Twitter & The Time Machine Paradigm

As I finally managed to use the word "paradigm" in a post title, I'm sure it will be read by millions of highly intelligent people so I'm really really going to be very cautious with what comes next.

The advent of social networks and the multiplication of tweets, facebook posts, instagram pictures, tumblr entries etc. have dramatically changed the nature of the Internet by speeding up its evolution and relevance.

I tweet, you tweet, we all tweet. We leave digital artifacts of our lives at any moment and from anywhere. This, in turn, lets us interact with other people though we may never meet them in real life (IRL). There is no doubt, in my mind, that this has a profound impact on the way we relate to the world and one another.

Have you ever realized that Twitter & social networks in general constitute time machines? What better way will future digital archeologists have in order to understand the past than to go back in time by exploring its tweets? How intriguing can it be to just go back to the twitter timeline at the time of a historic event so as to cease the thoughts of the many?

Think of this in terms of "what if Napoleon had had a Twitter account?"

Mini Connected Review

My previous post was all about BMW ConnectedDrive and BMW Apps. This one is about Mini Connected which is very similar to what is available on the BMW side of things.

One big difference with Mini Connected is that it does not come with a sim card so all "connected" functions use your iPhone data connection. In fact, what Mini calls "Mini Connected" is almost the same thing than what BMW calls "BMW Apps" (and not BMW Connected as you might have thought).

Mini Connected enables you to display your Facebook & Twitter feeds, use Google Send to Car and listen to webradios. The interface and functions are almost identical to what I described in my previous post about BMW Connected.

The same annoying bluetooth audio streaming deactivation happens when you plug your iPhone in the snapin but you can fix it in the same way that I previously described:

Join The Path

I've just joined The Path this morning. It is a new social network that aims at sharing mostly pictures amongst a maximum of 50 friends. I'm not sure if this new social network is groundbreaking but I, surely, intend to give it a try. I'll post more later on as I discover its features. Funny thing is that you apparently need to own an iPhone in order to sign up and it seems their iPhone app is only available in the US iTunes store so far. One cool thing is that the website seems to be entirely https - based which the paranoid in me loves!

One not cool thing is that you can't upload camera roll pictures from the iPhone app. You can only upload photos taken from within the app itself. This sucks big time and needs to be adressed ASAP.

So, if you're curious: Join The Path.

RockMelt Rocks

I've just installed the brand new and innovative RockMelt browser and I'm loving it. RockMelt smartly integrates your Facebook and Twitter accounts in their chromium-based browser. Think Chrome with deep Facebook, Twitter and RSS feed integration and you will understand what it is about! I have a limited amount of invitations left so if you're interested, just drop a comment with your email address (I will edit your email address after the invitation is sent).

Breaking News: Project Titan Will Be Integrated In iOS 4.2

I've just hung up the phone from a conference call with Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg who are respectively my 104th and 105th best friends. It was the middle of the night for them and morning for me but hey, I wouldn't have agreed to that call if I had to stay up late or wake up early in the morning. Anyway, we talked a lot of nonsense and also the future of Apple, Facebook and the World.

As you should know, Mark is hosting a special event next Monday to announce his so-called Project Titan. There's been a lot of talk about this project, maybe, maybe too much talk. This project is not a rebel project, this project is Titan Bloody Titan (Bono, leave my body right now).

Some people have been speculating that Titan is set to be a Gmail killer. Well, as I know about it before anyone and didn't sign any non-disclosure agreement (and even if I had, I doubt that Steve and Mark would risk losing me as a friend by suing me), I'm going to reveal it right now.

Basically, Project Titan is more than a Gmail killer. It will not only integrate push email through Facebook's web interface but also contacts, calendar and notes synchronization. The key feature there is not its availability on desktop computers through its web interface but its release on Monday on all iDevices (including Apple TV 2). That is the reason why Steve and Mark were spotted having coffee together in Palo Alto not long ago. Besides talking about how much more fun it would have been had I been there with them, they also discussed Project Titan.

It is no coincidence that iOS 4.2 hasn't been released to the public yet, the reason behind this is that it will be released on Monday coincidentally with Mark's announcement. iOS 4.2 will let users configure a Facebook account in pretty much the same way they are able to configure Exchange, MobileMe or other email accounts right now. They will, then, get push email, contacts, calendar, notes and Farmville directly from Facebook on their iOS device, rendering Microsoft Exchange useless.

Through this partnership between Apple, Facebook and its announcement on my blog, the three of us will dominate the world and facilitate Facebook addiction worldwide. Facebook will be the portal and iOS will support the devices.

Based on this information and my love for insider trading, I am publicly planning on taking over Google. My initial offering is US$ 0.000001 per share. As there are 270 million shares on the market, this should cost me something like US$ 270, a fair price in the light of the aforementioned secrets. I'm, obviously, not doing this for profit. I just wouldn't want Google to disappear from the face of the Earth as they still offer great services and host my blog.

Note: Should my prophecies not come true on Monday, you should consider that they originated from a different timeline in a parallel universe and should, hence, be discarded when assessing the credibility of this blog.

The Complete Unabridged Partial Guide To Living The Life 2.0

If living the life seems like a dream to you and you think you'll never be able to be successful enough in order to achieve it then focus on something even better: The Life 2.0. Luckily, you happen to be reading this post where  I intend to give out a few tips on how to live the Grand Life 2.0!

First of all, you should realize that living the old-fashioned way, as opposed to the digital Life 2.0, is out-dated. None of your geek friends will find you cool if you continue to avoid new technologies and stubbornly claim that they are useless. Embrace your digital self and try to excel at your new life. Everybody around you will end up copying you (or unfriending you).

