This post will make more sense in the context of Ning Things.
I shamelessly and hastily generalised from here (I need to check more sources of house rules, e.g. this one has a grid not a ladder, and the games must be longer for higher ranked players).
Description
The Thing Ladder is a list of people who all want to play a regular game of Thing, e.g. pool, darts, snooker, chess, draughts, connect 4 etc.
For now, Thing is just a two player game.
Rules
Bare Minimum Web Implementation
For Bonus Points
I keep glancing over at Ning, and I like the look of its small groups focus and emphasis on cloning and customisation. Though I'm not totally sold on it yet, I imagine the most successful Ning apps will be things that people stumble upon and immediately think "I must have this for me and my friends", rather than than the Big Web App model of "I must join this".
Herewith some notes on a few things that I might build with Ning if you don't do it first.
Flickr's photo notes are great, but often they only work with reference to larger versions of the photo. Since the Flickr API can be called from Javascript, I keep wanting a script that looks for bigger versions of the photo and offers a zoom function for notes (perhaps opening clipped versions of the note in a pop-up window?).
Sometimes Bloglines seems evil. And it does things that aren't super smart. And the social aspects of it are minimal at best. (My recommendations didn't change for months, but I add new feeds all the time. It still thinks I want to subscribe to Dilbert. It's wrong.)
All I really want is to keep track of which things I've read, across multiple machines. Bloglines is actually pretty good at that. But I don't need to use the same feed reader as thousands of other people. It would still be nice to see recommendations from friends, and a higher level view of what's going on. I'd like to see the best bits of reBlog, del.icio.us, Digg and Technorati in the next generation of online feed readers. I'd like a Flickr style privacy model, with a friends/family level, a contacts level, personal items, and a bunch of "public if you look for it" things for everyone else.
I'm imagining a feed-reading web-app for small groups (2 – 150 people?, roughly):
For bonus points:
Who's building this? Is this where someone tells me Bloglines already does half of this stuff?
Despite its wilful disregard of many best practice web design patterns I hold dear, and its obvious attraction to big business in order to sell things to "the kids", I'm still a big fan of MySpace for keeping track of new music. I go there mainly because lots of the bands I like are there every day, talking to their fans, keeping up to date gig listings (which they almost all fail to do on their own sites), posting new songs (often months before release), and so on. The good outweighs the bad, even if it's very bad.
For those who haven't tried it, when you find a band you like on MySpace you can "add" them as a friend (much as you add contacts on any social networking site). You then get bulletins and blogs and event notifications from those bands. But here's the thing: MySpace doesn’t notify you if your favourite bands post new tracks. That's the main reason I'm there!
MySpace should generate a podcast/RSS feed for me which points to the most recent downloadable mp3s from bands I have added as friends. Maybe that's a really obscure feature request? But if MySpace had an API, it would be a trivial 10 minute script, and then I could take the most up to date MySpace music with me wherever I went.
Without an API, it's an uphill struggle from the beginning. All the data is there, but it's locked up - I can't export a list of my friends, the track URLs are locked up in a Flash player, the HTML is so bad it almost seems deliberate. There are streaming-only tracks as well as tracks which are legal downloads – for bonus points a podcast script would also grab the streams, but I imagine that would involve hacking around with the Flash player they use and watching what goes over the wire to pick out the URLs. And a big fat News Corp lawsuit...
Update: since this page is getting lots of hits, some readers may be interested in this Myspace Parser which gives a Python interface to Myspace.
Since there's a bewildering array of sort-of matches from a quick look on Google, I thought I'd just put this out there.
I want to have a chat bot as a "to do" stack / list manager, something like:
> todo.push "blog about AIM todo stack bot"
todo: 1 item
> todo.push "AIM bot ideas"
todo: 2 items
> todo.list
blog about AIM todo stack bot
AIM bot ideas
> todo.peek
blog about AIM todo stack bot
> todo.pop
done: blog about AIM todo stack bot
> todo.list
AIM bot ideas
> done.list
blog about AIM todo stack bot
And so on. It's a chatbot rather than a command line utility or a website because I want it to follow me home and I want it to be private and immediate. This must have been done?
Please can I twin my del.icio.us account with my last.fm account and keep a record of the things I stream with the del.icio.us mp3 widget?
Whilst you're implementing that for me, can you do the same thing for myspace bands, purevolume bands and so on?
Could this be done with a Greasemonkey script or a Firefox extension?
I'm (re)writing a literature review at the moment (ostensibly for the first chapter of my thesis), and supposedly I'm writing a book chapter in the next two weeks too.
So, in the spirit of structured procrastination, I've spent the last half an hour thinking about socialfiction.org's Journal for Patterns Recognised. Herewith some notes for an article which shouldn't get written, but about which I welcome criticism and/or encouragement.
On What It Means To Spot A Pattern
Teleological implications aside, are patterns things which want to be found? If it isn't found, is it a pattern? If it can't be found, is it a pattern?
