I got an invitation to Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle location-sharing service this morning. While it’s still not fleshed out yet (the only function appears to be updating your location from the website directly). It’s somewhat hard to see what use the service will provide, but I don’t care about that. The polish on the Inferno Pigeon site is so well-executed, I want to use it regardless of what it does.

This screen is so human, so soft, so downright fucking cuddly, I just love it. Props should also be given to whomever on the Fuego Sparrow team came up with this privacy ping function. As the default is for the site to email you monthly to check that it’s still OK for them to share your location data, this is a great way to protect against irrate users. Nice work team Flame Heron; now just tell me what I’m supposed to use this Backdraft Canary thing to do.

PS - Yea, I think the name is funny, and I would’ve loved to be in the room bouncing those ideas off the walls.

This week the WIndows Live team announced the availability of an API for Windows Live Spaces Photos (don’t get me started on the name). Those of you who write software can now exert some control over the photos kept in a Live account. More interesting though to the rest of us who can’t code is the Live Data Interactive SDK, which shows off the functionality of this new API. Giving the human beings a view into what developers work with is very educational, and more than a little bit entertaining.

(Windows Live Spaces Photo API (Alpha) - Angus Logan)

This morning’s Defrag keynote opened with a panel discussion on where the business of search and discovery has come from, and where it needs to go.

Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley) made a strong opening analogy by explaining that search is currently an, “experience in orienteering;” the journey to your information begins with a few words, followed by a long period of sniffing out clues. This process repeats until hopefully you find what you were looking for.

Obviously this creates a demand for a major upgrade to the human experience of search. One of the natural solutions is natural language processing, where Microsoft is doing a lot of great work (TellMe, Windows Speech Recognition, and Ford Sync).

Another of the interesting factors in the evolution of search is a pitch for building more topic-specific indexes. Steve Larsen (Krugle) argued a compelling case for vertical search indexes, “In a code-writing search index, Python is never a reptile and always a language.”

This feels like a workaround for the lack of NLP implementation/effectiveness, but as opposed to most instances, that sort of design sounds extremely valuable. I think I might rather have a half-dozen different search engines that I use across a day, assuming they are each much more targeted toward the information I’m looking for. I think this type of strategy could allow for a lot of smaller-scale growth in the search market.

Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo) gave an explanation of Flickr’s Interestingness system which brought up the powerful difference between explicit and implicit discovery systems. Explicit systems (voting, rating) are ripe for gaming and rigging, which obviously prevents an honest view of the landscape from emerging. The Interestingness recipe watches views, comments, and favourites across all the system’s photos. In addition though, it weights the value of those actions based on the relationship the author has with the viewer (your brother marking your photo as a favourite is different than a stranger doing the same). Intricacies like that help develop a more honest result set.

The beauty I see in these implicit designs is their invisibility to a user’s actions. Rather than putting the request on the user to think consciously about the value they place on something, the software simply listens and reacts. As Bradley put it so eloquently, “The system changes in the user’s wake.”

When the discussion got to addressing the uncrawlable information trapped behind paywalls and corporate firewalls. Jeremie Miller (Search Wikia) made the comment that as people define knowledge by what is discovered through search, knowledge that doesn’t make it into the index may cease to exist (so far as many people are concerned).

Honestly I’m terrified by the social implications of such a reality; the rift between those with access to the indexes and those without can have dire effects, not to mention the concerns around who controls those indexes.

The other night the Meebo crew through a second birthday party for themselves, mostly to play Guitar Hero and munch, but there was a larger goal: to announce the next iteration of Meebo as an online platform.

Having spent the past few years building one of the best web-based IM clients in town, team Meebo decided to make themselves available to developers with one simple phrase, “I want to _____ with you.“

Scrape together some Flash or JavaScript into a way to watch, shop, frag, (or eat?) all within the Meebo universe. They’ve organized a Lunch 2.0 + all-night dev camp on 27 November to kickstart the ecosystem. The team will even set up a video conference if you’re interested but can’t make it down to Mountain View, CA this month.

Emre Sokullu has rolled up the Office 2.0 space for Read/WriteWeb including Meebo’s entrance. The productivity-on-the-web market would appear highly lucrative from all the companies diving into it. From Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, to the current crowd favourite Google Apps, and even Adobe’s Virtual Ubiquity, Meebo’s rocket has taken off for a very desirable planet.

All of this puts Microsoft in a very delicate position. The continued investment in free, online productivity tools certainly represents shots across the bow of the Office Armada. While the Office Live tools are mostly about the storage of data in the cloud, everyone else seems to be banking on the ability to do their work online; We’ll have to wait for Ray Ozzie’s other shoe to drop. Even after all the kimonos have been opened and all the offerings have matured, who knows what humans actually want.

If anyone would like, I have a few invites to Pownce that I’m happy to give away. I’ll pick three people who leave a comment at random and get y’all sharing links and videos and little quips in no time.

No assurances as to how useful you may ultimately find the service obviously. Web 2.0 and useful don’t always play peanut butter and jelly…

There’s no better way to start a week than with such a genius site as Your Scene Sucks. I can tell you that riding around Seattle can be like a scene kid safari when the wind is right, and now someone has taken the time to chronicle all of the subtle details that differentiate the subspecies.

Seeing as it’s only Monday and this is probably the most entertaining thing you’ll read all day, you might want to stop at the restroom before you dive in.

Alright fine, but I warned you…Dover.

I love what the kids at Moo are doing. I got my 10 pack of Flickr cards last week and will be ordering a full boat shortly (once I’ve picked the photos truly worth the printing).

With the announcement of these Skype cards though an idea hit me like a swift kick: I need a Web2 card. Though it will certainly take more deals before it’s useful, imagine it: A mini card where I can select my web2 services (Flickr, Skype, Upcoming, Yelp, Del.icio.us, etc.) and have each of them beautifully represented in the physical world.

Sure I could hack the Flickr cards and put the rest of my URLs on them, but that doesn’t give me the shiny logos (which some might argue will be the only lasting effect of Web2). That and I’m sure the cool kids at Moo will think of more great ways to communicate my various personas.

I got this in my inbox this morning. My favorite new travel tool Farecast has added RSS support. Using this simple form, I can generate a feed that will push their cost predictions to me as they change. Tres cool!