Here are the few apps and habits that you should focus on mastering in each aspect of your life:

1) Music: Don't listen to CDs anymore! Use Spotify, Pandora or Deezer. They're music streaming services that, for a limited monthly fee, allow you to listen to almost all music. Don't own your music. It's too old-fashioned, rent and stream it. When you're invited to a private party, replace the DJ's iPhone with yours and play hip hop when everybody wants to listen to techno music. They will love it (or might get yourself kicked out of that party).

2) Letting your friends know where you are: Don't call your friends to let them know where you are or enquire about their location. Check-in using Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Yelp, Plyce, Brightkite, Twitter AND Facebook. This will allow you to never be bored ever again as you will use most of your time to check-in from places to places on your Smartphone. Try to take pictures while you're at it. None of your friends will find them interesting but it will make you lose a lot more time. Moreover, strangers may like your pictures more than your friends and in turn, you will broaden your horizons by getting to know many perverts whose path you would never have crossed otherwise. Always keep in mind that there is no such thing as a check-in to be ashamed of (think toilets, bedroom, seat 45E on a plane).

3) Letting your friends know what you eat and drink: Use the aforementioned social networks to accurately document everything that will go through your intestines and bladder. You will manage to alienate a lot more friends who will be horrified by your lack of concern for your own health.

4) Use cloud storage services: I'm not talking about parking your private jet in the clouds but rather about keeping a copy of your precious files in the clouds in case anything would happen to your computers or home. Great services like SugarSync or Dropbox let you save all your digital data online and synchronize it across multiple computers.  Your friends' jaws will drop when you show them that you can access all your files from your smartphone, explaining: "This is panmnesia, I can access all my data and knowledge anywhere, anytime. Isn't it cool???". They will literally think: "that guy suffers from OCD, let's avoid him".

5) Movies: The Holy Grail of Entertainment! Get rid of your cable provider. How could you have time to watch anything on TV since you're constantly using Foursquare? If you happen to be dying to watch a specific movie or series, rent them on iTunes and watch them on your iPad in the toilets. It's probably the calmest place on Earth. Make sure you document having watched this movie on Miso and your location at the time on Foursquare.

6) Books: Buy a Kindle to show off, install the Kindle app on your iPad or use iBooks. Anyway, this is just to show off. Who has time to read nowadays? I don't... I never did either... Ok, so this might be due to the fact that I'm lazy. It might indeed have nothing to do with the digital revolution. I dread the birth of a social network like Miso dedicated to books. Everyone will know I'm not as smart as I try to make everyone think I am.

7) If you're into onanism, try Chatroulette!

And if you know BASIC:

8 GO TO 1


#Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I Was Abducted By Aliens In My Sleep

I had the greatest idea of all ideas last night as I decided to watch The Fourth Kind, a horror movie about alien abductions. What better way to find sleep on a Sunday evening than to be thinking about alien abductions? Evidently, I had one of the best nights of sleep ever and I would advise anyone to watch this movie alone in the dark at night. Although it is supposed to depict real events that occurred in Nome, AK in 2000, I find it far-fetched and hard to believe. Main character, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, was supposedly abducted by aliens in her sleep. Doesn't this sentence say it all? In my dictionary, being abducted in one's sleep equals to dreaming of being abducted. In addition, the main proof of alien abductions is given through Recovered Memory Therapy, a practice known to be non-scientific and unreliable. The most dramatic and scary scene is that rumored abductees speak Sumerian under hypnosis and trance. Well, Dr. Tyler has books about Sumerian on her desk. So it does not surprise me at all that her unconscious mind is familiar with some of its vocabulary.


In summary, although I dreamt last night that I was being abducted by aliens, I doubt aliens would go through the trouble of abducting earthlings just to drill through their skins and poke them. Unless, they invented a sport whose purpose is to drill as many holes as one can in an earthling, it would just seem like an awful waste of time and resources on their part. And seriously, if aliens have already visited Earth, how come they never left any comment on my blog? I check my stats regularly and Google does not mention any connection from outer space. Wouldn't intelligent lifeforms from outer space at least try to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter? The fact that they haven't done so yet makes it clear to me that they're either using AT&T or haven't visited earth yet.

Note: Once again, Hollywood shows that shrinks should not be taken seriously as most of them are mentally ill in the first place. It's such a classic that everytime I see a shrink in a movie, I can safely bet he or she is the bad guy!
Note 2: All the original documentary footage featured in this film was shot by the filmmakers. The whole movie is, of course, a clever hoax.

Uber-Communication

The rise of new technologies has lead to the advent of a new way of communicating.

Whenever someone sends me an email or leaves a message on my voicemail, I don't feel bound to answer them using the same means of communication they used to contact me. Answering a long voicemail can sometimes take a 10 second text message. Using Twitter to organize a dinner with friends can sometimes be much more convenient than email (that is when it comes to a dinner with tech-savvy friends of course).

Maybe new technologies have given us the opportunity to become lazy communicators in the sense that we now have a tendency to use the easiest way of communicating (not necessarily the most politically correct one) in a particular situation. However, the decrease in form has also given us the ability to interact a lot more and with many more people than before.

I can't even begin to think of what's going to come next in terms of communication as there are more and more options available... To name of few: Landline phone, cellular phone, email, text messaging, instant messaging (text, audio, video), Skype, VoIP, Web 2.0 social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku, Lindedin, MySpace, Orkut etc...).

Who could ever deny that what differentiates us from animals is language?