In finding a pattern, we become familiar with it and its medium (carrier?). Is pattern-ness defined by the process of becoming familiar? Can we become familiar with a pattern-less medium? (And would that familiarity be due to anything other than repetition - another manifestation of pattern?). Is a pattern a collection of similar landmarks?
In "The Pattern On The Stone", Daniel Hillis talks about randomness, information content and entropy (I don't recall if he uses these terms). Does a random image contain more "information" than an image of a face? (Why does it take more bits to store it? Should we think about how to generate it? Is one random thing the same as another, supposing no patterns have been identified which render it non-random?)
Are patterns correspondences? Similarities? Matches? Anything we recognise? Must patterns be regular (in space or time?)
Does recognition mean implication, or causation? (cf. Gladwell's Blink - does correlation imply causation whether we want it to or not?)
Do Christopher Alexander's design patterns or the Gang of Four's analogous object-oriented design patterns work in the same way as knitting patterns? Is a pattern a framework from which we can hang information?
So we have patterns in time - repetitions, echoes and (I suppose) resonance.
So we have patterns as best practice (design/formula), a way of working which we've done before, a record of success or failure (anti-patterns?).
Generative grammars, such as languages. Do they encapsulate, generate, define or represent patterns?
Are we hard-wired for pattern recognition? Are creatures in general? (Zebra Patterns vs Long Grass and mono vision... Fly eyes... Sawipnpg lteters in the mddlie of wdros... turning mouths upside-down on upside-down images... Scott Kim's typographic inversions... Tom Coates' We See Faces In Audio Equipment... moths with eyes on wings... Eddie Izzard's evil pilot fish headlights prank... what does gestalt psychology have to say about all of this?)
This seems like a good place to park some notes I've made on where I think the music industry should be headed. There's a long article or three hidden in there somewhere, but I'm not ready to write it yet.
General trends. Wherever I get my music, be it from a brick and mortar outlet, an online store, or direct from an artist or label I need the following qualities:
Retailers. They should be fixated by choice, but also by managing choice. Distribution is now easy, even high-street shops should be able to provide anything I want, instantly. I should never have to order, and wait. They could download the data, burn a CD and print the packaging in 5 minutes - so why don't they? Why don't black-market independent shops do this from iTunes or Napster - or do they already? If Amazon have a rich database full of recommendation material, why don't HMV or Virgin? Shouldn't I be able to pick up a CD, and find out what else I might like (maybe put it on a recommendation shelf, based on a barcode scan or something)?
Venues. All of them should be recording and distributing every performance, subject to artist approval of course. I know that instant post-gig CDs are in the works (and patent encumbered I believe) but that will only happen in the worst corporate-sell-out kind of a way, I'm sure. And only at the level where every show sounds the same, says the cynic in me.
Artists. They should be making their work available across the full spectrum - not just album tracks but also live/rehearsal/demo/acoustic/rare. They have the authority and sources of depth I was talking about earlier. Bands like Sigur Rós have already demonstrated online liner notes (onliner notes?) are viable with their untitled album, ( ), even if it was in the pursuit of absolute minimalism (no words, no titles, no stickers on the box...). Artists are aware that a loyal fanbase will pay for new material, especially if they get it first (before the radio, before the magazines and reviewers even).
Studios. Studios should be digital-distribution aware. Sound engineers should be too. It's the norm now for amateur and unsigned bands leave the studio with CDRs and immediately encode it at home to send to friends and promote online. Why don't the studios invest in professional quality encoders and use their mastering and mix-down knowhow to provide a range of good quality digital formats, optimised for the music in question? Ditto the standalone mastering people. Ditto CD pressing plants, who should be able to do mixed-mode CDs with a range pre-encoded tracks for sharing (free promotion).
Pricing. It's occasionally mooted that artists should give away recordings and make money touring. That's a poor excuse if people are willing to pay for recorded music, and we know they are. Artists will suffer from the volume and choice of alternatives, so the cost per track must come down. Actually, the cost per track must come down if iPod buyers are to be able to afford to fill their iPod. Likewise, if people want to pay per play, the cost must be negligable. Of course, steadily lowered prices reach a limit eventually. Unfortunately, that limit isn't 0, download fans. As cost-per-song reduces, it tends to a collective/blanket license. Otherwise there's no money in the system, and artists don't get paid. So, how should a compulsory license be paid? Could it be a digital music player tax? (Wasn't there a licensing levy on blank media?) Or should it be opt-in? (Wasn't there once a license which allowed people to record music from the radio in the UK?)
Fairness. The popularity of artists suffers from a power-law distribution, I'm sure. Should the proceeds from license fees use that distribution exactly, or should we work to flatten the distribution (progressive tax, in effect)? Are Britney Spears, Robbie Williams, Madonna and the Rolling Stones capable of making up the difference using the gravity provided by their own mega-brands? What about Elvis? Is making excuses for weighting towards the little guy the same as saying that artists should give away music and tour to make up the difference?
</brain-dump>
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