Google have just updated their Street View to include Flickr Photos …

… you can see this in action here.

Flickr joins Panaramio and Picasa as a source of photos. Flickr has always had plenty of good quality geotagged photos, so this looks like a handy addition to the whole Street View thing. No word on how many Flickr photos they’ve used, or if it’s just for certain locations, but I’m sure there’ll be some official word at some point.

But wait, there’s more:

Flickr photos have also been crunched into google’s image brain …

… not only allowing for seamless picture-zooming between Flickr, Picasa & Panaramio photos, but it also means Google has a bit more understand of where a photo is and it’s context to the surrounding area than Flickr itself has. I guess this means they’ll make it onto the iPad version of GoogleMaps too.

Which is kinda neat.

Not quite sure how the copyright works out though. Traditionally image search results have shown thumbnails, which are fine as search results. Here fullsized images are being shown, and considering they must have been downloaded to be processed for the image-zoomy thing, they’re probably being served from Googles servers.

Haven’t sniffed the traffic while Flash loads them, so not sure yet.

Photos shown: seattle space needle #3 by lomokev & IMG_5811: Space Needle by ac4lt

(via Kellan)

From Working at Flickr to the new job at The Guardian … a not unsurprising transition.

I count myself as very lucky, to have been able to work on Flickr, something that has effected so many peoples lives, bend its code in unexpected and unusual ways and mainly work with <3 amazing people … and this is basically how it went …

“In addition to building, scaling, evolving, and generally being as loud and fast as we could possibly be with the original Ludicorp team, I had the absolute privilege to hire and work in the trenches with some of the greatest people on the web.” – John Allspaw

“It is difficult and sad to leave Flickr but I have no regrets. If you asked me whether I’d do it again and what I’d do differently I’d tell you that I’d do it again in a heartbeat and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.” – Aaron Straup Cope

It’s that, right there, the people, harder, louder, faster, and to quote another ex-flickr, if I may, George Oates, “I’ve been thinking about the design for my spaceship” oh wait, that’s not it … “Just Fucking Do It”, yeah that’s more like it.

So that was Flickr, and now I’m at The Guardian.

I would have written this “Hey I’ve got a new job at The Guardian” sooner, but then it involves the question of what I’m doing at The Guardian and it took a few weeks to figure that out, and you know, having a spare moment :) …

Take a look at Frequent Releases Reduce Risk, you can get through 154 slides surprisingly quickly fwiw. For those without the time to read it, it’s all about deploy many times, often and keep moving forwards. With that in mind …

• I work on the Internet == fast!
• I work at The Guardian == wtf, old lumbering media, so slow!

But wait …

The Guardian prints (at around 33.4mph) newspapers every single day (well except Sunday, kinda). Not only that but it updates with various editions, or patches if you will. I’ve listened to conversations about last minute changes taking place because a new picture comes in, or a source of a quote needs to be checked. Layouts get swapped in at the last moment and so on.

To me that seems pretty fast, it certainly feels fast. It’s somewhat not unlike Continuous Deployment; you make it, update it, push it out there and fix bugs/corrections as you need to. If anything the paper version is in some ways just a snapshot of the current state of news. Also I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone roll back a newspaper. Sometimes The Graudian makes mistakes, bugs get in there but there are community feedback mechanisms in place for that too.

There are other similarities between Flickr and The G, but I’ll save those for another post. For the moment I now know what the answer is to the “what are you doing at The Guardian?” …

… It’s to do it again, in a heartbeat, and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.

The every-so lovely NewspaperClub have just announced their prices for printing your very own paper. And this shouldn’t have to be said, but I will …

Printing your own Newspaper is very exciting.

People are already used to printing books and to an extent magazines, (Blurb, lulu and MagCloud as examples) but newspaper up to this point have been far trickier. Unless you wanted a run of a thousand or so; Newspaper presses are huge and fast (and print lots), digital ones still expensive and not that common.

And that’s what makes it a thrill when your newspapers arrive on the doorstep, like this …

Stuff I learnt

I was very lucky to be able to have a go at printing a Newspaper (again), so I took the opportunity to use various photos to try different things out. High contrast, stripes, gradients, solid blacks an so on, here’s an example double spread …

1. Blacks will have that Newspaper look to them, not solid black, there’ll be specks of white and grey in there, but not as bad as you may think if you were tempted to ask the question “How’s the black appear?” I didn’t notice any weak stripes though the printing, or other stuff you maybe worried about.
2. I used a couple of photos with subtle gradients in and didn’t expect them to come out as well as they did, basically if you have mid grays don’t worry about it too much, the print handles it well.
3. When you convert colour images to black and white punch the contrast up a bit.
4. Best advice came from Tom at NewspaperClub, blow the highlights out a bit (in a way you wouldn’t normally do). Because the paper isn’t white, your whites won’t be, well white. Everything from a very light grey to white will essentially look the same. So adjust your levels so there’s more white at the top-end i.e. drag your right hand marker down about 5-8%, if that makes sense (if it doesn’t don’t worry about it)

The only other thing I discovered was with the center spread …

When I designed the pages, each page had a margin around the edge. My settings …

Page size; 11.378 by 14.9606 inches, no bleed.
Margins; Top: 0.8661, Bottom: 0.9449, Inside: 0.5118, Outside: 0.6299, Gutter: 0.1667 (inches).

