it for their search, it still can’t get in to look at all these peoples’ personal pages.

This effectively is blocking Google’s revenue stream as there’s a LOT of information they can’t index on these profiles. So it means the data Facebook then owns is worth a LOT more, because they have something even the biggest tech firm can’t see.

Interesting to see what Google’ll have to do next, GoogleBook?

Also as a side note, notice on the Jesus-esque Guardian picture of Mark Zuckerburg how shirt cuffed hand on the bottom left looks like it’s there for a little more than the picture… She should take that watch off first, it’ll be cold.

Sometimes we’ve hit a road-block when we’re trying to make Flash talk to the External Interface in our MySpace applications.

The Flash is having a great time and is more than happy to call Javascript with ExternalInterface when it wants. But when Javascript wants to chat back… beep beep. “Please leave a message”.

Flash appears to ignore the call, and leaves Javascipt in an error state and needing ice-cream.

To help you avoid that little relationship problem here’s the fix to the problem. Add the following to your code,

System.security.allowDomain(”*.msappspace.com”);
System.security.allowDomain(”*.yourdomain.co.uk”);

Flash’s Sandbox is set to divert all calls by default and blocks any chat. However as soon as you’ve added the allowDomain. Flash shouts, “HELLO!”, and it’s all back on again.

One big happy social networking family.

Good Job rondata, you are the lucky one who patrols the MySpace Developers forum helping for lost coding souls.

Being the social network’s developer’s gate keeper, passing through only the most genuine development question to the MySpace API team. Bit of a tough job to make sure they’re not bombarded with constant questioning about some of the ‘in-progress features’ like, External Interface.

Thought Den felt moved enough by your still ongoing constant plight trawling the forums to say, “proper job”.

Things Thought Den now wish Spotify would do

- Work on our iPhones
- Allow us to shuffle from every playlist I’ve made
- Look at a track we like already and recommend  more
- Personally, I’ve been going like a fat kid in a blind man’s sweet shop. Every album I see on a search is added to the playlists. But now there’s a huge really rubbish text-list of music. Give me Horizontal space and graphics!
- Bring back the whistling Direct gov and the Energy Saving Trust ads

So basically make it more like a free iTunes… please

We’ve been playing around with MySpace Application Surfaces to get Flash AS2 to talk to a Javascript Interface. It’s been a long day….

Here are our findings for any other Flash & MySpace Developers.

- ExternalInterface + SWFObject + iFrame will not work. Do not spend 4 hours refreshing your browser and re-testing. It will not work. There are also no tutorials to sort it out either.

- getURL is just plain dirty. Don’t do it.

The final solution we settled on is, don’t use SwfObject. Just have a plain Object/Embed tag. Then External Interface can talk to all the relevant parties.

Download our MySpace files (put into the Canvas Surface) and see what we’ve done.

Thought Den have recently finished hosting a programme of workshops at the Pervasive Media Studio. With the help of Jon Dovey, UWE academic and one of the studio founders, we encouraged residents and invitees to discuss the commercial prospects for pervasive media, looking at the markets we currently exploit and areas we’d like to move into. The sessions also tied in very nicely with the studio’s latest bid for funding from the Technology and Strategy Board so fingers crossed – sustainability is the word! Download the document if you’re interested in reading what came out of the sessions…

A common problem facing many of the studio residents is how to pitch their wares to commioners who might not be as technically au fait with the sort of work coming out of the studio. The ethos in the studio is to collaborate, explore and innovate and at times we risk isolating ourselves clients who are looking for more mainstream solutions. The T-Mobile campaign is a great example – swathes of the creative community sneered at the Liverpool St Station dance-off because Flash-mobs were so 5 years ago , but the general public absolutely loved it! And T-Mobile’s Trafalgar Sqr singalong sequel is again doing well on You Tube. So we looked at ways to take a step back from the cutting edge to make our work more accessible, along with what metrics might be relevant to demonstrate the success of our work. For residents like Simon Games and AntiVJ it can be a real challenge representing the success of a project because more often than not they’re dealing with a more profound emotional engagement than a simple page impression. These issues are far from solved but the debate is beginning…

So we’re staring to develop a MySpace application with Team Rubber, which is all good news. Basically it means we get to play with a new technology and they get to have their cool application benefit from the power of a social network.

However, not all is rosy. At the first step we’re presented with the choice, “Do you want to develop with OpenSocial or MySpaceID?”.

What? Which one do we choose! Surely like every other social platform, api or online do-hickey you just sign-up, ignore the instructions till it breaks then code like the wind?

It’s not even like the bullet points help you make a decision. Both offer their positives, but not weighted against each others.

To be honest why can’t we just have both? Surely, we could just use OpenSocial as a base and then add on any MySpaceID stuff as it goes?

Nope. One or t’other.