September 09 was a good month for Thought Den. There were subtlemobs in the pipeline and igFest09 was still leaving a warm fuzzy aftertaste. But most importantly, there was the prospect for the company to invest in a brand new sexy server to host all our clever sites & games.

Back then, in the haze of Autumn we read-up on and whittled down a list of providers to choose from. Deciding strongly to not be swayed by the sexiest newest thang’ out there with ample blinding gizmos, BOGOFs to fill your boots with and then all backed with snazzy marketing.

And we picked the Rackspace Cloud Sites. Knowing them to be a solid provider, we were already using their services on the clever  Parashoot site and their offering is aimed directly at companies like ourselves.

Rackspace cloud sites logo

So 6 months down the line… what do we think now? Is the snazzy server still flying high or have we needed to clip it’s wings? Here’s out personal thoughts so far. Bad news first as always!

The Bad news: We’re thinking clippers because…
- Setting up FTP is a chore. An actual chore.

- No SSH. We can’t do nippy logins, scp our files to the server, no mass chmod’ing. But now there’s no chance to accidentally “recursively delete” a whole folder+contents in one swoop.

- After setting up a domain aliases like “thoughtden.com” to point at your “thoughtden.co.uk”. The .com won’t accept emails, unless you give in and just create a whole new site.

- Web access to PHPMyAdmin is trial and error! There’s about 50 different databases choices to log in to, and they’re labelled by number, not name…
Enter the username & password, select database number 1, click login. wait….. nope. Enter the username & password, select database number 2, click login, wait…. nope. Hmmm.

Good news: Flying high because….
- Blazingly quick to get started!

- Simple & clean interface THROUGH-OUT the site. Very easy to use & navigate. Very easy.

- Pretend FTP details to login into your site while you’re waiting for the DNS to point. Makes our development really easy.

- Support. It’s just like Rackspace’s Fanatical support. Always useful, always speedy.

- All our sites are running up to speed.

- Dan’s free T-shirt all the way from America for saying “hi” in a blog-post.

Dan looking a goon

Conclusion: Good far outweighs the Bad, it’s still Flying!

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.