… which aren’t definitive or “The Correct” ones, just what I happened to used.

But because of the margins and the preview when I’d uploaded the PDF I assumed the center spread would have a margin down the middle. For that reason I cut out a strip of the center image, so they curves would appear correct, rather like looking out a window with two panes of glass in.

However, in this case the two sides were put flush together, and I didn’t need to cut a strip out of the middle … if you look closely at the picture you can see where the structure doesn’t match up under the dome, that’s totally down to me and not a printing error.

In short

If you’re printing photos, boost the contrast, tweak your levels a bit to give your top end more white, but don’t sweat it too much.

Have fun.

Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains by Flink Labs Originally uploaded by flinklabs

Because I was going to post about my new job, but got tired and found this instead.

“Inspired by several visualisations showing GPS tracks of planes, taxis, and people, we have produced a visualisation showing the ebb and flow of the trains in Melbourne over a weekday.

We geocoded all the train lines and converted the published train timetables from pdf for rendering using processing.

You can see an increase in trains during peak hours and a general steady state of trains during the day.

This visualisation was created and produced by Flink Labs www.flinklabs.com

Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper but more on that in a moment.

Considering everyone who reads this blog would have seen this already, I could just point you at the Newspaper Club’s own blog post: Data.gov.uk Newspaper, or this post over here: Postcode Paper: What you can do with the right data or even the twitter search for newspaperclub, and you’ll know all you need to know, however, I’ll tell you the most exciting bit …

… well … the 2nd most exciting bit was waiting for it to arrive. The most exciting bit was when it did arrive.

We had just 2 days to plan, figure it out and throw it all together, and a deadline of 6pm on Thursday night. You see that deadline is the important part, because we needed to show it to people on Friday. By getting it finished and sent to the printers by 6pm Thursday, it’d get printed early on Friday, a courier on a motorbike would whisk 50 copies from the printers to us for 11am in the morning.

They were, literally, hot off the press. If by literally we actually mean quite cool. Quite cool off the presses doesn’t have the same ring though.

That’s the excitement of waiting. You know they’re printed, they exist, somewhere they take up real physical space, real physical space possibly traveling at 65mph.

The really exciting part is where you get to rip open the plastic wrapping and hold the thing in your hands, turn the pages … it’s like a real, real thing, that’s really real.

Which is, in short, pretty awesome.

Ok, the “more on that” part:

When I say “Tom Taylor, Gavin Bell and I made a newspaper” what I really mean is “Tom Taylor and Gavin Bell made a newspaper”, I’m still settling into my new job (that I’ll blog about sometime, honest!) and only had a small amount of free time between meetings. I threw together The Allotments bit …

… that I then emailed over to Tom to be added to the paper.

The map is from OpenStreetMap, and the tile set is the “Fine Line” style from CloudMade. The Carrots marking the Allotments were positioned from the geo:rss data in an XML feed from www.london.gov.uk/allotments

Anyway, the whole point was to make something useful, something that could combine a whole bunch of government and local data together, that you could cut out and stick on your fridge … something that’s not effected by IE6 … last time I checked newsprint wasn’t effected by IE6, but frankly it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was.

So how did we do?

Well, this was a quick stab at playing with Data.gov.uk, which involves a lot of SPARQL endpoints. Firstly SPARQL ain’t the easiest thing to get to grips with in a couple of days. Although as more people play with it tools will get written and knowledge shared.

If that was the only stumbling block then all it would need is more time thrown at it and, with Newspaper Club’s leet skillz something beta-ish could probably be up and running fairly quickly.

However there’s still 2 things, 1) Need more data. Data.gov.uk is a great start, we just need more of it, like everthing, but I’m sure we’ll take what we can get as we get it.

2) Location, location, location. The big one.

We needed to convert Postcode to Council/Government areas. Because when people are asked for their specific location, address (house number, Postcode) is about as specific as they can get … not many people, bless ‘em, know their lat/long. However see this post: Blah blah blah, whatever for the current government response to freeing up the Postcode.

And when we have the Postcode we need to nail that down to some council authority area, but, the UK is a funny old place and as I’ve previously mentioned it’s full of areas like “Duke Elligton’s Marginal Lower Land Barrows of the Kidsworth Council Academic Elective Mobile Library Region” otherwise knows to the Ordnance Survey as OLK12.

WTF?

And all that’s locked away between The Royal Mail and The Ordnance Survey. Although near the end of the day Simon Willison discovered a CD with, in theory the Postcode to Council area lookup tables on.

Which is, to go off at a tangent, in essence one of the big problems with Digital Britain. The theory goes that The Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey have too much locked up in their data, they’d have to say something like “I know, we’ll unlock all our data, that’ll cause us to instantly wipe £350 million [made up big number] off our spreadsheets”.

But, the value to (Digital) Britain of unlocked this data, allowing small companies, big companies, individuals, projects like NewspaperClub to use, re-purpose, publish, develop, share, integrate is worth way more in the long run.

The Postcode Newspaper is a great, fantastic idea, but it’s going to be held back, along with other great, fantastic ideas. Data.gov.uk will generate a lot of ideas, but moving the whole country forwards, really unlocking useful information that actually helps real people … well that’ll just have to wait just a little bit longer.

