:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Tuesday, April 15, 2008 ::

Beyond The Rave

Rave-infected vampire flick, the first new movie from Hammer in almost 30 years



Episodes begin at MySpace.com/BeyondTheRave on April 17th.
Beyond the Rave is a vampire story set in England's underground rave scene. The movie follows the last hours of freedom of local soldier Ed, who is flying out to Iraq in the morning. With the help of his best friend Necro, he spends his last night in the UK tracking down his missing girlfriend Jen, last seen partying with a bizarre group of hardcore night-time ravers led by the mysterious Melech. But as he catches up with Jen at a party, Ed discovers that Melech's crowd, who are hosting the event, are looking for more than a night of fun, and that not everyone will make it through to dawn.

Labels: Advertising, Film, Horror, myspace, Video

:: Dan 15.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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This is interesting. I wrote a post about the need for an open system and API for social networking back in March (see point 4) and guessed that someone must be working on it somewhere. It seems [via dev/null] that LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is on the case, with OpenID. Although there are obvious privacy concerns about what information is held about you and where, especially if you actively wanted to keep different groups of friends linked to different accounts / aliases. Hopefully a robust set of rules can be written into it that might help to control aggregation sites like Spock and PeekYou, as Grom criticised last week. The biggest issue I have with these is the lack of control they give you over what information they collect about you. For example, PeekYou has scrapped my Blogger, LinkedIn and Flickr profiles together, which I'm not entirely happy about but can live with, somehow has failed to find my Facebook or MySpace, and has linked the wrong eBay account. Now, I'm not jumping to add the missing data, but I would obviously like to be able to remove the incorrect data. Having said that, there are data uses I wouldn't mind, especially having copied and pasted the same basic profile information into Blogger, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook, and rarely editing any of them, a simple "would you allow us to copy data from xx" dialogue during sign-up and one central point where changes cascade down would be very handy. But the user must have control over what data is taken from where.

Here's the link to dev/null's post again. I recommend reading the whole post if you skipped past the link previously.

Labels: Blogger, facebook, Flickr, FOSS, ID, myspace, OpenID, SocialNetworking

:: Dan 21.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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dev.null explains why MySpace will never open its API and why my prediction of what a competitor must do to beat it may be edging nearer.

Labels: myspace

:: Dan 17.4.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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SIT ON MYSPACE
Originally uploaded by acb.


A Forum Conversation about MySpace and possible alternatives gave me leave to consider its benefits and the difficulties in competing with it. My thoughts were as follows:

MySpace is an irritating rash of groin fungus and it's not going away, you just have to live with it.

What it allows you to do, networking wise, is essential in these super connected days. It's unfortunate that it is owned by a cock, is difficult to control and is over run with ads and spam. But despite that there's just no way any alternative is going to get off the ground without the user base.

An alternative networking system, should one ever have a chance of replacing it, would have to overcome all of these problems. To do that it would need the following:

1. Less intrusive advertising in a free version (cf Google AdSense) and no advertising at all in a paid for premium version.

2. Better user control and configuration, ability to embed into an existing site through scripting or use the systems own servers (cf Blogger)

3. Open API (Application Programming Interface) for integration across sites (cf Google, Flickr etc). Basically it needs to embrace Web2.0

4. Huge user base. The only way I can see this happening is if the API is good enough to allow existing myspace / google / blogger / flickr / yahoo / msn etc users to integrate all of their accounts in someway, rather than try to build a new user base from scratch.

If you are capable of providing this, please get coding. (Although I assume someone is doing it somewhere already.)

Labels: myspace, SocialNetworking, web 2.0

:: Dan 28.3.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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