WTF Photo by schoschie

Today (finally) saw the launch of Kids on DSP’s “Reactive Album” (more on that phrase later). You can get it from the App Store (iTunes App Store Link)

Previously I’ve expressed my interest how it fits in with the whole Augmented Reality thing (hint: wear noise canceling headphones). While waiting for the full album I thought I’d throw over some questions to the Kids on DSP folks. I started by asking them if they could briefly describe what a “Reactive Album” is …

Kids on DSP: It’s an album of music which is in a reactive format. Reactive music changes and adapts in real time to your actions or environment. On RjDj it includes audio from your surroundings, your movement and how you touch the device. However, Kids on DSP deliberately only used the audio input features of the format for this release.

Catt: The track I was listening to “Drowning Street” seems to follows a linear construction; layers of music and samples that build up on top of each other over time in a set order. Does the underlying software have scope for “forking” in these tracks, allowing outside noise to dictate dramatically different paths for the music to go down?

Kids on DSP: Drowning Street its actually non linear. It uses a Markov state changer to move between various possible musical mixes. In a sense its continually moving through many possible musical routes, and will never be exactly the same twice, however there are some sections ( especially at the start ) which have consistency across listens. Other tracks on the album have linear sequences but shift key in unusual ways. Dimensions has a large linear sequence, which has a number of possible forks it can take, which take the listener through different moods, or dimensions, of the music.

However the main thing that’s reactive in these tracks is the real time interaction of live audio both to create sonic environments and also to affect the music directly. Tracks like Drowning Street, Departures and Dynamophone create sonic and musical textures from incoming audio. Doppelganger and Dimensions also feed an analysis of incoming audio to parts of the music which is being synthesised on the device in realtime. So when certain sounds and louder noises happen, the actual notes and timbre of the music changes. Timecruising somehow actually makes reality go backwards in realtime ?! and Urban 25 makes techno from just the sounds of your surroundings – turning them into beats.

Catt: We’ve seen reactive music and mixing of TV/Video streams in live music performances from various artists over the years, but this is the first time we’ve really had the concept of a “Reactive” that plays on mass consumer hardware that people can just carry around with them. Where do you see the future of this form of music? Do you think we’ll see major artists releasing whole Reactive Albums or Singles as Apps rather than/instead of normal iTunes “music”?

Kids on DSP: This is a unique point in the history of recorded music. When the point of delivery ( the personal music player ) becomes a studio ( which RjDj is ), something magical happens. A definitive mix is no longer a necessity. Of course linear deterministic music can be a subset of reactive music. The 3 min 20 mixed down pop song will always exist, as will all other forms of linear music – but now at the touch of a screen they could also become reactive if you want them to.

The other major difference with this format is it frees music from being delivered in a single form, frozen in time – like a mp3. When music becomes software, it opens up numerous possibilities. It can be expanded, updated or changed or have elements of it unlocked with use. It can become personalised or it can become social.

At RjDj we are already working with a number of major artists to release music in this reactive format.

Catt: My favorite track from the preview of the Album was Doppelganger. Which is your favorite and why?

Kids on DSP: Doppelganger is very popular because of the cheeky animal in it. Personally I like the moody spatious tracks like Departures and Dynamophone. Timecruising is also really chilled and mindbending.

Catt: The RjDj site and software allows users to record, upload and share their tracks. Will they be able to do that with the Kids on DSP Album, and if so is there some kind of Creative Commons licensing going on, allowing people to share their versions? Cleared samples and all that stuff?

Kids on DSP: Yes you can record and share your interaction with all scenes. In fact Kids on DSP created a specific scene called We Are Listening, for everyone to vocally record their thoughts about the album. It has crazy echoes and effects and snippets of the other scenes.

The licensing of RjDj scenes is detailed on the site.

Catt: Are you excited?

Kids on DSP: Yes we are very excited about the Kids on DSP application. In many ways it is the first of its kind. We are very excited about the future of reactive music on the iPhone and beyond…

Catt: Thank you Kids for taking the time.

So where’s my obligatory geo angle in all of this?

Well, it’s these two things, first consider the BBC World Service’s Save Our Sounds – Audio Map

… that’s attempting to “preserve endangered sounds for future generations.”

And RjDj itself, that has tens of thousands of user recordings of their RjDj experiences.

What I’d love to see in the near/distant future are “geotagged” uploads. So we can compare what a particular Reactive Track sounds like recorded in New York at Midnight, a Busy Bangkok Street, walking past buskers in London, or the Windy Hills of Scotland Mix.

The Reactive Album has a set number of tracks on it, but each persons experience of that track is unique to them and their location.

Less Music for Airports and more Music of Airports.

You can find out more about RjDj at RjDj.me and Kids on DSP in the following videos:

1) Me playing with “Drowning Street” on the Nottingham to London Train …

And some YouTube Videos …

2) The “Ghost in the Machine” bit at 5:10 onwards is neato.

3) From 1:40 onwards for those with ADHD …

4) Pretty much most of this …

(sorry about the terrible video quality) …

… an interesting form of spam, where a computer creates and very carefully controls and positions level 1 characters. Moving them perfectly, so when they die they all spell out the URL of gold sellers.

To kill the character they use a hack that jumps them way above the ground, the fall kills them and they "die" aligned just right for forming the letters.

At 01:09 you can see the start of a char being positioned, at 0:36 you can see them land a die. The end of the video shows the nearly formed .com

I expect the coding required to spell out words was tested on a private server before being rolled out onto public servers. Also, clever but annoying :)

Video is here, you can see the (near) final result
here

Now if only we could have him taking giant strides over the moon’s surface ;)

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

I’ve just spent the last few days in London rushing around the place, not really having a clue where I was going. Meaning that most of the time I’d rather jump into a cab than take the tube.

Well that and the heat, the Underground is hot, taxis have Air Conditioning. Also I generally don’t know where the tube stations are … however if I had this …

(YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fZk0HaIs4s)

… then I probably would grab the Tube. As one of the comments on YouTube says …

“You missed a trick here. Surely the app could also work out my average walking speed so that as well as the distance to destination it could also display time to walk to it? :)”

To which I’d just add that it should also show when the next train is due to arrive. Allowing you to figure out if you need to speed up, or can relax.

Although not yet approved acrossair are one of the first groups of surely many many more to get AR apps out there. This is just the beginning. I also hope more people concentrate on these specific apps then general ones that’ll try and do everything.

(oh and more games plz)

[Via: LDN]

“She folds and cuts individual maps by region to produce clothes not to be worn but rather hung, mostly pleated parochial dresses and button-down shirts made out of modern maps. Universal by nature, her work is popular wherever shown.”

Several more at the site: Elisabeth Lecourt at Fairfax Contemporary Art Galleries, something to go with Map Shoes :)

Via: LDN

I had the happy fortune to read two articles back-to-back; Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny: Tim Berners-Lee talking back in 1995 …

… and Slide 43 of 44 of Matt Webb’s reboot11 talk.

The thread that joins them together, Tim Berners-Lee talked a lot back then about how he hoped the Internet would help solve problems …

“It is, then, a good time 50 years on to sit back and consider to what extent we have actually made life easier. We have access to information: but have we been solving problems? Well, there are many things it is much easier for individuals today than 5 years ago. Personally I don’t feel that the web has made great strides in helping us work as a global team.“

Although this talk was 14 years ago I think it still applies. The web for all the “great strides” is still right in it’s infancy, no matter how developed we currently think it is, with it’s Flash and it’s CSS and it’s HTML5 and whatever.

Collecting Information

We are still primarily at the information collecting stage. Wikipedia is collecting information, Flickr is collecting photos, Facebook is collecting users, OpenStreetMap is collecting data.

Personally at the end of my time at Flickr, and even now, I’m not ultimately interested in the how and why of collecting more stuff, I’m interested in doing something will all that information.

The comment about “we have access to information: but have we been solving problems?” struck a chord. And I thought “Yeah, we should be solving problems”.

Problems

I think there are two types of problems…

1. Obvious Problems; OpenStreetMap collects information to solve the problem of not having information. Wikipedia collects information to solve the problem of not having information, etc.
2. Non-Obvious Problems; (see I’m good at this) The problems that we realise can only be solved when we’ve gathered a sufficient amount of information.

This was gearing me up for the Problem Solving Stage, we’re getting better at collecting information, still not so good at solving problems.

However …

Inventing Culture

Matt Webb, on Slide 43 said …

“Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.”

… and because Schulze &amp Webb and all who sail in her are way smarter and far more future thinking than me, I tend to listen to them, even if I don’t fully understand it all :)

From this I take away that, if, we really want to be smart we need to look beyond collecting information, beyond solving problems, to changing culture and inventing new forms of culture.

I think that Flickr is kinda 80% collecting, 16% problem solving and 4% inventing culture.

I haven’t decided what my 100 hours are going to be, but I’m going to try and look beyond problem solving as being a topic.

An Example with Open Street Map

Stage 1: Collecting Information, we’ve seen now that OSM is getting better at collecting information, so …

Stage 2: Solving Problems. Well what are maps good for, in the scope of mass cultural/social consumption, i.e. what do I use them for rather than someone with a specific job?

Well, I use maps to get somewhere.

But do I really need a map for that? I really just need a compass and a bearing and then walk/drive in that direction until I eventually get to the place I want to go.

The only problem with that, is that I may not get to where I want to go in time. So for me, a map solves a time based problem rather than a location based on, and I suspect that applies to most users of maps.

Stage 3: The problem of getting to somewhere on time can either be solved with maps or removed by a cultural shift.

Leaving the question; What can we do to remove the need to be at certain unknown places at a set time and in the long run, the need to collect information for maps at all?

Photos by revdancatt, russelldavies and we-make-money-not-art.

Flickr just released Mobile Nearby for “smartphones” ie the iphone and that other one. Just go to m.flickr.com and there should be a new link that figures out where you are and, well, shows you nearby photos.

Two quick things;

1) I’m still waiting for broadband to be connect here, so I’m doing everything via the iphone. Of course version 3.0 came out while we were up in the sky that I can’t d/l ’cause I have no internets. And I can’t tether my laptop to the iPhone to d/l it because I don’t have tethering.

Also can’t copy and paste links, you’ll have to find the code.flickr.com/blog post yourself.

2) Interestingly Google map tile :)

After the last post I’ve been thinking about Ants* a lot, but more of that later (later time-wise not post-wise), in the mean time I missed this post from Fast Company a couple of days ago …

iPhone Augmented Reality

Which, while not being earth shatteringly insightful does add to the build up of interest in the subject.

However, how long until we can talk about the subject without mentioning a way to find the nearest Coffee shop? Stabby stab stabbity stab stab stab. Please, no more coffee shop/pizza ordering examples for maps/geo/AR, k.thnx.

*Ants

Last night I was mulling over the new iPhone and 3.0OS stuff, and then Brady goes and covers most of it anyway: What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs.

Really the two elements I was most interested in were the Compass for pretty much the reasons Brady (damn him!) states … the Augmented Reality bit. Regular readers will already know I have a soft spot for AR … Where I’m actually living in augmented reality, Jefferson Airplane and what does this mean for photos and Nearly Augmented Reality – Step 5.

So when the phone knows roughly where you are and roughly which way you’re facing you can start to do some fancy/interesting, or at the very least something that overlays information based on your current location.

Throw on top of that the Camera refinements which, once again, sigh, Brady points out means it’ll have a better time reading QR Codes both close up and now slightly further away. I’ve never had any trouble myself using Optiscan from airsource on the iPhone. But it should help it pick other markings placed to help an app key into exact location.

… oh wait, third thing, the Peer-to-Peer API, useful for groking a location if you don’t know where you are, based on people nearby who do. Probably the best introduction to why this works and is good is Leonard’s talk from last year’s WhereCamp: Proximity and Relative Location: Theory and Practice.

Hopefully now it’ll be possible to prove the location aware, information/data sharing, roaming mesh-network can now be done on readily available consumer hardware.

iPhones are the new ants.

Photo by grateful420angelina

Oh #spymaster, I saw this comment posted to twitter the other day …

“decides to stop following everyone who uses #spymaster. Do you guys even know what twitter is for?”

… I have no arguments with the “stop following” part, everyone is free to do what they want. It’s the whole knowing what something is for that bugs me. My short answer is this …

“the street finds its own uses for things”

William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982

… the aphorism that has also become somewhat of a manifesto for people around my age who share(d) an interest in technology, Sci-Fi, Hip-Hop, 1950 electronics magazines, post-future urbanism, The KLF/ORB/FSOL and flying cars, while growing up. Don’t tell me we’ve turned our back on it?

The slightly longer answer …

There are many websites and even technologies that started off as one thing and become something else. An example randomly off the top of my head is Flickr, which has a fairly well documented history of starting as a game and turning into a rather successful photo (and video) sharing website.

And you know, people have turned this whole internet thing from a military and general system for academic communication into something you can *gasp* play games on, don’t you know what its for?

Kids, get your Galactic Empire off my X.25 Pad!

Experience tells me that on websites with large communities there are many camps, two of which we’re concerned about here…

1. The very vocal minority, often early adopters, very techno-savy, who have strong opinions of what a service should or shouldn’t be.
2. The vast majority of users who just carry on using the website on a daily basis and don’t really care about the finer details of technical implementation as long as their friends are there and they can carry on using it with too much friction.

Take for example the whole #fixreplies firestorm that hit a while back. In a nutshell, Twitter removed an option, that was turned off by default anyway and that only 3% of people turned on …

… and I’m guessing of those 3% most are from the early adopter, techno-savy group. Who of course noticed when it went away. But having it turned on pounded the servers for everyone else.

When you build a huge, massively used system it’s generally a good idea to build in the ability to progressively turn bits off should it become unstable. If turning one of those bits back on would make the whole system unstable again and magically instantly fixing it isn’t an option, then you leave it off.

The vocal minority get pissed (and those in the tech industry should probably know better), the vast majority (97%) carry on as normal without noticing a thing other than increased uptime and reliability. Or you keep the vocal minority happy and screw your main user base.

So what does this have to do with Spymaster?

Well, some people seem to be getting a bit upset about how the game uses twitter and how people chose to play the game. I’m not directing this at Joe and his bullet pointed list of actions specifically, he just happens to be linked to from this TechCrunch post.

But here’s the thing, the way I play the game (details below) introduces me to a lot of users I wouldn’t normally interact with. Most of them have around 11-190 followers, have a twitter stream full of spymaster tweets, @replies to followers and people they are following and general chit-chat. Of the people they are @replying to, some seem to have nothing to do with #spymaster and other follow the same pattern.

These are the from the vast majority of users pool, users who are, and I can hardly even begin to believe this, having fun. Enjoying playing the game and even adding commentary above that added by spymaster itself …

“@revdancatt HOW DARE YOU”

“@revdancatt Don’t know who you are, but you and I are done professionally! It’s on, I tell you! It’s on!”

“flickr celeb @revdancatt keeps wounding me. I’m gonna go cry in the corner”

“@revdancatt — Sir, THIS WILL NOT STAND!!!! [pounds shoe on table fer dramatic effect -- Odor Eater falls out, blunting aforesaid effect...]”

I’ve even seen accounts that look so new (default icon, only a few followers, all tweets are #spymaster ones) that they’ve obviously been set up to play spymaster. Some of these will be people creating a second account so as not to annoy their friends (how wise) but others will be people who have now joined twitter, just to play. For them Twitter is a gaming platform first and foremost.

“the street finds its own uses for things”

William Gibson – Burning Chrome – 1982

I think that roughly makes my point: If you don’t like all the #spymaster tweets from people you are following, unfollow them or ask them to stop, it’s that simple.

“But wait!” you may say “If we the vocal minority don’t speak up, Twitter will never fix stuff, like blocking hash tags!”

Well a) it’s not “Broken” so doesn’t really need to be “fixed”. It’s “Broken” for how you use it. b) I’ll get back to that in the section “Customized Clients or a new Twitter” if you want to skip ahead.

How I play Spymaster, a rough gameplay analysis and why the @spymaster Twitters are important.

So I like to dissect game and try and figure out the mechanics, find optimal paths and so on, and this is what I’ve come up with for Spymaster^*.

1) I appear to make most of my money from people attacking me and failing …

… To put it into context, I’m only level 3 in the above screen-shot, doing “Tasks” will earn me about 1k and I can only do a few before having to wait a while for my energy (a limited game resource) to fill up again. An average failed attack will give me around 18k, which I could “earn” in around two hours of actually paying attention.

2) I earn more from a failed attack against me than I lose from a successful one. The below shot shows 6 (co-ordinated) attacks, each person won and lost an attack (the last one killed me, which seemed to have no effect other than make we wait 15mins before I can play again, fwiw) …

… overall I lost £5,832.07 and “won” £28,350.35 for a net gain of £22.45k all for very little effort … but still some effort …

So it seems that if they are high level and attacking you (a lower level player) and they win … they don’t get much as they are attacking below their level. If they lose then they lose a whole bunch of cash to you, seemly as punishment for attacking down levels, but also because they probably have more of it than you.

In essence my tactic (which is just a tactic btw, not the best tactic), can be summed up as … attack people above your level, in the hope that you can provoke them into attacking you back, as that’s when you get the money. Also, because they are higher level they’re probably earning more money from tasks and so on.

Just one more thing though, normally attacking (or being attacked by) people high above your level is a bad thing, so any winnings I get instantly get spent on arming myself to the teeth, I suspect I have a disproportionate amount of hardware for my level :)

So how would you go about finding people who are a few levels above you?

Well handily Twitter appears to be part of the game, just fancy that!


http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 4
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 5
http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6


… you can construct other searches too, depending on what you’re looking for.

Clicking through to the players we can start to get a feel for what kind of target they are, here’s “billyforce”, we can see what he’s been upto and how many followers he has, etc …

Now the good news for people who hate #spymaster …

A general essence of games, is that you shouldn’t give information away to the other players, or at least you should know more about them, then they do about you.

Meaning one of the best overall tactics to playing #spymaster is to shut the fuck up. Fortunately for me lots of people don’t do that.

Consider these two options:

1. You want to track how often player A attacks and wins, and how often other players are attacked by A. How fast player A moves up the levels and if they are spending their money on safehouses.
2. You want to target a user who has just purchased a safehouse (which generates cash) and then gone to sleep … so you can let their income from the safehouse build up without them spending it. Which means you’re looking for a player in a timezone ahead of you.

In that second case, at around 3-4pm I could start looking at players from the UK, where it’s 11-12pm for them, searching for people securing safehouses …

http://twitter.com/#search?q=spymaster secured a safe house

… once identified, keep an eye out for lack of tweets for around 5 hours and then attack.

Both of these two cases sounds like a lot of hard work, something computers are much better at keeping tabs on. If only the game had some messaging system, and ideally where the players were located in the world and an API. That would allow a computer to keep track of these things … oh wait, Twitter …

Customized Clients or a new Twitter

But first, back to the original “problem”, to re-cap, I’d rather Twitter spent their time improving stability and scaling, rather than the ability to filter out #hashtags on the website for the vocal minority (actually it’d be nice if they could do both, but that’s not always very practical).

Anyway, I suspect that most cutting-edge users who are upset by #spymaster use twitter clients anyway. I’d be surprised if after this that the next updates to popular clients didn’t include the ability to suppress #hashtags.

So we can built twitter clients that exclude all mention of #spymaster, good!

Now what if we build one that keeps track of only #spymaster comments? We can use a combination of the URLs I use above …


http://twitter.com/#search?q=I just reached level 6


… to discover players, attempt to discern where in the world they live for the timezone. Then once it’s found the players, consume their streams to monitor progression through the game, purchases and attacks. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to find quickly rising players with an appropriate number of followers.

The other thing these clients can do, is then share their information via twitter using their own #hashtag with other clients, allowing for a distributed network to track playing statistics and so on.

But, while do-able is probably a bit much for #spymaster. Not however for the more sophisticated games that will surly follow.

As web applications become more complex, a lot of focus can be put on the internal messaging and queueing needed to keep things running and scaling. If game developers can offload a bunch of this messaging (both client facing and internal), notifications and user authentication to a system that already has the issues of scaling and so-on nailed, then there’s no reason for them not to.

Using Twitter as a backbone or infrastructure to a game isn’t a bad idea, and for players Twitter just becomes a gaming platform with extra social aspects thrown on-top if they want it.

Is that what I want Twitter to turn into? No not really, would it surprise me, hummmm, not really, people like playing games it’s in our nature.

It does point to the possibility of creating something like Twitter that handles all the messaging and authing, the scaling and APIs, that games (or whatever) can build on-top of. The nice thing about this is that …

1. A user, can play #spymaster and whatever new games come out on a dedicated “platform” rather than mix it in with the Twitter they already have (but remember for some people, twitter as a gaming platform is already the only thing they use it for)
2. A user can play more than one game on the system, with all the messages for each game being mixed in with each other. Clients, blog-widgets and so on can separate them out and display them however they like.
3. Other games could be built on-top of the mechanics of already existing games
4. Meta-game and analysis can take place by aggregating all the data.

With Twitter extending their API, location based knowledge and stability, if they threw in private groups (for internal game messaging, oh and for a cost) and the option to piggy-back on their system in return for adverts placed in the messages. Then it becomes a pretty exciting platform for game development, if that game is narrative/location/social/casual driven.

So I’m sorry everyone who hates seeing #spymaster “spam” but I’m all for more games that’ll build up a rich history of plays, turns and actions. Hopefully your twitter clients will save you while the rest of us have fun.

;)

Bonus Controversial Statement for people who have gotten this far.

As big as World of Warcraft is, with it’s super rich graphics and immersion, it’s a closed system. With LUA you can build add-ons within the game, but it’s very hard to extend the games interaction out into the web. New “casual” games built on systems like Twitter(clone) that therefor have APIs for “free”, can be built out in all sorts of directions, and can be easily integrated and played on many different devices, from rich front-ended 3D games, to web-browsers, to iPhones, to real-life meetings and QR-Codes.

Just the Auction House in World of Warcraft can be a fun game in itself, but you can’t get at it from anywhere else other then the game. EVE online has broken away from this by having tools they tell you when you’ve leveled up a skill in the game, thus pulling you back to logging in to set the next skill away.

Unless games like WoW start to have more out of game interaction, they’ll finally get toppled by newer games that do.

Which isn’t #spymaster …

yet.

^*I’ve set aside the whole number of followers part for simplicity.

Where 2.0 has finished now, although it carries on with WhereCamp. It was fun and the first one I’ve been to where I didn’t have to do any talking, which makes it doubly fun, possible for everyone. I missed Wednesday, but managed some of the workshops on Tuesday and talks on Thursday.

There are a few thing I want to comment on (new Yahoo! stuff, Flickr Shapefiles for example) but for the time being… Making Maps.

… quoting Kellan always add an extra level of sophistication to a presentation!

Anyway, there were a couple of workshops; Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up (where that slide above is from) and Be a Cartographer: Thinking About the Design of Maps, that suggest that people are looking beyond just adding maps to sites and throwing pins on to show data, to actually thinking about the form and function of maps.

Obvious people have been thinking about the form and function of maps for a long time, I’m just saying it’s “new” in the way that online maps were “new” a few years ago.

(You can find out more about Maps From Scratch at http://www.mapsfromscratch.com/).

What I particularly enjoyed about Maps from Scratch from the Stamen team is that what they do is very much like the Penn & Teller Cup and Balls Routine …

… in that, by using clear cups Penn & Teller show that what makes the “magic” in the trick is not concealing secret knowledge but just by being very good at what they do, the slight of hand, distractions and so on.

And that’s Stamen, Michal showed us all the tools (mapnik, TileCache etc.) that they use, the mystical command-line incantations needs to summon new tiles into existence and so on. Michal started by showing us a selection of finished tile sets (Cup and Balls with the Red Plastic cups) and then, from start-to-finish producing a new set of map tiles from thin air, including the how-to part.

And yet, even knowing how it’s all done, being able to watch it over and over again, it’ll take a fair bit of practice before getting that good.

Overall, impressed.

Yay, it’s Where 2.0 time again, which means heading off inordinately early in the morning. Last year was at Millbrae …

… this year San Jose. Where [badum] I’m hoping to catch-up with the many interesting people who make the yearly pilgrimage. Somehow this seems to happen via each of our Profile Pages (only slightly edited from last year) or, most likely, in the bar :) I’m around Tuesday and Thursday, but not Wednesday, fwiw.

I’m not, as it happens, presenting this year due to (back then upcoming) entertaining timing issues ;) but the wonderful Aaron Straup Cope is with a live performance of The Shape of Alpha…

History and geography remain powerful anchors through which we orient ourselves to our communities and the world at large. This is reflected in the practice and evolution of story-telling, the interpretation and naming of place and the disputes that sometimes follow. As locative technologies play an increasingly important role in all aspects of daily life so too will the ability to interpret and contextualize the abundance of data produced in the precise but distant language of machines.

… which I’m make super-extra-special effort to go and see. I’m also going to get my hands dirty with Maps from Scratch: Online Maps from the Ground Up, because maps are fun!

Hopefully see you there, assuming I don’t get lost on the way.

Places page: Millbrae, featured photo; How to Not Meet Girlz by cstoller.

“… at an airport the individual is defined, not by the tangible ground mortgaged into his soul for the next 40 years, but the indeterminate flicker of flight numbers trembling on an annunciator screen. We are no longer citizens with civic obligations, but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open, our lightness of baggage mandated by the system. Airports have become a new kind of discontinuous city, whose vast populations, measured by annual passenger throughputs, are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.”

J.G. Ballard 1930 – 2009

Airports hold a particular fascination, dystopian near-miss 1950s futures forked somewhere back in 1967. Like miniature Metropolises, with shops and gyms and showers and bars, utilities, police forces and mail services, museums, hotels and meeting rooms, magic moving walkways with phasing soundtracks all of their own. Towering brave architecture, archingly high ceilings hinting at wind blown Tallships setting sail out towards exotic lands and the sinking horizon. Or slabs of post-military-undustrial concrete, smoothed to the curves needed to accommodates the passing hordes of a yet unwritten Romero movie.

So what of these mini cities?

Dopplr sends me emails, citing when my friends are traveling around the world. At any one time, give or take a few days, there’s generally someone I know passing through an airport. Millions of other people are flowing through these citadels to modern travel each day.

Crunching down time, overlapping those days, collapsing each airport to its own naked singularity, we all have the same general experiences, move in unison on the same magic walkways, each taking our own 2.5 hours to pass through the system.

When I see that someone is flying to Chicago, I can instantly hear the distinctive clack clack clack sound of suitcase wheels on the O’Hare tiles. London Heathrow, Terminal 4, the long distant but still present dull bitter tang of worn Silk Cut imbued carpets. SFO, the monorail symmetry and looping arrival/departure roads.

Back to Flickr.

Flickr (to me) is about more than just photos (and videos) it’s about sharing experiences. People take photos to record their story of passing though a location or event. Flickr collects and collates those stories. That’s kinda where the Places idea grew from.

Places pages are for Cities, and Towns and Villages … and now even neighborhoods, for people treading the same footsteps but at different times. For many of us, the Airport is also a Place …

… and yet, a while back if you geotagged a photo taken at Heathrow Airport (for example) Flickr would say it was taken in the London Borough of Hounslow. When you arrive, depart or pass through Heathrow Airport, you don’t really think “My, that London Borough of Hounslow is a terribly busy place” while at the same time Hounslow probably doesn’t think of itself as having 1/4 million people passing through it each day … even though this is true.

Which is why, at some point, it changed, to this…

http://www.flickr.com/places/LHR
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/LAX
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/FRA
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/CDG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/AMS
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/HKG
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/ORD
… and this …
http://www.flickr.com/places/SFO

Well, you get the idea …

Collecting together our transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy airport experiences.

Photos from Daniel H. Agostini aka dhammza, Telstar Logistics, heather and straup.

http://www.fluffykittens.com/projects/panda2

Very alpha, you kinda need a fast machine and Firefox/Safari. More information here and here.

That is all :)

I can now officially say that after nearly 4 years I’m no longer working at Flickr, today was my last day, and I think it’s fair to say I’ll miss it terribly. There’s no other job quite like it. I’ll miss the people, I’ll miss the coding and I’ll miss the blogging. And besides, where else can you get to build rainbow vomiting pandas?

To put a little background around it, we (The Catt Family) are moving back to the UK (up near Manchester fwiw) for various family reasons. Over the last few weeks/months we’ve been poking around various options, none of which are incredibly practical. So in the end, it’s a case of take the money and run :)

Which means we get to finally have a look around San Francisco as tourists and take some much needed time off (while being paid for it, which is nice) before we fly back to the UK in the next few months.

So there’s two obvious things.

1) What am I doing next, employment?

I have no idea, I’m taking a couple of months off and the most pressing thing is to get back to the UK. The whole family thing is currently > work. Once that’s sorted we’ll think about the next adventure.

Of course if you want to employ someone who’s worked at one of the top photo sharing web sites called Flickr in the World, from when it was still tiny small(ish) and just moved to the US from Canada, to the huge beast it is now, yada yada yada maps blah etc. then drop me an email (unless you are ning.com, in which case could you please stop already).

Especially if you’re Google with a desk free in the Manchester office :)

If you need a reference just ask, well anyone really, you probably already know me by at least 1 degree of separation.

2) Will you still be working on Flickr stuff?

Yes, of course … along with more Processing stuff and poking around at a couple of js libraries I’ve not had a chance to play with yet.

But back to Flickr, I’ve often joked that I could probably get more stuff done working with the Flickr API outside of Flickr than inside. Mainly due to the simple removal of the Lawyers-Layer more than anything else ;) But I’ve always been concerned about doing stuff that clashes with the list of things on the Project board.

It’s not really possible to ethically build something in my free time that, well you know … which is why I wound down geobloggers as a geotagging your Flickr photos on a Google Map site …

… but now, I’m once more freeeeeeee (well in two months anyway) to just build whatever I feel like again + processing + new javascript libraries + map tiles :)

But in the meantime, I think I’m going to enjoy putting my feet up, playing with the kids, messing about in San Francisco, getting a few D&D session in and maybe even, you know, having time to blog a bit more.

Onwards!

Photos by Rev Dan Catt, Matt Biddulph and Dee Adams.